Web Strategy: On Blog Campaigns and “Very Effective” Web Advertising

Colleague Sam Levin sent me this article: According to eMarketer, Blog Reading Is a Free-Floating Affair they suggested that promoting a blog through search is not effective, as blog readers run across them by links from other blogs. Why is this significant?

Web Strategy: Best practices in blog campaigns
From a corporate web strategy, this could mean that effective word-of-mouth campaigns need to happen in the blogosphere, the points of origin must occur from bloggers. I could read into this and suggest that corporate website campaigns may not be effective ways to reach bloggers and kick off that ‘viral’ effect. I’m not surprised with eMarketer’s research proving that promoting one’s blog in a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaign as not effective. People trust others like them, so this makes sense.

1) Your blog campaigns should therefore originate with bloggers, I recommend you build relations with them (blogger relations, just like media or press relations) and give them advanced or special information that entices them to blog it, as their peers (your market) will likely find it. Avoid using repurposed content, and it should be ‘entertaining’ as suggested by eMarketer.

2) Avoid making search or your corporate website as the primary originator of your blog campaign, as it’s unlikely to be as effective according to the report. If you’ve corporate bloggers, that may be a nice tie to the blogosphere, although authenticity is always difficult to achieve.

Effective Web Advertising
Be sure to scroll down on the report from eMarketer, it shows that SEM (49% said very effective) is still the most effective web advertising, rapidly followed by Social Networks ( 30% said very effective). Please note that advertising is only one small piece of the web strategy puzzle, there’s many other aspects to consider. Read my report on the Many forms of Web Marketing

As a Web Strategist (focused on corporate) it’s good to look at our wide arsenal of tools to use, thanks eMarketer for this report, I enjoy their reports, and would eventually love to write for them as my career progresses.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 10:09 am and is filed under Search Strategy, Social Networking, Web Advertising, Web Marketing, Web Strategy, Web Usage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.