Ultimate Influencer Outreach Guide for Beginners

This article is all about gaining brand awareness by planning effective influencer outreach campaigns. Wait, you haven’t heard about influencer outreach, not sure if this strategy benefits your business? 

No worries! Our in-depth guide explains everything you need to know about influencer marketing step by step.

Here’s what we’re going to talk about:

• What influencer outreach is?
• How influencers can boost your brand’s awareness?
• How to get in touch with relevant influencers?
• How to maintain solid relationships with influencers?

But first, let’s start with the basics!

What Is Influencer Outreach?

Influencer outreach is the process of getting in touch with influencers.

The goal is to get them to vouch for your business by testing your products, positively reviewing your services, and promoting your brand.

When you’re just starting out, every time a satisfied client mentions your brand is like a small win for your business. But if an influencer recommends your product or services – well, that feels more like climbing 2 steps at a time.

Because an influencer with a large following is seen as an expert in their niche, their opinion and product reviews influence many people to buy or pass certain products or services, such as when Cristiano Ronaldo pushed away 2 Coca-Cola bottles and said “Water!” encouraging people to drink water. Well, that gesture alone knocked off $4 billion from Coca-Cola’s value!

What Is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is when brands collaborate with people who have a significant social media presence with high count followers for promotion.

Influencers endorse brands publicly to make them more visible on the internet and encourage followers to buy their products or services.

Is Influencer Outreach Right for Your Business? 

An influencer outreach campaign strategy can benefit your business significantly. You’ll miss out if you don’t give it a try at least once. More than 75% of brands will dedicate budget to influencer outreach strategies in 2021. 

But is this necessary for your business? 

It is not just a trendy marketing strategy that will dry out in a few years. Up to 90% of brands who have implemented influencer email outreach in their marketing strategy were satisfied with the results.

Influencer marketing brings genuine value to your marketing efforts. It increases your brand’s trust and authority. So if you have the budget for it, why not?

How do you know if influencer marketing is for you? 

If you’re a local offline business, then influencer marketing might not be your cup of tea. But if you have any business that requires an online presence, you need influencer marketing.

Depending on how much time and money you’re willing to invest you can customize it for both small to large businesses. If you have less time you can opt-in for Postaga’s done for you service.

Why Is Influencer Marketing Important? 

Podcasts are booming, people read more blog articles and engage on social media channels more often. 

Keeping up with the trends will help your business flourish and attract more hot leads. Because this is the power of influencer marketing, everyone is talking about! 

When an influencer endorses a brand, everyone that follows them will be more inclined to buy their products or services. So, influencer marketing can bring value to your business like:

• Attracting new customers that you couldn’t reach
• Building relationships with relevant people
• Establishing authority in your niche

And indeed, it helps you with more than just one aspect: traffic, sales, online presence, and gaining customers’ trust!

Different Types of Influencer Marketing 

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to a successful influencer outreach campaign. That’s why you can choose between these types of influencer marketing campaigns or even mix them up for even more effective results!

Collaboration

Have you run out of brand-generated content ideas? Do you struggle with low post reach? Choosing to collaborate with an influential blogger can be the perfect boost that your content needs. In addition, you can talk about expertise in your niche, give the audience real solutions, and build trust with potential customers. 

There are also “sponsored posts” opportunities. You’ll pay influencers to talk about your brand on their blog. Most of the time, this can look like in-depth product reviews or a product launch announcement. 

You can also invite them to your podcast show promoting each other. Or ask to get invited to their podcast or youtube channel.

Brand Ambassador 

Another effective way to make your business bloom is to employ an influencer relevant to your domain and make them your brand ambassador.

Their job is to boost your brand awareness, increase sales, and put your business in a positive light by posting content regularly on LinkedIn, Twitter, or their websites.

Because the brand ambassador is “the face” of your business, you’ll have to research carefully who you should team up with. Quick advice, though – make sure that their target audience is relevant to your business and that their style suits your brand personality. 

Deploy Affiliates

By implementing an affiliate program, you can collaborate with tons of influencers, so they willingly promote your business. This strategy works by agreeing with influencers on a commission per sale. 

The difference between affiliates and brand ambassadors is that the latter doesn’t work with commissions. Instead, brand ambassadors might get access to special events, up-front fees, or freebies. Meanwhile, affiliates are paid according to the sales they make. 

Giveaway Collaboration

One more great way to boost your sales when you’re teaming up with an influencer is to offer a freebie, discount, coupon, or anything that benefits the audience. As the name implies, you’re giving something away. 

Why Should You Do Giveaways?

Hearing favorite influencers doing a collaborative giveaway works quite well. Because coming up with a discount or a special offer is hard to resist for audiences not to engage in. 

What might these giveaway collaborations look like? 

• Exclusive coupons (10% off, $40 off)
• Special offers (buy 1-month plan get 1 month free)
• Unique codes (use code to get free credits)

The best way to make this influencer marketing strategy work is to come up with an exclusive discount that benefits the audience but doesn’t hurt your profits at the same time. 

Where Do You Find Influencers Relevant to Your Niche? 

For B2B or SaaS owners, perfect influencers would be available on LinkedIn. Other business owners that can vouch for you could be the perfect game-changer because their endorsements establish your credibility.

SaaS owners can also find significant exposure with SaaS Facebook groups as well.

However, if you want to do some PR, Twitter is a better social media platform because you can find journalists with a large audience. You can also try out HARO.

If you’re an e-commerce business owner, your influencer will hang around on Instagram, Snapchat or Facebook.

Postaga can find you, relevant journalists, webmaster influencers in an instant automatically scraping their emails for you to set up cold email campaigns.

How Do You Choose the Perfect Influencers for Your Brand? 

Here’s a quick checklist you should think about before choosing the influencer that will represent your brand:

1. Relevance
2. Audience Size
3. Recent Activity
4. Engagement

Relevance

Your journey begins with the relevant influencer. Always choose an influencer related to your business. If a food blogger suddenly promotes VPN services, it will confuse their audience and, even worse, might lose credibility. Choosing a technology influencer will do the trick for you. If you have an SEO tool, then SEO Agency owners and SEO experts are your influencers.

Audience Size

The more followers they have, the more exposure you’ll get. However, a broad social audience doesn’t necessarily mean potential customers. Some influencers might pay for fake followers. You’ll have to choose influencers that can give you the best results and maintain a level of professionalism online.

However, you have to come to terms with one thing – we’re not going after the biggest fish in the ocean with 100k followers because they can charge a hefty amount that can break your bank.

Recent Activity

Make sure that the influencer you’re reaching out to is regularly active online. Look for their recent posts and make sure they are not older than 1-2 weeks.

Avoid controversial figures by analyzing their recent activities. Make sure they’re not involved in scams, press scandals, or any other similar things that can ruin your brand’s image or your influencer marketing efforts. 

Engagement rate

Pay attention to the influencers with a broad audience but a more low level of engagement. It means that the audience is not very active or doesn’t interact with the influencer, or they might even be using bots. Thus, your marketing strategy results won’t be that successful. The influencer you’re teaming up with should have an authentic relationship with their followers. 

What Are The Type Of Influencers? 

Just because your influencer doesn’t have millions of subscribers, it doesn’t mean they are too small or not a good investment. Based on the number of their followers, there are different influencer types : 

• Celebrity Influencer – High-profile companies or individuals with millions of followers. 
• Macro Influencers – Not as big as celebrities, but their audience is still big enough to bring a significant impact to your business. They might have less than a million followers.
• Micro-Influencers – With their audience somewhere around 10k-100k followers, they are still growing their online presence.
• Nano Influencers – Their audience has around 1k-10k followers, and they’re just setting out in the industry. Often, they don’t have enough traffic or a loyal audience, but they’re easier to reach and collaborate with because they are potential influencers.

How To Get Noticed By Influencers?

Coming out of nowhere and asking them to do you a favor is less likely to work. That’s why you’ll have to pop up on your influencer’s radar for 1-2 months and engage with them regularly. Here are a few ideas you can try out: 

• Share, retweet, like, and comment on their posts; 
• Follow them on their social accounts.
• Attend their webinars, workshops, or seminars;
• Connect on LinkedIn
• Mention them in your post

Being considerate and genuinely interested in their content will help you reach your goals and establish a long relationship with influencers. 

When looking to get noticed by webmasters, you need to create excellent and popular content, or at least better than your competitors. Your content is proof that you know what you’re talking about and you deserve their time for your brand. 

How Can You Build Your Influencers Contact List?

Once you’ve figured out which influencers are relevant to your business, it’s time to build your email lists.

Not everyone will have their business contact details displayed in the same place on the internet. For example, some excellent influencers might put it on LinkedIn, others on their website, or even on Twitter. Still, this doesn’t mean they’re the right ones, so you’ll need to research it.

To not waste any time, you can use email scraping tools to gather the email addresses of influencers. 

Journalists Prospecting Tools

If you’re looking for journalists to put your brand in the spotlight, you can try tools like: 

1. HARO 
2. Twitter hashtags like #journorequests, #prrequest
3. RadioGuestList
4. Source Bottle 
5. Qwoted
6. Prowly 
7. Muck Rack 
8. Roxhill Media

Influencer Prospecting Tools

If you’re looking for web influencers, these are some of the best prospecting tools:

1. Postaga 
2. Hunter 
3. Snov
4. Uplead 
5. Find That Lead 
6. Voila Norbert
7. Texau
8. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Blog Influencer Prospecting Tools

Here are a few more webmaster prospecting tools you can use to find the correct contact details: 

1. Postaga
2. Respona
3. Buzzstream 
4. Pitchbox
5. Buzzsumo
6. Klear
7. Ninja Outreach

Once you’ve found everything you need, you can build a list of social media influencers by crafting a CSV consisting of: 

• Domain 
• First and last name 
• Company name
• Email Addresses
• An opening line personalized based on their recent activity.

Since a CSV file is easier to import in any cold email campaign tool, it’ll be easier to fill in all the details for your influencer outreach campaign. Just make sure to distribute each element to each column, and you’re good to go!

Craft Your First Influencer Outreach Campaign!

Setting your first outreach campaign can be a quite difficult task, but don’t worry – we got your back!

• Begin with segmented prospects
• Craft Your email copy
• Be direct with what you want
• Mention what’s in it for them
• Email personalization
• Send unique follow up email
• Upload CSV to Postaga
• Launch the campaign

Segmenting Prospects

First of all, segment your prospects based on the data you gathered. For example, you can group all prospects that have below 10 thousand readers or followers. If you’re just getting started, it doesn’t make sense to reach out to influencers with millions of audiences. You must ensure that their values align with yours.

Crafting Influencer Outreach Email Copy

Now that you’re ready to craft your email. You’ll have to be honest with what you want in your copy – you’d like to boost your brand’s awareness, and think they’d be a good fit!

Providing Value

Look at things from their perspective and tell them the benefits of teaming up with you. For example, your business is relevant to their audience, so people want to hear about your products or services. Providing them valuable information and a reason why they should collaborate with you is the key.

Email Personalization

Last but not least, don’t send copy-pasted template emails or generic stuff. Your blog is excellent! or I love your style! It might seem a bit spammy. Instead, personalize your email with their name, their recent activities, catchy subject lines, make it relatable, and sprinkle a few jokes too!

To help you save time, Postaga can pull in snippet details from prospects’ domains so you can take it up a notch to craft unique opening lines for each contact. 

Campaign Ready For Launch!

Now to upload the CSV you’ve created scraping the influencer’s contact list, and launch the campaign. 

For those influencers who haven’t responded yet, postaga automatically sets up a follow-up email. Even better, you can choose how long Postaga should wait until they send the next follow-up email. 

One excellent way to build long-term relationships with influencers is to engage with them even after the deal has ended – like, share, tweet, and comment on their content on a regular basis! 

Yes, this is a time-consuming process. Thus postaga has introduced a done for you service for founders with less time.

How To Manage & Negotiate With Influencers?

Expect different answers. Some will ignore your emails, some will be rude to you, and only a handful might be open for collaboration.

Before closing a deal with them, you’ll have to set some rules that will make the negotiation part easier:

• Have you decided on your influencer marketing budgets?
• How long would you like to collaborate with an influencer?
• Is this an exclusive collaboration or broad?
• What is the volume of content the influencers should deliver? 
• What specific marketing goals have you planned?
• How exactly can they help your goals? 

Once you know exactly what you want from the social influencers, you can start the negotiations. 

Most of the time, the audience will be the target point of the discussion. For example, Hootsuite recommends the formula:

• $100 per 10,000 followers + extra perks, incentives, or discounts. 

Some webmasters will give you backlinks for free, and some will charge you. Looking for backlinks from Influential websites is a challenge itself, but it can cost you from $200 to $350, according to ahrefs.

But this is just a suggestion, of course. It’s more important to stick to your budget and focus on a potential influencer that fits your financial situation.  

How to Scale Your Influencer Outreach Campaign? 

Your brand deserves to be seen, so don’t stop only at 4-5 relevant influencers for your business. 

However, selecting the perfect influencers to represent your business can be a time-consuming and challenging task. First, you have to do in-depth research to see who genuinely vibes with your brand’s personality. 

Here are a few tips to help you grow and scale your outreach campaigns to build strong partnerships with influencers.

1. Connecting To A Chain Of Influencers

From experience, I can assure you; you’ll do better by starting with smaller influencers and working your way up to the bigger ones. It is better than waiting for the celebrity influencers or prominent site owners to notice you. 

Connect with one influencer and cover their network. And from their network, select three or more influencers to collaborate with. Now you have four influencers to work with, cover each of their networks and ask for an introduction to more influential figures. You can rinse and repeat this process to grow your network chain.

2. Segmenting Your Influencers

Here are a few ways you can segment your influencers.

1. Follower count
2. Geographical location
3. Niche Expertise
4. Social Platforms
5. Website SEO Metrics

The primary way to segment your influencer is based on their follower count. Only contact and collaborate with influencers that have below 5000 followers. Once you’re done, target influencers with 10,000 followers, then target ones with 15,000 followers. Rinse and repeat to expand.

If you have a service specific to Los Angeles, it’s pointless to collaborate with an influencer with Dallas or Australian followers. But if you have a scalable service, target one city or state at a time to ensure scalability. 

If you have an SEO SaaS tool, you can work with digital and content marketing agencies. But working with food bloggers is not recommended. To grow your network based on the niche, be sure you’re in related niches.

Target one social platform influencer at a time. Don’t work with LinkedIn, Twitter and webmaster all at the same time. Take it slow, work with one at a time.

When working with webmasters, take a look at DA or DR and the organic traffic. Being a new website owner, you can’t collaborate with 90 DA websites. Work your way up by starting with 20 DA site owners with at least 1000 organic traffic.

To Wrap It All Up

Influencer outreach unlocks the gateway to influencer marketing. The benefits of influencer marketing are immense- boosting your brand awareness to increase your sales and help you get high-quality backlinks to your websites.

From traditional posts to hiring brand ambassadors, your business will stand out from competitors more quickly. 

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