Outreach Marketing

Why Should You Introduce Outreach Marketing to Your Company’s Strategy?

Authored by Michal Jonca, the Community Manager at Passport Photo Online

Regardless of the industry, every company should care about its online presence. After all, the better visibility and recognition, the greater profits. But the beginnings are usually painful, especially when you don’t have a large budget to promote your business. There is, however, a solution that doesn’t necessarily require significant funds to bring great good results. It is outreach marketing.

What is outreach marketing?

Outreach marketing assumes that you can use the reach of others to achieve specific business goals. Therefore, the whole idea is based on finding influential people gathering a specific audience that largely coincides with your company’s target group. By establishing fruitful cooperation, you can:

• Reach new customers;
• Increase sales;
• Build your brand awareness;
• Improve your SEO.

For those reasons, outreach marketing is often compared to PR or influencer marketing.

But outreach marketing does not have to involve cooperation with big influencers having enormous reach. Often it isn’t necessary at all. The clue of outreach marketing is win-win cooperation. In other words, both parties should benefit from it.

An example of an outreach marketing campaign may be, for example, sending book bloggers and BookTubers news on the publishing market, which they can later discuss as part of their reviews. It is a relatively small expense for the publishing house, which can pay off more than you think. The reviewer gets new or even pre-premiere books utterly free in exchange.

Now, let’s take a look at the main pros of outreach marketing.

What are the advantages of outreach marketing?

The first is SEO improvement. Probably when you think about Search Engine Optimisation, you see competitive keywords, catchy headlines, and well-written sentences.

You’re right.

Those elements are essential for your online visibility. But there is something equally important – link building. To make a long story short, if your website has a great link profile (i.e., has a lot of valuable backlinks), the algorithms consider it credible and reward you with higher SERP scores.

The second is the possibility of promoting your content. Links are like gates inviting new guests to visit your online home. Let’s be clear – most website owners face a problem promoting content. The situation is different when someone who has already gained the trust and has gathered a committed audience recommends a given product, service, or content.

Outreach also impacts building and strengthening brand awareness. By using the reach of influential people, you can make your business more recognisable. Additionally, outreach marketing is one of the most profitable ways to draw people’s attention to what you are doing.

Finally, outreach marketing increases brand credibility. People trust external recommendations more than the company’s statements. Many followers treat influencers’ opinions almost on a par with their relatives’.

How to run effective outreach marketing?

The above mentioned pros are so notable that we observe the rising interest in using this form of promotion. The main challenge is to stand out from the crowd. Influencers get so many pitches of this type they can’t respond to each one. Moreover, they have to take care of their image. If they decide to any cooperation, they will become nothing more than the marketing column.

To do effective outreach marketing, you have to encourage those people to cooperate with you. Here are three steps you should implement in your strategy:

1. Define specific goals. What would you like to achieve? Is your pitch targeted to appear as a guest on the podcast? How about getting links to your article?
2. Choose the right target group. Influencers have various audiences. Your choice should depend on the industry and goals you want to achieve (previous bullet point). Let’s go back to the example of a publishing house promoting its activities. What would be better – choosing a fashion influencer with millions of followers or a person with a much smaller audience but focused on book reviews? Of course, the latter.
3. Personalise your outreach. It’s not just about adding first and last name to the beginning of the message. You have to keep in mind who the final recipient is. The answer is the influencer’s audience.

So is outreach marketing for you?

Every company should care about its online presence. There are many benefits to outreach including better visibility and recognition, and greater profits.

John Wilson

John Wilson is a branding and website design expert. He boasts over 10 years of digital marketing experience. He loves to share his expertise and insights on all things digital marketing by keeping this blog up to date.