What is Outreach Marketing?
Outreach marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on pitching your business content to certain influential people who have a strong relationship with your target audience. For this reason, outreach marketing is sometimes referred to as influencer marketing.
Part of outreach marketing is searching for individuals and organizations who have audiences that share similar interests, needs, and issues to yours. Once you locate these organizations and individuals, you can then reach out them with the request that they promote your content.
Outreach marketing is all about finding and teaming up with influencers to promote your business. Influencers can act as the link between your business and your target customers while also giving you a boost of popularity and visibility.
Partnering with someone who has hundreds of thousands of followers and is willing to not just mention, but promote, your work, is a great way to increase traffic to your website as well as up your credibility and overall awareness of your business. What’s more, when an influencer partners with you, it can only mean positive outcomes down the line.
Most people are more likely to trust recommendations from their friends or favorite celebrities and social media personalities, even more so than traditional advertisements. With this in mind, if you can create a strong outreach marketing strategy along with ads and other marketing practices, your business can only continue to grow.
Why is Outreach Marketing Important?
Have you been creating high-quality content and distributing it well? Are you posting on all your social media platforms, emailing your list of subscribers, and doing what you can to connect with your target audience? Are you still experiencing little to no traffic? Though frustrating, this scenario is not uncommon at all.
Growing a business is no easy task, and the younger yours is, the more work you have in front of you. If you are doing everything you can and are still seeing little to no business growth, there’s is still more you can do. Outreach marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies to try.
Through outreach marketing, your business gains fans, visibility, and credibility most of all. These three things are imperative not just for business growth, but also for gaining trust from your target audience.
Fans of your business can potentially become customers, visibility leads to more people within and outside of your target audience learning about your products or services, and credibility makes your target audience members more likely to engage with your business, make a purchase, and tell their friends, family, and colleagues. In short, outreach marketing is important because it can open a lot of doors for your business and pave the way for lasting growth.
What is the Process of Outreach Marketing?
To execute outreach marketing, there are a few steps you must take. First, you must identify influential people and then build a relationship with them so that they’re more likely to work with you and share your content.
Identifying Influential People
When identifying influencers, there are criteria they should meet to ensure success. These include the following:
Activity
Your ideal influencer needs to be active on their social media platforms. If they haven’t posted, blogged, or tweeted in a year or more, chances are that they don’t have a fresh audience. Even if they are on board with promoting your content, they’re already at a deficit and likely won’t gain your business much traffic.
Relevancy
This simply means that the influencer you choose must be related to your business in some way. For example, if you sell content management software, your ideal influencer should be connected to online businesses in some way. You wouldn’t want an influencer who is known for makeup tutorials – no matter how popular they are! Your brands won’t mesh well, which can cause more confusion than enthusiasm amongst their followers.
Popularity
Contrary to what you might think, your influencer should not be too big. When you engage in outreach marketing, think of it as a two-way street. Your influencer will be more likely to partner with you if they feel you’ll be able to help them sometime in the future. With this in mind, choose an influencer with a good following, but room to grow.
Engagement
Look at the audience your potential influential partner has. Do their posts have likes, retweets, and comments? Does the influencer respond to comments and create a conversation with their followers? Follower counts are only important if you know the influencer is as engaged with their followers as their followers are with them. This ensures that a conversation about your business, product, or service will ensue.
Relationship Building
Once you’ve identified an influencer, reach out to them via email. If this doesn’t work, you can also attempt a connection through a tweet or a direct message on their most active social media platform. Hopefully, they respond and you can pitch your idea for a partnership with them.
When crafting your pitch, be sure to be clear, concise, and to mention any benefits your influencer stands to gain from partnering with you. A solid pitch can make a huge difference, so do what you can to create a great one.
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