Have you ever thought about what outreach marketing is?
What benefit does it bring to your entire marketing strategy?
It seems like outreach marketing embraces two main aspects that you can observe in outreach and marketing separately. These two aspects are building business relationships and building links.
Sounds a bit hectic, isn’t it?
Therefore, let’s get into detail on what outreach marketing is and review a few actionable tips that will help you benefit from it.
Shall we begin?
Outreach Marketing Basics
First of all, let’s review the definition of outreach marketing more precisely.
Outreach marketing stands for using standard email outreach to build business relationships with bloggers, influencers, and other business prospects. The purpose of this process is to acquire backlinks, promote content, and boost traffic to your website.
As you understand, outreach marketing embraces not link building and content promotion solely. It helps develop relationships with brand ambassadors and reaching niche influencers.
To sum up, outreach marketing is an integral part of the entire marketing strategy you apply in the business.
By the way, did you know that only 8.5% of outreach emails get a reply?
But what about the rest of 91.5% of messages?
These messages don’t even get a review from the recipients. And you might wonder why it happens. Here are three main reasons for this:
- No personalization.
- No understanding of how outreach marketing process should be handled.
- Spamming.
By avoiding these three bad “habits” you will be able to upskill your outreach marketing quality and improve a marketing strategy in general.
Pros and Cons of Outreach Marketing
It is time to see what outreach marketing has pros and cons behind the back. Let’s start with the positive sides of this process.
Pros of outreach marketing are:
Content promotion
Most of the time content promotion is limited by sharing it across social media channels and some of the niche-related communities. Unfortunately, it is not enough if we are talking about effective content promotion.
Therefore, outreach marketing helps you promote content by reaching out to people personally. As a result, this way of promotion raises your brand awareness and activates a “word of mouth” reaction within the niche.
SEO improving
Obviously, outreach marketing affects your positioning on the SERP.
How?
By acquiring backlinks from niche-related high-quality websites.
You might wonder how it is possible?
Keep in mind that backlinks are counted as the second important factor that has a direct impact on rankings. Moreover, according to a study from Ahrefs, there is a correlation between the number of referring domains for a certain page and the amount of traffic that comes to this page.
To conclude, outreach marketing is a “must” approach to build more backlinks and move your pages in the SERP.
Build your business network
Needless to say that outreach marketing is a wonderful way to build your business network.
Nevertheless, it should be stated that people are less tolerant these days. It means that your outreach approach must impress the targets and incline them to pay attention to your pitch.
It is quite expensive
Let’s be honest. Outreach marketing is a costly affair. You will have to pay for utilizing some tools like Buzzstream (digital PR), Ahrefs (finding outreach opportunities), Hunter.io (finding email addresses), etc.
Four Actionable Tips Behind a Successful Outreach Marketing
Before you move further and find out four actionable outreach marketing tips, you should understand one core principle – outreach is not broadcasting.
Therefore, don’t confuse “outreach marketing” with “email marketing” – they have different approaches and final objectives.
If you can separate these types of outreach, you will be able to get the most of this technique.
Now, let’s review four tips of outreach marketing one-by-one.
Set up outreach marketing goals
Outreach marketing activity requires setting up concrete goals. Thus, you should brainstorm what exactly you’re willing to get from each outreach campaign.
- Do you want to promote your piece of content and earn some high-authority backlinks?
- Do you want to participate in the upcoming expert roundup?
- Do you want to get your brand featured in some news?
The lists of ideas for your outreach marketing campaigns can be as long as you wish. However, without setting up goals and clear objectives you won’t be able to benefit from outreach activities.
Let’s see how to define the goal and adapt it to your outreach marketing campaign.
For example, you want to boost the number of backlinks to one of your well-performed content pages. You should start by identifying the metrics for this goal specifically. These metrics can be based on:
- How many backlinks you have acquired for this page.
- Response rate per target segment.
- Link Value Ration (link worth compared to how much it takes to generate it).
- DR and UR (Ahrefs metrics) estimations.
What’s more important, you can analyze your competitors in terms of how their backlinks are translated into revenue by paying attention to the number of backlinks and value of traffic.
Afterwards, feel free to use the following formula calculation.
Monthly value of your traffic / # of linking root domains = monthly link value * 24 months
By making this research you will be able to prioritize your goals and estimate the entire performance of outreach email campaigns.
Pick up a target audience wisely
There are four main categories of the audience to choose from. Let’s review them:
- Spawn – the representatives of this category are noobs who have just got into a game and they have neither followers nor audience.
- Small fish – people from this category already have a small audience and a handful of followers.
- Big fish – these people have sway over the niche.
- Sharks – to put it simply, people with millions of followers across social channels.
How to choose the audience for yourself?
It depends on your outreach marketing objectives. For instance, you decided to build some links for the guide on making an infographic.
You can reach out to all design-related blogs, design professionals, design digital agencies.
Taking into account the topic of the post, you should be focused on “spawn”, “small fish”, and “big fish” categories of the audience. The first two categories of the audience can be impressed with your piece of content. But when you’re sending your outreach marketing pitch to the “big fish” category, you should ask those people’s opinion regarding your content.
One more example. You have released a new SaaS that helps create online presentations. You need to explore blogs that have content that would cover this topic.
How to find these blogs?
There are lots of digital PR tools you can use for this. One of them is Respona. Just insert your target keyword and get a list of opportunities in real-time.
Afterwards, review all suggested results and move to the next outreach marketing steps.
Email template personalization
You already chose your target audience, found prospects to reach out to, and now you must take care of creating a personalized outreach email template.
Keep in mind that email template personalization is one of the most critically important steps in your outreach process. If your outreach template is personalized properly, it will improve the performance of the outreach campaign drastically.
Therefore, the “personalization” step is the last step in any outreach campaign you’re going to run using Respona.
At this stage, you must create an email template using merging fields for automated purposes. Plus, you can use content snippets that are created by summarizing the information of a certain piece of content (if you want to add this).
Remember, “email personalization” is not just adding the prospect’s name. It is to show that you have spent the time exploring the information about the people you want to send your outreach pitch to. In other words, let them see that you know a few personal things about them.
Your goal is to build relationships
Even though outreach marketing is one of the most advanced link building strategies, it aims to build relationships, not just links.
Unfortunately, practice shows that people care about links, promotion, mentions, and other benefits that outreach marketing can bring. But they don’t care about building strong relationships.
You get the messages from other people who treat you in the same way – they need something from you. They are not interested in building relationships. Your reaction to this approach is rather negative than positive.
Thus, you should change your own outreach marketing approach. As it says, “be the change that you want to see the world”. Your new outreach approach must be the reason for how people would react to it – positively or negatively.
Be friendly. Be interested in the people sincerely. Try to give first. And you will get in return.
To Conclude: Ensure maximum result from outreach marketing
By the end of reading this guide, you understand what is outreach marketing and how to perform it effectively.
The guide suggested four tips that will make any outreach marketing campaign more resultative.
- 10+ Follow Up Email Template Examples
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About author
Sergey Aliokhin is a community outreach manager at Visme. When not at work, he likes to spend his time with family, read books on science-fiction, practice playing the bass, and visit the gym.
