How To Do Outreach Marketing in 3 Steps (2024)

So, you have a great product and high-quality content on your blog. Perfect!

But why are you still struggling to get decent traffic?

Well, there could be several reasons.

But let’s focus on one solution that could get you 96 new links in 3 months – outreach marketing.

Simply put, an outreach marketing strategy involves connecting with influencers who serve your target audience. So, it does seem like influencer marketing or networking.

Let’s dive into the details (in the digital marketing context) while I show you how to do outreach marketing.

What is outreach marketing?

Outreach implies bringing information or services to people, right where they spend time (e.g., in events, on email, or social media platforms).

So, outreach marketing is sharing information about your offering to people who’ll find it relevant. While most professionals connect on email, you can also use LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, direct mail, forums, etc.

But unlike direct marketing, the goal of outreach marketing is building relationships with prospective partners. It’s more about creating human connections that increase brand awareness.

Isn’t a human connection easier than a sales pitch?

So a blogger outreach, for example, could involve guest-posting to earn backlinks – that’s how Brian Dean got over 13k shares from one post!

Besides guest-posting, you can also target:

• Resource pages

• Weekly roundups

• And listicles (e.g., X best or Top X articles )

Outreach marketing is similar to email marketing, but it’s more targeted, personalized, and natural.

It’s natural because you’re not sending a cold email to get sales. Instead, you’d, for example, inform a blogger about your post/product that could be super helpful for their audience.

And you could even incentivize the favor. E.g., in exchange for the link, you can offer to share the blogger’s post with your audience – see the image below.

Source: Backlinko.com

Types of outreach marketing

Outreach marketing could be classified based on the platform, e.g., social media outreach marketing (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) and email outreach marketing.

You can also classify outreach marketing campaigns based on the motive, e.g.,

• Link building for SEO efforts or to provide backlink services.
• Networking to form valuable connections with potential influencers
• Blogger outreach to leverage other bloggers’ (&vlogger) audiences. You might write guest posts or even be a guest in a podcast.
• Cold sales to start a conversation or be on possible buyers’ radar.

Why is outreach marketing important?

Outreach marketing makes it easier for potential customers to find your offering by engaging with them in their ‘natural setting,’ e.g., blog posts they follow, social media, email campaigns, or events.

But is an outreach marketing campaign cheap?

Nope.

You’ll need to invest in many outreach tools like Buzzsumo, an email finder (e.g., Hunter), a tool to automate your email sequence (e.g., Mailshake), or more, depending on your strategy.

How to do outreach marketing in 3 simple steps

Outreach marketing is the process of identifying, targeting, and engaging with prospects. Let’s delve into the steps.

1. Identify the right influencers

Besides finding brands that serve your audience, have a good following, and will find your product/service relevant, you need to identify the decision-makers.

When doing a blogger outreach, the decision-maker is likely the webmaster or owner of the blog – not contributors.

And when doing a cold sales outreach, you’d be looking for:

• The business owner or marketer if it’s a small business
• The department lead if it’s a large company. E.g., the Content Manager or Editor.

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