Boosting product visibility through influencer and blogger PR

The perfect product is only as good as its visibility.

All the time, effort and investment spent in the design process is pointless without engaged prospects ready to make purchases. Ultimately, eyes on your product are the difference between sales, and stock gathering dust.

Companies will direct large portions of their budget into paid advertisements, which can and will drive interest and traffic to your product pages. While this can be an effective method to boost sales, newer companies may find it trickier to convert sales due to a lack of trust or brand awareness.

That’s where influencer and blogger PR comes in.

Why influencer and blogger PR?

Bloggers and influencers can give your product the stamp of authenticity that a new brand might need. Paid advertorials run the risk of garnering skepticism, while organic content from third-party sources can establish genuine credibility. Product reviews and demonstrations from impartial sources provide valuable feedback from customers, while influencing their audience’s purchasing decisions.

Positive reviews from online blogs can also provide significant SEO value to your site, with the opportunity to drive multiple links to target category pages. Trust-driven SEO strategies are becoming increasingly important for brands, as Google continues to place more emphasis on E-E-A-T. Thus, unbiased, third-party reviews add significant weight to a site’s trustworthiness and authority.

In addition, blog and influencer audiences are typically engaged and invested in the creator’s content. As a result, any positive coverage of your products from a content creator will go a long way to generating a new host of qualified prospects. 

With an influencer or blog for every niche under the sun, brands are able to tap into ready-made audiences specific to their product. Resultingly, influencer and blogger collaborations can be highly targeted, allowing you to invest the time and money directly into engaged and relevant eyes on your product.

How does it work?

Any collaboration can be boiled down to a few key steps. Here at Distinctly, we’ve refined our internal and client processes to allow for seamless working between the client, the creator and us to generate impactful coverage.

Influencer and blogger collaborations are usually founded on a gifted basis. In return for a free product from your client, the blogger or influencer will create reciprocal content to share with their platform.

This requires facilitation of product samples. With many moving parts, it’s vital to have a robust and replicable process to ensure your blogger and influencer collaborations run smoothly.

1. Sourcing opportunities

First, we must have a clear idea of which partners we want to approach to align with our wider strategy and goals

Prospective partners can be found through:

• Competitor backlink analysis
• Target audience-adjacent groups, clubs or affiliations
• Social media – via ‘following’ tabs of relevant profiles, tagged images, competitor hashtags etc.

2. Validating opportunities

If you have any agreed content stipulations to include, be sure to lay these out before sending the product. It may be best to introduce these in a second email, should you be concerned about scaring off any newer influencers. Possible stipulations might include:

• Hashtags
• Tags to client profiles
• Specific links and/or anchor text
• You may want to consider creating your own UTM links to monitor traffic as a result of your activity
• Any brand messaging

5. Converting the opportunity

To process a sample request, we need the blogger’s address, desired size and desired product. We then update our internal sample tracker with the relevant information. It’s important to be as succinct as possible, in order to maintain the influencer’s engagement should a second product selection be required (due to stock issues etc).

Once the product is confirmed and on the way, ensure to keep the influencer updated, and provide any tracking information.

Ensure to keep on top of your warm leads and processed sample opportunities. Often, multiple follow-ups are required to convert some opportunities, so it’s important to stay organised. Colour coding your sample tracker can be a simple way to flag opportunities that need chasing at a glance, as you get further away from the date of sample receipt.

Once your content is published, ensure to double check whether your stipulations have been met. While gifted collaborations aren’t legally binding, a polite request can go a long way to ensuring your client’s expectations are satisfied. It’s best to act on this as quickly as possible to maximise viewership – if you’re too late, the post will be lost in the timeline along with a missed opportunity.