The The PR Desk is a regular column on FBC written by PR professional Heather Travis to help food bloggers navigate the ins and outs of working with brands and PR agencies. Today Heather gives you blogging tips so you can plan your own big picture blog campaigns (and show brands you're ready to go big), as part of her ongoing Show Me the Money! series.
How Do You Show You're Ready To Go Beyond the Blog?
We talked last time about working on big picture campaigns and today we’re applying the same thinking to your own blog. Do you want to show brands you're ready to go beyond the blog?
If the answer is yes, you need to realize that you yourself are a big picture campaign.
Say what now, Heather?
The challenge: manage yourself and your content as a large big picture campaign.
Stay with me here. A strong blogger knows that all aspects of their business should be in sync, but I challenge you to really think like a marketer and make all the pieces actually WORK together.
You need to manage yourself and your content as a large, big picture campaign.
We’ve talked before about showing me rather than telling me how you offer up value, and how you create unique content with a unique view. Now I challenge you to take it one step further: show me you understand the value chain and can actually drive a meaningful result through a coordinated effort.
A Gold Star Approach to Showing You're Ready for a Big Picture Campaign
In order to make this clear, I’ll walk you through a hypothetical example to demonstrate a gold star approach to clearly showing brands you're ready to go beyond the blog with your own big picture campaign.
Meet Lucy
Meet Lucy. Lucy is a full time recipe developer and food photographer, and has a growing YouTube channel. Lucy has good social stats, but her engagement is even better — her audience loves her and they tell her so.
Lucy works with brands on sponsored posts and videos. She also does lots of freelance recipe development and photography work that belongs to clients (rather than living on her channels).
As an additional revenue stream, Lucy develops e-books. She promotes the e-book sales through her socials and her e-newsletter and gets steady income and positive feedback. Since the last e-book was published, Lucy launched her YouTube channel.
The Campaign Asset and Goal
Wanting to do another collection of recipes, Lucy begins to plan her campaign out. This time, however, she's going to look beyond the typical revenue streams and think much bigger.
At the core is the new e-book filled with 50 recipes and beautiful photography. This is the asset and sales are the goal.
Going Bigger to Reach Her Goal
To reach her goal of many sales, Lucy goes bigger and here’s how.
- Lucy develops a series of cooking videos for each of the recipes, a 30-second teaser and a full length.
- Each of the 30-second videos are uploaded to the YouTube channel as part of the e-book launch. The full-length version are held beyond a paywall on Patreon and are available for a fee. This is a new revenue source and her audience has shown they're willing to pay for her valued content.
- Lucy sends producers at local TV shows video clips along with a pitch about a possible cooking/food segment she can host. The featured recipes would be from the new e-book. This series of local TV appearances would help add an additional revenue source and increase her audience.
- Lucy sells tickets to local audience members who have purchased the e-book and hosts a cooking class at her local grocery store and audience meetup.
- Lucy collaborates with other YouTube creators in other channel videos to spread the word.
- Lucy is featured on two or three podcasts that want to talk about her new recipes and how amazing they are for “insert holiday, event, story idea here.”
- Lucy hosts a contest for her readers.
You can see how Lucy can just keep adding in more and more ideas. But the key here is not more ideas: it's ideas and tactics that connect with each other and all drive back toward the goal of more e-book sales and an increased audience.
What Lucy Is Demonstrating to Brands
What Lucy is doing is here is serving herself up awesome content and work, generating serious income AND serving her audience. And she's also very clearly showing me as a potential brand partner that she understands how all the moving parts fit together.
Showing me this, coupled with a long series of conversations (per my last column in this series) will help your valued brand partners know you're ready for big picture campaigns and ready to move beyond the blog.
MORE READING
- Big Picture Sponsored Campaigns: Doing Things Better & Bigger
- A Blogger's Guide to Knowing When to Raise Your Rates
- PR Desk: A Case For Ditching Blogger Rate Cards
Heather Travis is a PR professional and lover of all things creative. She has extensive experience developing and implementing integrated public relations and marketing programs for agricultural brands, producers and processors, as well as high end sporting goods. She’s a DIY junkie with a mean power tool addiction, and can often be found painting, refinishing, and scouring both junk yards and antique markets for her next fix … err, piece of content for her blog heatherinheels.com. Find Heather on Twitter @heathertravis and Instagram @heathertravis.
You can unsubscribe any time!
Leave a Reply