Contest Outreach Strategy
-
Hello Mozzers,
I've just started a contest in my own SEO blog, in which people will receive a full website audit, a keyword research plus competitive analysis, and an on-site audit.
What I want from it is two things:
- Get a few testimonials for my upcoming SEO consulting services;
- Get more FB fans.
As I know that my blog won't get too many tweets and shares per se, I have to manually outreach bloggers so they may tweet about my contest.
What I've been doing up until now is saying:
"Hey, my name is Ivan, I've got this blog and I'm running this contest. The prizes are these ones. I know your Twitter audience may be interested in this, so, could you tweet this? Thanks".
In the email I already give them a tweet with the URL and everyhing, so they don't have to do anything, but copy and pasting.
What're your opinion on this strategy? Do you recommend doing something else, like a more indirect approach, to contest outreach?
Thank you very much!
Ivan -
I would worry less about what your communication to them says and more about identifying the market. To get a 20-40% return on who you contact, you're going to have to put in some major work into who these site owners are and if they want or need help. This isn't a numbers game, it's a market identification game.
If it were me, I'd spend time on a few web design and website development forums looking for people who are asking questions about their site or have concerns, and then develop conversations with them. Step away from this being about you and make it about them.
Hope that helps!
-
Ivan,
I'd say that one audience that is likely to respond favorably to your contest would be small companies with new websites. Such an audience is most concentrated around lower-end and new web designers who are willing to make relatively inexpensive websites for clients in order to establish a client base.
Those types web designers are rarely at the top of the search results for "web designer [your city]"-type searches because their domains aren't established enough to rank highly. That means that if you do a search like that, you're like to find those rising-star web designers down past page two or three (along with the falling-stars who have had their time in the sun and have dropped out of page-one due to unsustainable SEO tactics--there are a lot more of those than there used to be). If you contact those low-ranking web designers with your contest, they may be happy to to ask their clients to tweet something to you in order for a chance to win.
-
Peter,
Thanks for your answer.
To clarify, when I say "what I have been doing up to now..." I mean one day lol. I've just started doing this, I've no experience with contest creation.
Well, in fact, I've just got one reply of one prospect, so from the 10 emails sent, I've got 1 answer. That's a 10% effectiveness. I'm thinking on sending around 30 emails, so we'll see in a few days.
I hope to get a 20-40% success rate, just because I'm trying to get one tweet. We'll see in a few days.
About what you say, it's true that what matters is having a nice social following. But that takes a lot of time. Imagine that if I take a client (not this case), and they don't have too many followers, it's the same situation that I've got. Even if my client had lots of followers-fans, if they don't have good engagement rates (what Avinash Kaushik calls applause rate, amplification rate and conversation rate), then that doesn't matter at all.
Anyways, thanks for your answer!
-
Hi Ivan
You say "what I have been doing up to now..." which suggests you have already been doing this. What success have you seen on bloggers being willing to tweet to their followers your offer? If you have already offered this to quite a few bloggers, then you should already have some indication on (a) the percentages of bloggers who are willing to tweet for you and (b) the take up rate from their tweets.
I would be interested to hear if it is proving successful for you.
My strategy if wanting to offer these free audits is to build a list of contacts myself through my own outreach in social media. It's not a quick strategy but something you need to build and grow over time. Go on to the social media channels and engage with people, listen and try to answer their questions, share with your own followers any good things they are sharing. Then, as people build up more trust and authority in the places you are engaging people will begin to respond to you more and be more willing to share the good things you put out.
I hope that helps,
Peter
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Outreach - Guest Blogs & Articles
Hi I know how old hat guest blogs are - but is all lost for high quality articles being placed on relevant sites? I am trying to decide where to put my offsite SEO efforts - we have no outreach strategy at present. Do I ignore articles altogether & focus on SEO/Social campaigns? Or try and do both? It's only me internally, we are looking to outsource some of the work but not all. Help! Thanks!
Social Media | | BeckyKey0 -
Authorship without Google+ - Ideas and strategies
Hi everyone, I am currently coaching several companies on Content Marketing, Authorship etc and how to implement these techniques at an institutional level - more here. My question is - Can an author reap the benefits of authorship in all search engines simultaneously without linking to Google + and becoming entangled in the Google Circles phenomena? I know don't laugh. 🙂 I know it seems like an ignorant question, but there must be a way. Is there a possibility of doing this with Author Schema's http://schema.org/Article? Will Google treat them the same way as Google +? My clients are not happy about getting so entangled with Google + and leaving out the other search engines. Thanks Carla
Social Media | | Carla_Dawson0 -
What is the best app for running a photo contest?
We sell vinyl wall decals. Our product lends itself to social media. We are going to run a monthly contest for the best/most creative customer photo. What is the best app for this?
Social Media | | katazoom0 -
FB Sharing Contest Tracking Question?
We are going to give-a-way a PS4 through a social media contest. Likes, g+ circles and shares, but I wasn't sure if there was a problem tracking shares. I always thought I could just look at my FB posts and it would say how many shares. All I want to do is people to give someone an extra entry for sharing one of my post on his or her FB page. However, I've read that tracking shares can be difficult. I think the shares that are difficult to track are the ones beyond what I need, like if a 3rd party shared it or something, but I'm not sure. I want the contest to be as accurate as possible. Can anybody confirm or correct my thinking, please? Happy Thanksgiving Eve! Ruben
Social Media | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
4 Weeks In - Need to Develop my SEO Strategy
Hello All, 1st post \ interaction on Moz! I'm now half way through my 4th week in an 'Online Marketing' role for an established travel operator \ agent in the UK and I now want to really start working on my SEO (and linkbuilding) strategy. I'm using Moz for most things and I have highlighted (via crawl diagnostics) lots of warnings & errors (15,000 pages crawled, 12,000 errors and 26,000 warnings!) which I will be addressing with the web design company next week... We engage (but not as much as we should) in Social Media and I have an excellent content writer who can write unique, interesting and informative content about our niche - which is quite large! I am obviously keen to focus my SEO efforts on the content and I have created accounts on Web 2.0 (Squidoo, Hubpages, Blogger etc), Social Bookmarking (Stumbleupon, Digg, Reddit etc) and I have started to engage with other webmasters within the industry in the hope I can submit one or two 'guest posts. Adding to that we have an excellent blog that 'sits off' our site and already has some great content on! I am also looking at other content ideas such as; lists, infographics, quizzes, surveys etc So my question is; do I continue with the 'content strategy' and if so, should i continue with the platforms I am currently using (as above)? I don't think that I'm a million miles away but any advice would be greatly appreciated! Andy
Social Media | | TomKing0 -
How To Use Followerwonk and Twitter for outreach link building
I'm wondering if anyone can help me with how to use follower wonk and twitter for outreach link building and offer any strategies. I'm using the following method but perhaps there are more efficient ways of doing it or other software that can aid the process. As I understand it it's a case of searching bios on followerwonk based on keywords and at the minute I'm selecting targets by social authority. (Is that the best metric or the there another one that's better?). I'm basically then following users in my niche and hoping that they follow me back. Those that do I'm then visiting their website based on the url in their twitter bio and running it through OSE to check the domain authority to see if the site authority is high enough to warrant listing them as a potential link target. If so I'm communicating with them by sharing their content, mentioning them or direct messaging them complimenting them on an article or such like. My aim is to build a relationship and eventually achieve a guest post or backlink somehow. Is this how the process should work?
Social Media | | SamCUK0 -
Using ReTweets for Outreach
Does anyone know of a tool that export a list of people that Retweeted a piece of content with the url they list on their profile? I'm trying to mine the individuals that RT'd an outreach piece we did to try to gain more opportunities but can't find a tool that will mine the data from peoples twitter profiles. I know of Retweet follow (their export is no where to be found) and Topsy but wanted to avoid doing a bunch of manual thanks tweet@'s. I also have a list of all the twitter handles/urls that I'm looking to find what their site is to do more personalized outreach for.
Social Media | | Peter_Dean0 -
How to Position Yourself When Doing Link Building & Outreach on behalf of Clients?
One of the things we struggle with is how to position ourselves when doing outreach such as link building on behalf of a client. We know many times it is best for outreach to come directly from the client themselves so that it comes across as more genuine. However, some clients prefer to outsource the entire process. When doing outreach on behalf of clients, how do you position yourself? Are you typically transparent about being a marketer working for an agency, or do you spin it more as being someone 'with' the company? Does it ever make sense to use aliases?
Social Media | | Jeff-Hahn0