The outreach marketing landscape has evolved quite a bit over the past few years. With how promising the marketing method has become, 2018 is proving to be an ideal time for marketers to jump on the outreach marketing bandwagon.
Also called Influencer Outreach, outreach marketing has taken the spotlight in making your content shine with both organic traffic and SEO value. So, if you’ve never tried outreach or are doing it but getting dismal results, then this is the guide for you.
What’s Outreach Marketing, Anyway?
Outreach marketing, in basic terms, means connecting with the relevant people in the industry who have the means of promoting your business to a considerably large audience. And just from the name of the strategy itself, it’s all about extending your reach.
Outreach also involves plenty of email communication and writing compelling content, which is why it’s commonly grouped together with content and email marketing.
Part of why outreach marketing is so popular is because of how it utilizes the best of both marketing disciplines to produce amazing results.
So, how do you do it without ending up wasting valuable time and resources? Good question.
In this article, we’ll talk about the five best ways to do outreach marketing that can improve brand awareness and build natural links that carry great SEO value.
How to Create an Outreach Marketing Strategy That Works
1. Know your goals
It’s the most crucial step, and one that many marketers would rather just skip. Having goals and objectives is how you can determine if your campaign is a success.
Without goals, you and your team have nothing to focus on. And you’ll end up doing a whole bunch of other things that won’t lead to any significant results.
Having clearly defined KPI for monitoring progress is also a must for measuring performance. If you have a campaign with the objective of getting high engagement, then your KPI’s would be social shares, page views, and link clicks.
2. Find influencers
Just finding influencers isn’t a big deal. It’s finding ones that are ideal for your business that’s the tricky part. Because you can’t target them all.
Some won’t be a good fit, while others don’t have the right audience reach. You can use a spreadsheet to list them down. Something like the following is a good start:
Some of the more popular tools marketers use today to find influencers are BuzzStream and Buzzsumo. They can provide a wealth of information on the influential people in your industry.
Buzzstream has an incredible influencer search engine called Discovery that’s been all the rage for marketers.
For example, if you’re involved in e-commerce and want to find out who the top online personalities are in that line of business, simply type ‘e-commerce’ in the search bar and voila!
(Source: BuzzStream)
For Buzzsumo, it can’t get any more straightforward. All you need to do is click on a section that says ‘Influencer’ at the top bar, then type in a keyword of the industry you’re in, like “inbound marketing”.
(Source: Proficient Blogging)
Other great tools you can use to dig up influencers are Alltop and Technorati. Both both still work like search engines that you can use to target individuals in a certain niche.
Now that you have some of the most powerful tools for influencer search, it should be easy enough for you to build up a nice long list in your spreadsheet.
3. Reach out
Here comes the most important part of outreach marketing: reaching out and letting influencers know about your business.
If you’re still using BuzzStream, this step is going to a breeze because you can do that right from their platform. Also, make sure to check out NinjaOutreach, which is used by some of the biggest names in digital marketing like Neil Patel and Rand Fishkin of Moz.
Want to do it the traditional way? No problem.
First, you’ll need to find out the email addresses of the influencers. Clearbit is a good option for that. Just use their Chrome browser extension and you’ll be able to find the email address of most influencers.
Next, use an email verification tool like EmailListVerify to make sure your emails don’t bounce. And once you know which ones are still active, all that’s left to do is reach out.
How to do Email Outreach
The only way for you to get good results from email outreach is to make everything killer: that means killer subject lines, killer email bodies, and a killer pitch. Otherwise, you’re just wasting your time.
Here’s an example of a great email for outreach marketing:
Want to see more templates for outreach emails? Make sure to check out this guide from HubSpot for more ideas on how to write and structure them.
4. Build Lasting Relationships
While waiting for email replies, or even before you send out emails, it’s important to get familiar with the influencers you’re targeting.
Follow their social media profiles and engage with their content. And don’t be fake about it. Look for a tweet or LinkedIn update they shared that caught your interest and tell them what you liked or didn’t like.
Outreach marketing requires being interested in the things your influencers are interested in as part of your strategy. Promote their work, mention them, or send a short, sweet message.
5. Produce Kick-Ass Content
You can start creating compelling content both before or after you get in touch with influencers. That’s because you have the option of pitching ideas or ready-to-publish content.
Either way, you’ll need to bring your A-game when crafting content that will impress influencers enough to make them publish and share it.
If you’re writing a guest post, make sure to read this timeless guide from CopyBlogger. You’ll be crafting epic guest posts in no time.
You can also include a link back to your personal website in your author bio. But before you do, make sure your site is ready to handle substantial traffic. If your pages are suffering from slow loading time, try using a reliable CDN (content delivery network) and see if that fixes the problem.
That’s it — You’re All Set!
Outreach marketing can be one of the best things you can do for your brand or business. But you can’t expect great results if you don’t put in the effort. After all, nothing worth doing ever comes easy. And it’s the same for whatever marketing strategy you decide to pursue.
