Partnering with ZRecs: Product Giveaways

It's been great working with Z Recommends. Jennifer and Jeremiah have such creative ideas, and are so professional. Linking to a ZRecs product review offers my visitors a thorough, unbiased, third-party recommendations they can trust. - Andy McGrew, Mr. McGroovy's

Companies whose products have been reviewed on Z Recommends have seen the depth of our commitment to unbiased and thorough reviewing firsthand, but to really understand the lengths we go to, you have to speak with the companies we have partnered with to conduct ZRecs giveaways. Giving away products online can benefit companies large and small by generating grassroots interest in their products. Companies which have given away products through Z Recommends include small startups like Mr. McGroovy's, Tattoos for Tots, Born Free, and Diaper Valet; established small companies like Boon, ThinkGeek, Obentec (Laptop Lunches), and School Zone; and major companies including Thermos and K'Nex.

Wonder why the interest spans such a range of company sizes and stages of development? We'd argue that it's our commitment to using giveways to help companies focus interest on the most important features of their products. While any product giveaway is certain to generate temporary interest among blog readers, we believe that great giveaways are not just giveaways of great products, but are designed to leave a lasting impression and contribute to readers' pre-purchase impression of the product. We work hard to make sure participating companies get more from ZRecs giveaways than they do elsewhere online. Here's how we do it:

Engaging giveaway campaigns. Depending on your product, we will design a method for giving it away that is sure to attract the most attention possible. We don't send readers to your website to answer a trivia question about your company; our goal, rather, is to help them take a creative and self-guided step towards the idea of owning your product.

Social media utilization. We are interested in social media both as a means of reaching out to new audiences and as a way to capitalize on their very un-blog-like features. Group activities, crowdsourcing, and user-generated content play a key role in our design of upcoming campaigns. When applicable, we also treat our blog itself as a mediated form of social media, soliciting involved feedback from readers and highlighting user contributions in our own posts.

A strategic rollout. We are fast becoming veterans in the still-young world of blogging, and have a well-honed method of anticipating blog traffic based on days of the week, weeks of the month, and spillover effects of other anchor content. ZRecs frequently runs advertising campaigns on other blogs to promote our giveaways, which we consider one of our blog's greatest draws. We screen products carefully, and find that the monetary value of a giveaway item is secondary to finding products which match the style, spirit, and values expressed in our blog. All of these things help ensure that our giveaway of your product gets maximum exposure to new audiences that matter to your company.

Hard data. We use Google Analytics to provide us with highly-detailed reports on traffic patterns, traffic sources, and visitor behaviors. For sizeable giveaways, we can closely monitor campaigns throughout their life cycle and deliver hard data in the form of site statistics and charts to tell you how many people saw our coverage of your product and where they came from. A campaign can be designed to soliciting specific product feedback from readers if desired.

We can't make specific promises about what a giveaway will do for your product, but we can promise that ZRecs can provide you with a fresh set of eyes on your products and possibly a fresh perspective on a potential customer base. Here's what one satisfied giveaway partner had to say:

Thank you so much to Z Recommends for coordinating a great giveaway of our Animal Bag! The idea to have readers submit photos of their stuffed animal storage was incredibly creative. It generated terrific photos and gave us inspiration for some fun future campaigns of our own. I loved getting the statistics at the end of the giveaway - very thorough and a great way to measure the success of the promotion. - Kate Benjamin, Director of Marketing, Boon Inc.

Please note: We only give away products we have tried and reviewed favorably on Z Recommends. If you make or distribute a product for parents of young children or for children ages 1-6 and would like to discuss having it reviewed on our blog, email us at zrecommends (at) gmail (dot) com with a link and some information about your product.