Note: This a guest post we provided to My Private Brand
Is it better to engage bloggers with a limited audience who are passionate about your brand, or to seek out highly influential bloggers who reach a larger audience but may not be as committed to your cause? Ideally you can have both. A new term “advocate influencers” has been coined to describe people who are passionate about your brand but have the ability to reach a large audience as well. If this group of people doesn’t exist for your brand, why not create and enable it?
Food Lion, the U.S. division of Brussels-based Delhaize Group, recently engaged our agency, Theory House to challenge popular, Baltimore-Washington metropolitan bloggers to compete in a “Frugal Cook-Off” and create nutritious, low-cost meals for a family of four using Food Lion Private Brands, as well as fresh produce and meat options available at Food Lion stores.
The event was held at a Talara Restaurant in Baltimore. The winning blogger team created an entrée with two sides in 45 minutes using items shopped from an onsite Food Lion pantry of store brand products. The total cost of the meal was $9.90. The bloggers were judged on creativity, taste and awarded points for being frugal.
I can tell you from being in the room that while these bloggers may have entered as influencers; they left as advocates for Food Lion and its brands. This was a very interactive and engaging experience for the bloggers and they became intimate with Food Lion and its family of Private Brands. A few hours into the event thousands of social media impressions had already been generated, and with promotional assets being delivered to the bloggers this week that number will really start to climb.
So when considering blogger outreach strategies for your brands, think about ways to engage and activate them in a meaningful way.
