I moved into the Colorado PR realm in early 2010, having been at agencies in Los Angeles and San Diego previously. At the time it felt like a struggle to find more than a tiny handful of active bloggers for local campaigns, event attendance and so on. It was a huge shift based on my previous experience, and I wondered when Colorado, and the Front Range in particular, would catch up.
Fast forward to 2016. We’ve come a long way.
Our variety of active, relevant and compelling bloggers is growing rapidly. Moms still dominate, followed by food and fitness bloggers given that healthy living is often a quintessential part of the Colorado lifestyle. However, we are also finally seeing more style and décor bloggers, which I can only hope means more coastal retail outlets (I’m talking to you, Zara and Club Monaco) are not far behind.
Blog conferences like BLEND and FitBloggin have chosen Colorado in recent years for their summits, and I sincerely hope Colorado is on the radar of blog network juggernauts like BlogHer, Mom 2.0 and ShiftCon. I know Denver would knock everyone’s socks off.
Within the Colorado blogger community there are some standouts that keep the rest of us pushing, growing and thinking bigger. There is a closed Facebook group where people are asking great questions and working hard to get more engagement on their posts for sponsors and partners. Updated blogrolls, like this one from Aimee Giese, can help marketers expand their horizons for Colorado blog and ambassador campaigns. We’re maturing!
And when it comes to forming relationships with bloggers in our own backyard, Colorado marketers should not assume that just because we’re all local every blogger will jump at your pitch or invitation. If anything, even more due diligence and thoughtfulness is required to make a pitch stick. A few tips I’d like to stress include:
- Understand whether the blog is geared for national readers, local readers or a hybrid of the two. Proceed accordingly.
- Set client expectations based on your identified targets when it comes to budgeting for sponsored posts, reviews or giveaways. As these sites mature and grow, so do the agreements and expectations around content from PR and marketers.
- Get a feel for the inner circle and get ready to be transparent with your targets if you’re not offering the same thing to everyone.
- Meet them! Go to coffee, make it to a meet up or at the very least, engage human-to-human on Twitter until you can meet IRL.
I’m personally inspired and hopeful that the Colorado blogger landscape will continue to grow and evolve by leaps and bounds.
How do you currently engage with our hometown talent today?
