Why you should care about vlogmas

Christmas may be months away, but seasonal decorations are already decking the halls of Harrods. No doubt many communication professionals are preparing themselves for the busiest quarter in the year too. Vlogmas (or blogmas) is the latest trend to burst on the marketing, PR and comms scene. During this blog you’ll learn how to capitalise on this in order to increase brand awareness and reach during the Christmas period, as well as our top tips for building influential relationships

What is Blogmas?

If you haven’t already guessed, blogmas is the same as vlogmas, just written content rather than video content.

Why should you care?

We ran a search on vlogmas using our media intelligence platform and discovered an eye watering 127,333 mentions of ‘Vlogmas’ last December alone! This included 28,038 YouTube descriptions, 18,886 Instagram posts and 74,848 tweets.

We also had a look at blogmas and found almost 8000 blog posts mentioning this term. In total there were 28,153 mentions of blogmas on social media! We expect blogmas is going to be much bigger this year!

That’s a staggering 156,086 mentions of vlogmas / blogmas in a 31 day period!

During b/vlogmas, we see huge influencers post every day as opposed to once or twice a week. The chances of our brand being mentioned during this time spikes because of the frequency, which is why smart brands (large and small) are capitalising on this trend.

How to build relationships with vloggers/bloggers

Find Vloggers

The first thing to do is create a list of potential influencers. It’s really important to consider the audience of the influencer to avoid pushing our brand to the wrong audience. We can use media monitoring to look for people talking about keywords related to our industries. Depending on the industry, the search is likely to pull thousands of mentions. We can hear over the noise by filtering posters by reach in order to find those with the largest following.

Our influencer contact management database also comes with contact cards for each member of the database. These contact card contains an email address, social media profiles, websites, biography and any other details that we’ll need to get in contact with the influencer. This is an easy and time-saving solution.

Word of advice:

Don’t fall into the trap of only looking at following, whether their community engages with them is very important. Sometimes it is actually more beneficial to build relationships with micro-influencers as they often have a more loyal community of followers Also look at how influential their followers are so you know if they’ll have a positive impact on influential reach..

Using an engagement tool that has a built in CRM feature seriously helps to build relationships. For example, if we notice some of the influencers already follow us or have engaged with us in the past, we should definitely flag them up as potential influencers to connect with. If we see that all their past engagement history with us is negative, our approach towards them will be considerably different.

2) Research

This stage is absolutely essential if we wish to build any kind of authentic relationship with our influencers. Learn as much as much about the target influencers as possible as this will allow us to tailor communications with them and ensure our product is right for them.

Questions to consider:

How do they like to be contacted?
What kinds of posts do they respond to?
What are their hobbies and interests?
When’s their birthday?
Have they had any significant life events occur recently, for example, just bought a Pug?
What’s their favourite colour?

Knowing the above helps us get personal. For example, have they just got married? A jewellery company could send them a gift engraved with their new initials.

By using media monitoring we can discover specific keywords or topics that they regularly discuss on their blog or social media.

3) Build Relationships

Now it’s time to start interacting with the influencer on the basis of the information we’ve found. Aimlessly liking their tweets and sending them irrelevant content won’t get us anywhere. If we were to meet them in person, how would we act? Build authentic relationships based on a genuine interest in their life and content and we’ll have more success.

It’s also worth creating an influencer workflow. This is a plan outlining week by week communication strategies. Whilst we don’t want to draft exact tweets in advance, it’s useful to have a guide to the process. For example, we may want to like, comment on and promote their own content, before asking them questions. If we know that they vlog on a Tuesday, schedule in some time to listen in to help become more relevant.

4) Pitch It

Once some kind of bond has been formed e.g. they reply to your messages regularly, it’s time to pitch, but don’t forget to personalise it. We need to show the influencer that we’ve taken a genuine interest in them. As tempting as it can be to fire off a generic email to a list of people, taking the time to tailor a pitch to each specific person can be hugely beneficial.

Our pitch must benefit both parties. It’s pretty unlikely that an influencer will do something that doesn’t benefit them, they may request a fee, but one thing’s certain – the content must be of interest to their audience.

“The best way to create projects with mutual benefit is to ask how you can help the influencers grow their network and also how to make it simple for them” Michael Brenner, CEO, Marketing Insider Group.

Don’t forget to offer something that will be valuable to their audience and keep asks focused and small.

5) Maintain Relationships

Whether the influencer accepts our request or not, avoid suddenly dropping them. Continue to interact with them for potential future collaborations. We don’t want to seem like now we’ve got what we wanted, we no longer care about them.

Now you have a rough idea how to get started with vlogmas / blogmas, Read our influencer relations guide :

• Find the right influencers and get them to work with you
• Make the most of those relationships once you’ve established them
• Measure the success of your influencer programs