Overcoming the Obstacle of Outreach Marketing

With the advancements in digital advertising and the exponential rise of social media, it’s become easier for businesses to get their name in front of prospective customers. Yet, with the increased opportunity comes a rapid rise in competition; how can you stand out in a saturated market? At Liberty, we believe that the answer lies in the art of outreach marketing.

What is outreach marketing?

If you read our blog, you’ll know that we talk about content marketing quite a lot. Outreach marketing is part and parcel of content marketing. It’s the process of reaching out to the right people at the right time in order to boost your brand awareness.

Think of it as an online networking opportunity. Outreach marketing allows you to build meaningful relationships with businesses and key industry leaders so that you can position your business among the industry elite. In a nutshell, it’s about connecting with your peers and treating them as a part of your brand.

Whilst creating great content is an integral part of digital marketing, it means nothing if you don’t have a strong outreach strategy. There’s nothing more frustrating than a piece of high-quality content that doesn’t meet its potential because of poor outreach. By incorporating outreach into your strategy, you can get your content in front of larger and more appropriate audiences.

Outreach marketing is the cornerstone of an effective digital strategy. You’re more likely to get links to your website and brand mentions from other reputable sites, which will also help your SEO efforts. Plus, it helps your company gain increased exposure whilst establishing a sense of trustworthiness with potential customers. Digital PR is more than just press releases.

Under the influence

When it comes to understanding why influencers are so effective, the clue is in the name. Influencers often have a loyal following that they take the time to interact with. It takes time to build a reputation as an influencer, and the relationship that influencers have with their followers shouldn’t be underestimated. In fact, according to recent research, influencer marketing delivers 11x higher ROI than traditional forms of digital marketing.  (Traditional vs digital PR) As such, collaborating with an influencer seems like a no-brainer.

However, when it comes to influencer marketing, it’s important that you don’t just go to the person with the biggest follower count, but rather focus your attention on somebody that shares similar values to you.

Also, rather than requesting that an influencer plugs your product or service, you should invest time in carefully curated content. If you get too bogged down with tactics and focus solely on the results, you’ll miss out on building relationships with influencers, and these relationships are more likely to pay off in the long run. In fact, research from CrowdTap found that 76% of influencers prefer to work with brands that grant creative freedom, meaning that creative freedom was more desirable than competitive rates of compensation.

Do you want to build a strategy?

If you want to create an effective outreach strategy, the first step is to ensure you fully-understand your brand. Consider the unique selling point of the business and make sure you can communicate your brand’s values clearly and concisely. You need to be able to live and breathe your brand and ensure it has a consistent tone of voice so that you can find the people who are most likely to fall in love with everything that your brand represents.

Once you know your brand inside-out, it’s time to get to know your target audience. Consider your buyer personas and learn to understand the key traits of your target audience.

Of course, getting to know what your potential client base looks like is one thing, but finding them in real life is another battle altogether. At this point, it’s worth creating an outreach list so you can start to build relationships with relevant people. This list will include influencers that are relevant to your niche market, as well as media partners and news sources that can help you to get your name in front of the relevant audience.

You should invest time each week to search for authoritative websites and influential people. The ways to do this include creating social media lists, getting involved in online communities and even using advanced search strings in Google. If you do this, you’ll start to compile information about potential prospects that you can add to your outreach list.

Once you’ve conducted your research and have an outreach list that you’re happy with, you need to think carefully about which of these people you’d most like to work with. If certain sites aren’t relevant to you, then remove them from your list. By ensuring you have quality and relevance before you start the process of outreach, you’ll be sure to only target the best and most relevant partnerships.

Getting personal

Now that you’ve whittled it down to a select few websites and influencers, you can start crafting your messages and building relationships. If you want to be truly effective in your outreach efforts, you need to make sure that your messages are personalised. If you’re passionate about working with a certain influencer or brand, you have to be able to show them why it’s the perfect pairing. Read more in how to get more out of your online PR.

Looking to Boost Your Influence?

If you’re finding it difficult to get over the obstacle of outreach marketing, it might be worth talking to a professional. Find out how we can help by giving us a call.