Cheap And Simple Marketing Strategy
I once told Jonas of Yehey.com:
If you want a simple yet cheap way to get links for your website, treat the bloggers out to lunch.
Well he has taken it to heart and treated the known Filipino bloggers out to dinner a couple of times while launching Yehey’s services. It was very much like a press briefing. Although there was really no guarantee that the bloggers would actually write about it, they tend to at least think about the event. If it was particularly memorable, they would definitely say something about it.
SM Hypermart’s Taste of Asia has gone waaaaayyyy beyond just dinner. They invited over 200 bloggers to a big party… TWICE! They even had a writing contest that gave away prizes for the best written blog about SM Hypermart. They did two things right:
1. Invited a whole lot of bloggers to FREE food and Drinks.
2. Enticed them to write about it by giving prizes.
SM Hypermart’s blog-writing contest has driven their website to the first page of their target keywords.
Not bad at all eh? What they did was relatively cheaper than publishing on major newspapers. Just think about it. If you advertise on newspapers, a full page spread will cost you around 300-500 Thousand pesos ($6000-$10000) for only one day advertising. If you sponsor a party and spend around 100 Thousand pesos ($2000), you could get bloggers to talk about you and link to your website. The website links stays virtually forever.
It is clear here that SM Hypermart is targeting the high end, tech savvy and educated market. Who else would search for SM Hypermart or Philippine Supermarket online? I strongly suspect that this is merely a part of their overall marketing scheme.
This case does provide an example for other restaurants to emulate. You offer food anyway. Might as well get some bloggers to talk about your place, right? Just invite them to lunch or dinner. Serve the best food you’ve got. If the experience was memorable, people will blog about it.
Hey you can even do that on your birthday. If you have a personal website, invite your blogger buddies. If you all get drunk and happy, they will blog about it.
There’s a relatively cheap marketing tactic for you.
MAGNIFICENT ELY The Technopreneur: This is my blog on usability, design, technopreneurship - with a dash of love, life and success thoughts. (Jozzua was my old 'telnet days' chat name).
Aug 24th, 2007 at 11:22 pm
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