How To Do Outreach Marketing in 3 Steps (2023)

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.

Here’s a general process for finding outreach prospects (have your spreadsheet ready):

• Do a Google Search to find ranking articles related to your product. E.g., you can look for product reviews related to your product (you want your product to be mentioned/linked from such articles).
• Pick the domains with 70+ DR (Domain Authority) because these typically rank higher. But make sure the sites serve your target niche (e.g., techradar.com for a tech product). I have installed the Keywords Everywhere extension that shows me Moz DA for every listing on Google.

• Alternatively, you can look for popular blogs on Alltop.

• Then use Seamless.ai extension to find the Editor for the company site (or blog owner).

You can check out my in-depth guide on outreach software for more details on these tools.

Suppose you’re doing social media outreach. In that case, you can look at the influencer’s followers (in the platform that’s effective for your niche) and retweet ratio (how often they retweet someone else’s content – Buzzsumo will show you).

When doing blogger outreach, you might consider prioritizing bloggers who get comments and shares – it implies a loyal community.

After this step, you should have a list of prospects’ websites, their names, title/position, and email addresses in your spreadsheet.

Let’s see how to really personalize your message – and get responses.

2. Target & personalize your message

Stating your prospect’s name on the outreach message is merely scratching the surface in personalization. You need to find out if they need your product/service and how it will help them.

For example, sending a web development email to a webmaster is spamming because they already have a website and logo.

Personalization means first putting yourself in the prospect’s shoes. What do they want? And how will your offering help them achieve their overall goal?

You need to research them, which might involve reading their posts and commenting way before you send your first outreach email.

Here’s an excellent example of personalization.

You can view more outreach campaign templates in my previous guide.

You should have a template for your first email and two follow-up emails at the end of this step. Schedule these emails in automation tools like Mailshake or Respona and launch!

And yes, follow-up emails are necessary, no matter how hyper-personalized your initial email is.

People are busy, and they are often email addicts (guilty as charged). They may have opened your email while grabbing a coffee and forgot to reply. They may have been in the middle of a task and briefly opened your email before moving on.

It’s your job to nudge them a few times gently.

Suffice to say, having just one follow-up email could increase your email response rate up to 27%.

3. Keep the conversation going!

Your outreach campaign does not end after getting a link or retweet. You need to build a relationship with the prospects for future opportunities and have loyal brand ambassadors.

I recommend connecting with your prospects on social media, especially the platform where your audience hangs out.

The best way to determine where your audience hangs out is to look at your current campaigns. On which social media platforms do you get the most engagement?

Alternatively, you can rely on the 2016 social media report by TrackMarven, which analyzed the top industries per platform:

Wrapping up

Outreach marketing involves building relationships with influencers that serve your target audience. It’s an effective strategy to increase brand awareness. But it also contributes to your marketing efforts by increasing your website traffic and customer base.

The steps for a successful outreach campaign include identifying the right influencer, personalizing your message, and maintaining a strong relationship.

As always, test your strategy, refine what works and repeat.

Good luck!

Jessica La