Why Bloggers and Brands Go Hand in Hand

Bloggers are an important asset to any eCommerce digital marketing strategy, with user-generated content building bridges of trust and authenticity between brand and audience, as well as enhancing brand reach, these relationships need to be seriously considered and nurtured! It is a mutually beneficial relationship, and resources for bloggers who are starting out recommend for bloggers to build relationships with brands just as much. In this post we look at the top 4 ways brands benefit from building relationships with bloggers.

1. Brand Awareness

A key factor I wanted to highlight, is the kind of brand awareness bloggers can achieve for your eCommerce brand.  Bloggers devote so much of their time and energy to building and engaging their audience, this is their bread and butter. Whether it's on their website, on YouTube or any other social media platform, their goal is to get their content seen and enjoyed by hundreds, maybe even thousands of readers each day. Through relevant and timely collaboration, your brand could be reaching this audience too!

This is a very valuable asset we need to take into consideration. If there’s an audience you are working to engage, collaborating with a blog with the same audience could be priceless. To incentivise collaboration, you may consider sending out some products on behalf of your business which they can review and write about on their blog. Whilst some businesses don't like the idea of giving away their products, this isn't "buying" a blogger, it's offering a blogger the opportunity to have their own tangible experience with your product. Remember that a blogger's content is their most prized commodity, growing their audience and keeping them interested is a bloggers priority. So naturally they don't want to recommend anything to their audience that they do not have direct experience with! So involving a blogger and collaborating as much as possible is always ideal. 

Research highlighted in a blogpost by The WordStream indicates that millennials are 44% more likely to trust experts, who happen to be strangers, than advertisements and 247% more likely to be influenced by blogs or social networking sites. This re-iterates the potential impact of building working relationships with influential bloggers, especially if you have a millennial audience! 

2. Promote Your Products

Whilst bloggers undeniably have the power to help raise awareness to your eCommerce brand as a whole, they can also help create excitement around your products. Many bloggers work with companies to host competitions. This is usually in the form of a blog post which has a tool where readers can enter by providing their details, resulting in the opportunity to win a product or service.

For example, we worked on a competition for a brand, where a key promotional tactic was to engage with bloggers. Although we can't go into too much detail, this approach gained a fantastic ROI, solicited over 2,000 entries, over 100 comments and 80+ social shares.

A particular competition we worked with just one blogger, for a client in the gadget industry which received a fantastic ROI. This resulted in over two thousand entries, one hundred and six comments, and over eighty social shares.

Depending on the tool the blogger uses to host the competition, there can be a great opportunity to further market your brand once the competition is over.

Most tools have the opportunity to collect data I.e. email data. With the right email marketing strategy you could have contributed to your company’s list of long term customers.

3. Helps Your SEO

Whilst you can work with bloggers to create a buzz for your brand, collaborating in this way can also be a brilliant addition to improving your SEO campaign results.

A result we achieved recently re-iterates this after we developed a piece of content written on behalf of a company in the wedding industry; the blog is a lifestyle blog with a weddings section. We included a link back to our client’s site and highlighted the keyword in the piece we were targeting. The piece was published. When looking into the keyword results we saw a tremendous return in keyword rankings. They were originally positioned near the end of page 2 at position #16 in the Google search engine. In just a few days we saw the keyword rise to position #10 hitting page 1!

Of course, you cannot be guaranteed this sort of return for each opportunity. Nevertheless it’s a strong result to show the potential return you can have from achieving a link back to your site from a relevant and authoritive blog.

4. Social Media Promotion

Collaborating with bloggers could also be the perfect complement to your social profiles. Alongside bloggers impressive devotion to developing their blogs stance in the community, most blogs have active social profiles in addition to that.

As part of your agreement to collaborate, you could consider discussing social promotion to tweet or post about the work they did with your brand. This means greater awareness of your brand on their social platforms meaning you hit a bigger audience and potentially increasing your following / page likes.

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