Outreach is a marketing strategy that focuses on finding individuals and organizations that may be interested in building a partnership with your business. It helps increase brand recognition, facilitate the promotion, and boost revenue. In content marketing, outreach is used to boost your content’s reach, gain SEO authority (link building), and build relationship with other content publishers.
Outreach marketing (also referred to as influencer marketing) is not a complicated strategy. From the term itself, ‘outreach’ requires directly interacting and ‘negotiating’ with influential people whose followers are similar to yours. Whether it’s through email or social media chat (LinkedIn), the goal here is to make a convincing pitch to these influencers and have them share your content with their fans; thus, eventually increasing your exposure to your target audience.
This is not your typical type of promotion: It’s a form of referral. And we all know how powerful recommendations from the right people are.
About the Company
This client I work with is a SaaS company who provides productivity app solutions to remote workers like myself. Personally, I’ve already used their products on several occasions. And as a freelancer, this has helped me establish trust between me and my clients especially when pay date comes around.
Being one of the first remote employee management applications, the company focuses on allowing customers to build distributed teams who can work wherever and whenever they want. In return, this makes it easier for decision makers to allocate office-running costs in more important areas of the business.
Their app is quick and easy to use – much like plug and play – which is probably the reason why they’re one of the highly downloaded apps in their niche.
The Challenge
Upon learning the power of content marketing, and how creating long form content has help them generate leads effortlessly, the company has devoted more resources in this strategy wherein they sought help from content marketing experts – from writers to content promoters and social media experts.
Looking at the buyer’s journey, their strategy targets customers at the research phase. Most of their articles are focused on educating consumers, help them make educated purchase decisions, which in return helped this company become one of the most respected influencers in their niche.
They hired me to become a part of their outreach team wherein I was assigned to promote articles through partnerships including landing a guest post, link exchange partnership, and cross promotion.
Where I rocked…
Since the company was pretty open to any suggestions and experimentation on outreach marketing strategy, I was able to test different approaches in the process. The devil lies in the negotiation and basically how your email (messaging) is structured.
In this project, I’ve discovered the 3 things that help make your pitch standout:
- You need an attention grabbing Subject Line
- Understand that your target prospects receive a ton of emails with the same proposal on a daily basis. You don’t want your email to blend in with the others.
- You need to be direct in your email body
- Understand that you are talking to one of the busiest members of the organizations. You need to be direct with your Initial email: tell them the reason why you’ve emailed them.
- You need to tell them how they can benefit from this collaboration
- What’s in it for me? One of the issues I found in most blogger outreach process is how most outreach specialists put so much of their focus on acquiring links. You have to put yourself in the shoes of the content publisher. You want to give them an offer they couldn’t refuse.
OUTREACH CAMPAIGN STATISTICS (RECENT WINS)
The initial marketing campaign (2019) lasted for 2-3 months. The article is relaunched and updated this year to cater to the current COVID crisis (highly relevant for businesses who continued operations remotely).
Peak of marketing campaign around June to August 2020
58% of the referring domains acquired are DO-FOLLOW links
Ranked highly for very high difficulty keywords and receives constant traffic from all sources.
As seen in the graph above, the organic traffic continues to rise since the campaign’s relaunch.
Conclusion
The key takeaway in this campaign is: Don’t underestimate the power of evergreen content. Evergreen content is content that remains useful to your audience year after year. If you have any content that’s already getting traction, keep it fresh and updated to fit the current trends. In this campaign, you could say we got luck as the current crisis has created a demand for information related to this topic. Either way, we were able to get good returns from the resources we’ve invested in producing this article and other related articles on their blog.
The campaign relaunch continues to be a success as this is one of the most highly visited page on their blog.
