Ultimate Guide To Outreach Marketing for Newbies

One of the most effective ways to stand out in a crowded marketplace is by utilizing the power of influencers and notable businesses in your niche.

Among the buzziest forms of online marketing, outreach marketing focuses on initiating and managing a mutually beneficial relationship with influencers or targeted businesses. It is an excellent way to grow your exposure while also achieving your marketing and sales goals.

What is Outreach Marketing?

Outreach marketing aims to forge relationships with individuals or businesses in your target market to increase your website’s exposure while promoting your products or services. Experts also refer to it as influencer marketing since it involves reaching out to individuals with existing audiences relevant to your niche.

A mention of your brand on popular websites or social media platforms could make an incredible difference for your online presence. More online visibility means more authority, trust, and organic traffic leading to potential conversions, sales, and revenue. In addition, people tend to buy from businesses that have reviews from influencers they idolize.

Why is Outreach Marketing Important?

Building a business is not a walk in the park; a lucrative niche requires serious work. Suppose you are doing everything you can and still can’t seem to get ahead. Welp, it’s time to revisit your strategies. Outreach marketing can bring the difference you’re looking for. 

Influencer outreach helps you establish and nurture connections that work for your business growth. Through constant communication via email, you can earn the trust of notable figures in your industry and inspire them to recommend your business to others. That helps maximize exposure for your product or service and ultimately elevates your sales and revenue.

Actual Benefits of Outreach Marketing

Your competitors are actively using outreach strategies that should be enough to compel you to include this strategy in your marketing arsenal. But if you are still in the wonderland, here are specific advantages of outreach marketing to consider:

1. Boost Your SEO & Content
2. Promote your Business
3. Building Relationship

Boost Your SEO & Content

A key advantage of outreach marketing is that it boosts your overall SEO efforts. Helping you pop up in search engines. When reputable, industry-related sites link to your website, Google automatically rewards you higher result page rankings. A study by SparkToro found that the quality of linking sites and page content is the second-most important Google ranking factor.

Outreach doesn’t just help drive traffic to your website. It’s also an effective strategy to raise brand awareness. By running content outreach campaigns you can get a piece of content in front of a larger audience.

Promote your Business

You are in for disappointments if you simply create your website and expect people to just find your product or services. Utilizing outreach marketing to connect with like-minded influential people or prominent websites can help drive attention to your business.

Builds Relationships

The thing with the modern business world is it is nearly impossible to achieve success independently. That brings us to another advantage of outreach marketing- network expansion. Crafting good conversations that engage decision-makers in your marketplace helps you build genuine relationships that will grow your business.

Your end goal might be to promote your business but building relationships can help you in so many ways that you can’t even imagine.

When running content outreach campaigns you will need links from authoritative sites multiple times. Unless you have a good relationship with them, you will not be able to get repetitive links from them. Thus building relationships is crucial.

Flaws of Outreach Marketing 

Regardless of the potential return on investment(ROI), every marketing technique carries its share of weaknesses. The main disadvantages of outreach marketing are: 

• It can be expensive: Tools and person-hours required for data mining, email compilation, and email automation tools can dramatically increase the cost of your outreach efforts. Also, the influencer can charge you to feature you. So be ready to open up your wallet.
• It is time-consuming: It takes time and tons of patience to compile prospect lists, find respective email addresses, create compelling messages, manage leads, and build networks with the right people.

Nevertheless, outreach marketing ensures guaranteed results and is cheaper than PPC ads. It is more human and has a far-reaching impact than PPC ads.

Ultimate Battle: Email Marketing VS Outreach Marketing

Outreach marketing focuses on individuals who don’t know you yet. You can find these prospects by:

• Scouring Directories & Social Media platforms
• Scraping relevant decision-makers
• Spying on competitors 

At first, you have to figure out your target market before you opt-in for outreach marketing. The primary goal of outreach marketing is to establish a common ground and relatable connection with prospects and schedule a meeting.

Thus, your email contents should be precise, sticking to only what your contacts need to know beforehand. That way, you make it easier for them to make a quick yet informed decision about whether or not to engage with you. Thus your outreach email must highlight how your proposal benefits your prospect as well.

Email Marketing is nothing like cold email outreach. Email marketing targets specific audiences that have opted to receive information from you. These individuals could be someone who:

• Willingly subscribed to your newsletters
• Subscribed to your promotional emails
• Signed up for a free trial
• Downloaded something from your site
• Visited your site but is yet to make a buying decision
• Existing customers you want to upsell

To do that, you must focus on building your email list first. And compiling the email list can be easy with loyal customers willing to receive blogs and updates from you. But it’s almost impossible getting someone you don’t know to subscribe to your promotional material.

Businesses use marketing emails to show leads the value they could unlock by becoming their customer. However, because the contacts are yet to commit, such emails should be a combination of value and sales. Providing helpful information to the audience keeps them hooked, which we simply describe as nurturing in the marketing world. 

Types of People to Contact For Outreach Marketing

A crucial part of an outreach marketing strategy is getting the right people to bridge your business with your potential customers. Harness the power of these experts to elevate your business growth: 

• Prominent Bloggers
• Complimentary Business Owners
• Journalists
• Brand Ambassadors
• Social Media Influencers 
• Topical Experts

How To Identify & Select Influencers?

It’s much easier and effective to reach your target audience through someone with ready access to your relevant group. Only reason you’re seeking the help of influencers is to connect your brand with your target audience. 

Now the question is, how do you identify the best influencers for your business? Use the following criteria:

1. Relevancy
2. Activity
3. Engagement Rate
4. Popularity

Relevancy To Your Business

Select an influencer that matches your business or industry. Someone who helps you connect with audiences that are genuinely interested in your products or services. For example, if you are a makeup brand, choosing a beauty blogger with a smaller audience will make more sense than partnering with a tech blogger with a broader audience. 

Their Recent Activity

Industry relevance only counts when you partner with an active influencer. You can judge an individual’s activity level by checking their most recent social media or blog posts. Influencers who haven’t updated their social media or blog in the last month are better to be avoided.

Are controversial influencers with a bad history a reliable partner? Certainly not! Chances are, such an individual doesn’t have a loyal audience and will not bring much value. Hence they can even hurt your brand image.

Their Engagement Rate

Another critical measure of the value of an influencer is how they engage with their followers. Are they responsive to social and blog comments? What amount of social shares does their content get? How many organic page views do they get per month on their website?

If their posts have tons of likes but few comments or comments consisting of single words like “great”, you have a good reason to be skeptical. Avoid spammy fake influencers.

Popularity Level

When you choose an influencer, you want someone who has a track record for providing high value for investment. Influencers with a large follower count can be challenging to reach and might hinder your efforts. Work with an individual with a good following and room for growth.

For example, an influencer with 4000 followers may offer more value than a counterpart with 15,000 if those 4000 individuals actively engage with the influencer’s posts. 

Easy Steps To Successful Outreach Marketing

Create Your Goals

The goal of your outreach marketing is to smoothen your sales process by generating new clients within your target market through influential figures. Divide your goals for each campaign that you set out. Ask yourself the following questions and set up your own KPIs

1. How many influencers do you want to work with for each campaign?
2. How much exposure do you want to get?
3. How big of an audience do you want access to for each campaign?
4. How much are you willing to spend on each campaign?

Prospect based on Target Audience

Customers are not necessarily knocking at your door during the initial phase, you’ll need to walk the extra mile to conduct strong prospecting and connect with influencers first.

Outreach marketing is most effective when the influencer goals align with your brand. That’s why you should identify influential figures who have your customers as followers. It is the actual first step to making a successful cold outreach marketing campaign.

Research And Segment

Developing relatable connections with influencers starts with thorough research. Discover the demographics of your prospects, check their social media pages, analyze their audiences, and figure out their pain points. 

Next, segment your influencer list based on the data obtained from research. It’s smarter to target smaller groups with more personalized messages than trying to win over a big crowd of marginal influencers with bland emails. 

Begin With Awesome Subject Lines

Subject lines are 64% of what makes or breaks an email open. Get your subject lines right with the following pointers:

• Keep your subject line short and sweet
• Blend text and emojis to add some personality
• Include recipient’s or company name subject lines
• Avoid ALL CAPS excess bold and signs (#, $, %)

Don’t Forget To Personalize Everything

Email personalization is a foundational tactic to successful cold email campaigns. Personalized email makes people feel appreciated and valued, which can make all the difference in deciding whether you’re a spammer or not.

Adding a personal touch to the email content can help improve your response rate and get recipients to take your desired action. That means crafting your email body based on the information you have on each prospect. Different ways to personalize emails include:

• Complimenting recent achievement
• Press on pain points to collaborate
• Mentioning a mutual connection
• Screenshots of their website
• Highlighting a trigger event
• Personalize using common interests, hobbies
• Common personalization– Name, Company Name

Provide Genuine Value

Don’t be that guy who asks for something without providing value. Offer your contacts something valuable that will trigger them to collaborate. Giving (rather than receiving) helps you stand out and create familiarity in a noisy space where people request endless favors from people they don’t know. And here’s how to do that:

• Link to their blog post
• Comment and share their blogs and social media
• Refer people your influencer’s way
• Include them in a round-up of experts in their niche
• Offer to solve their pain points

Focus On Building Relationships

Instead of being too salesy, nurture the connections into lasting relationships to get the most out of outreach marketing. It isn’t something that happens overnight; it’s a process that’s grounded on making individuals in your network feel recognized and appreciated. 

Deliver your promises, keep in touch, stay honest with your communication, and send thank, holiday, or birthday notes once in a while. In-person meetings, whether at a trade event, golf course, or coffee shop, can help deepen the quality of your relationships with influencers that matter to your business.

Bonus: Outreach Marketing Tips

So we added a few tricks to squeeze the most out of your outreach marketing efforts:

• Craft short cold emails
• Standout with some visual appeal – GIFs, images, and videos
• Include easily actionable call-to-actions
• A/B test different email components
• Be mindful of the email timing
• Smaller campaigns allow more flexibility
• Never forget to send follow-up emails
• Keep an eye on campaign metrics

Verdict

Email outreach marketing has seen significant growth in recent years as an effective method of generating brand awareness, collaboration as well as sales. It’s all about building influencer relationships, which isn’t hard but takes time and effort. We hope the insights above will help you create an outreach marketing campaign that generates superior results (and connections) for your venture.

Using the right tools helps cut unnecessary manual work and costs associated with outreach marketing. Postaga allows you to gain journalist and influencers information instantly. You can automate prospecting and increase your business’ exposure with minimal effort. Find and connect with the best in your industry, add personal touches with texts, and stay on top of your outreach campaign progress- straight from your dashboard. 

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