Overview
Product sampling is the act of sending free products to recipients with the hopes of starting word-of-mouth referrals, gaining feedback about your product, and creating organic user-generated content.
A Product Sampling Campaign is a campaign type that focuses on finding specific experts to increase your products' visibility at scale. A target expert audience can apply to your campaign and try a free product in exchange for their honest feedback and user-generated content. ExpertVoice does not influence the opinions of selected experts, nor do we modify or edit their content.
These campaigns are run over a series of weeks from start to finish. Based on your company's objectives, priorities, and resources, you can start collecting incentivized reviews and user-generated content (UGC) within about eight weeks from the launch of your campaign, or you can also work at your own pace. Learn more about the high-level product sampling campaign timeline here.
Access to features within Campaigns varies based on your subscription. To request access to additional features, reach out to your Customer Success partner for more information.
Use cases and best practices for product sampling
Before launching a Product Sampling Campaign on ExpertVoice, here are some things to consider.
Timing
You can launch a sampling campaign before, during or after a product launch.
Goals
You can launch a sampling campaign to increase awareness and collect user-generated content for a specific product.
Implementation
With Product Sampling Guided Support, you'll feel confident to create, publish and monitor the campaign on your own in the Advocacy Platform after attending an initial campaign kickoff meeting and receiving resources and coaching. After the campaign ends, attend a performance review meeting to discuss your campaign output and key learnings.
With Product Sampling Managed Support, your Sampling Team will create, publish and manage your campaign from start to finish.
Targeting
You can send free samples to an exclusive group of experts. These experts can represent an existing audience that your brand previously targeted on ExpertVoice, such as your dealer list, a new audience, such as an ExpertVoice Community, or a combination of these.
Products
You can ship different product sizes, colors, and types to different expert segments. Participants in each segment may receive separate sets of activity-related instructions for participating in your campaign.
Each expert can only receive one product type for your campaign, but you can ship different products to different experts.
You'll need to fulfill the product shipping and can include a custom order insert to provide the receiving expert with additional information about your product and what's expected of them.
How to create a Product Sampling Campaign
A Product Sampling Campaign, like most available campaigns available on ExpertVoice, is created by following the necessary steps in the Advocacy Platform.
- Targeting - Determine which expert audience can see and apply to your campaign
- Application - Create 10-12 questions that will help you identify the most appropriate experts to participate in your campaign
- Segments - Setup smaller, more manageable groups of experts within your target audience for activity-related messaging and reporting purposes
- Messaging - Customize how your campaign will be presented to experts on ExpertVoice
- Activities - Outline the tasks that you would like approved experts to complete
- Availability - Schedule when your campaign will be accessible
To get started, visit the Campaign Manager in the Advocacy Platform.
Click on Create New Campaign from the prompt at the top right and select Product Sampling. Give your new campaign a unique name. This name is not expert-facing but is used to populate a few steps as you build your campaign initially. You can adjust the expert-facing name later in the Messaging step.
Then, click Continue and start the step-by-step instructions to guide you through building and publishing a campaign. You can work ahead in different steps, but remember to save each step along the way.
When your campaign is live, track your applicants and the overall campaign performance within the Campaign Manager.