Gourmet Station Blog - Strategy & Content (2)
11/23/2004
Carra, Ben and I had our first strategy meeting for the GourmetStation blog. Lots of energy and enthusiasm in the meeting room at Blue Marble Media. It will be fun to work with people who are excited about seeing how far we can push the vision.
Being the good marketers we are, we first developed goals and objectives. Goal: To develop an adverblog using the “voice” of GourmetStation’s brand icon, T. Alexander.
Objectives
*To build brand awareness among new audiences
*To build brand loyalty with current patrons
*To increase new patron sales
*To increase repeat sales from current customer base
*To encourage informal customer communication and interaction with the brand in a fun, informal environment
Next step: To develop success metrics
Since the voice of the blog will be from T. Alexander, GourmetStation’s icon, there was a lot of talk about the concept of a faux/branding/adver blog (not quite sure what to call this) and the importance of playing it straight with visitors. (Visions of Ranging Cows floated in my mind.) We agreed that one of our first challenges would be to create a back story about T. Alexander – age, personality, background. The more dimensions we could create the richer and more realistic the posts.
Next we began development of a Post/Content Strategy. Post/Content Goal: to reinforce the GourmetStation brand through T. Alexander’s (GourmetStation’s icon) experiences, insights, observations of food, travel and life. Creating a post/content strategy and goal will:
*Focus content/posts
*Provide direction for the look and feel development
*Incorporate GourmetStation's offerings in a non intrusive manner
With a strategic foundation established our conversation turned to post ideas. We agreed T.A’s posts would be as realistic as possible. Frequency: 3-4 times a week. Vary in length: from a couple of sentences to a few short paragraphs.
We quickly found ourselves with a wealth of ideas from local culture and festivals to TA’s personal memories to TA travels and blogging at airports. (Side bar: must research airports with wifi).
Focused back on one of our objective - How could we subtly blend posts with GourmetStation’s special and seasonal offerings? If GourmetStation offers a spring lamb special perhaps T.A. will be traveling in New Zealand blogging about a fine lamb dinner at a quaint restaurant in Kaikoura. Or perhaps TA blogs about dinner with Kiwi friends Jilly and Paul in their new home on the outskirts of Auckland.
We also wanted to explore multi media aspects including: Vblogging (video blogging), audio blogging, photo blogging. A T. Alexander photo album would be pretty cool.
It didn’t take us long to realize that if we were going to make this work, there could be quite a bit of research involved even for posts with only a few sentences. We needed a media/content plan.
*Month-by-month content/media plan will be developed
*Monthly story idea conference call/meetings
Next Meeting – Blog Format