Pitching to Mommy Bloggers

When businesses try to market products and services via endorsements on blogs targeted at moms, it pays to understand the rules of the road

By Karen E. Klein

When Lisa Williamson and Julie Jumonville founded UpSpring Baby in 2007, they knew their innovative infant products would not sell without getting specific information and education to their target customers.

"We sell new inventions to meet moms' unmet needs. We needed to get the word out, but we didn't have millions to spend on advertising," Williamson says. So they turned to "mommy bloggers," a generation of women who are living their parenting years out on the Internet, as a means of spreading the word.

They hired Kimberly Schram as vice-president for corporate communications at the 12-employee, Austin (Tex.)-based firm and gave her a primary goal: Form relationships with influential mommy bloggers who could review and perhaps even champion the firm's signature products.

Last spring, Williamson says, the company got retail distribution through Babies "R" Us, followed by Target (TGT) and Walgreens (WAG). She credits the national interest to mommy bloggers who wrote about Milkscreen, which tests alcohol levels in breast milk, and Walking Wings, which help hold up unsteady toddlers, thanks to Schram's efforts.

Children's Products Under Review

It doesn't hurt that Williamson and Jumonville, who as the company's engineer is developing several new products for debut later this year, are both mothers of young children who fled corporate jobs to form their own company. But it's not only children's products that are good candidates for marketing through blogs.

There are 82.5 million mothers in the U.S., according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and 35 million of them have children under 18 and access the Internet regularly, according to a 2008 research report by eMarketer. Since women do the majority of product research and household purchasing, savvy mommy blogs include product reviews and recommendations on items ranging from infant clothing to packaged food to new cars.

Large corporations have been marketing to bloggers for several years, and many have marketing campaigns specifically set up to reach mothering blogs.

Mark Vance, chief marketing officer at Aquion Water Treatment Products in Chicago, conducted research with mommy bloggers on behalf of his firm's RainSoft in-home water filtration and conditioning systems. "We realized that 'protector moms' are our target market," Vance says.

Free Samples

In addition to reaching out to mommy bloggers via personal e-mails and interacting in their blog comments, Vance invited local bloggers to host six in-home focus groups for his products and had an additional 600 take an online survey. "We discovered that protector moms are making decisions and sharing that information with their friends via blogs. That's where we saw the opportunity to not only market to and engage with these folks, but to also ask them to help us understand if we were meeting their needs and if we had ideas worth trying," he says.

Camilla Ferenczi, a marketing account coordinator with The Fresh Ideas group, based in Boulder, Colo., says she incorporates blogging campaigns into all her marketing efforts. Firms must be willing to give away product samples in order to entice blog reviews, she says. "When a blogger can review your product and give away some free samples or coupons, it creates a viral effect for them. It creates a buzz on Twitter, increases their visitors, and makes their numbers go up.

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