Contents
Creating and maintaining business growth is challenging, especially for startups and small businesses. Marketing budgets are tight, and competition is fierce.
One way to overcome these challenges is outreach marketing. It uses connections with influential individuals or companies to increase brand awareness and grow a customer base. Successful businesses use these brand advocates to expand their reach and boost revenue.
Let’s explore the benefits of an outreach marketing strategy. I’ll also share four tactics that deliver results.
What is Outreach Marketing?
Outreach marketing involves partnering with influencers, whether social media influencers, bloggers, industry leaders, or other companies and organizations.
The goal is to build strong relationships with these partners and market to their followers. You do this through, among others:
- Content (product reviews, sponsored posts, guest posts…)
- Affiliate marketing
- Brand ambassadorship
If this sounds like influencer marketing, you are mostly correct. Both leverage influence to increase growth. But, outreach marketing comes before influencer marketing. The target audience is influential people rather than potential customers.
Every outreach strategy includes these essential steps:
- Identify the right influencers
You shouldn’t partner with any influencer. Investigate who aligns with your business and marketing objectives. You want influencers whose following matches your ideal customer profile. They must also be active on their platforms, relevant to your industry, and have an engaged audience.
- Choose an outreach channel
Once you have your list of influencers, you can start building relationships by sending them an email or direct message on social media.
- Develop compelling messages
You’re contacting people who may or may not be interested in your brand. So, you must craft prospecting messages that prove your value. In concise words, tell them how they would enjoy the partnership and include a clear call to action.
Why Outreach Marketing is Essential
Partnering with the right influencer positively impacts your business. Customers will trust your brand because of the association with their favorite brand, organization or personality.
I’ll briefly cover other benefits of outreach marketing.
1. Increases brand awareness /expanded audience reach
Collaborating with influential figures and organizations through outreach marketing puts your brand in front of their audiences. That gives you access to audiences that may not know your brand or products. The result is an increase in brand awareness.
When influential bloggers add backlinks to your web pages, it helps your SEO. This often happens through guest posts. The boost in organic traffic from influential sources increases your ranking on search engine results pages. That further increases your online presence to search audiences.
2. Lead generation
Outreach marketing can help you generate leads indirectly. When you team up with influential people, brands, and organizations, you also reach their audiences. These audiences can be your potential customers, too.
All this isn’t to say you should rely on outreach marketing and influencers to generate leads. Leverage other online and offline channels as well. SEO, for instance, can help you reach potential customers with your content. Attending industry events frequented by potential customers helps as well. Just don’t forget to share your digital business card. Uniqode offers multiple features that can be customized as per your needs. Enable two-way contact sharing. That way you can collect leads directly with the card through a lead capture form. With this innovative approach to lead generation, expect those leads to come in droves.
3. Build long-term relationships
Outreach marketing allows you to build long-term relationships with influencers. This is especially true when an initial partnership ends up being successful. This successful partnership leads to more mutually beneficial partnerships that ultimately ensure long-term relationships and strengthen them.
As the relationship becomes stronger, these partners also become your fierce and loyal advocates beyond active campaigns.
So, you’ll see them promoting your content on their own branded channels, engaging with your random content, among others. Talk about more free brand promotion!
4 Outreach Marketing Tactics that Drive Results
The right outreach marketing channel depends on your target market or potential partner. Your best bet for reaching social media influencers is on the social platform they are active on. For bloggers, the appropriate channel may be email.
Here are four approaches to reach and connect with influential people or brands.
1. Email outreach
Email outreach is simply sending emails to targeted influencers. The goal can be to seek guest post opportunities, request backlinks, or create other partnerships. Email outreach is different from email marketing:
- Cold email outreach – sending emails to recipients–influential figures, brands, organizations–you don’t have a relationship with.
- Opt-in email marketing – sending emails to subscribers–potential customers–who opted in to receive news and updates from your brands.
As you can tell, the primary difference is the recipients. One is already interested in your brand, the other isn’t yet.
Other differences follow along this divide.
Cold email outreach | Opt-in email marketing | |
Contact source | Email addresses come from social media prospecting, email finder software, or third-party email lists. | Email addresses come from recipients signing up for your newsletter |
Aim | Cold emails are used to initiate contact and generate new leads. The goal is to get the recipient to respond and take you up on your offer. | Opt-in emails nurture existing relationships. |
Engagement | Engagement should be infrequent. Cold email recipients didn’t elect to hear from you, and sending too many emails risks ending up in the spam folder. | Engagement is frequent to keep your brand at the top of subscriber’s minds. These recipients elected to hear from you. So, you should engage regularly. |
You can use tools like Evaboot to scrape email addresses off online sources such as LinkedIn. The good thing with Evaboot is that it doesn’t give you false emails. If the email address doesn’t seem real or is old, it won’t be included in the final list it gives you.
Whatever your email outreach goal is, make sure you personalize your message. That means more than just including the email recipient’s name. You also need to ensure your main message is customized to the recipient’s own experience.
Check out this blogger outreach email template. Notice how the writer specifies the recipient’s blog post, website, and field:
Hi [name]!
I hope you are well.
I enjoyed your insights in [name blog post]. I also work in [field/industry] and I’m interested in writing a guest post for your [blog name]. Are you accepting guest posts?
I create keyword-optimized and actionable content on [topics]. Here are a few samples of my work:
- [sample one]
- [sample two]
- [sample three]
I’d love to share a couple of guest post ideas to see if they are a fit for your blog 🙂
Do let me know what you think?
Regards,
Ensure a successful outreach marketing campaign by implementing other email marketing best practices. Apart from personalization, these include using compelling subject lines, ensuring concise email content, and A/B testing. You can also use marketing automation tools to streamline email creation and distribution.
2. LinkedIn outreach
LinkedIn is a must for your outreach marketing.
It’s the largest network of professionals, with more than one billion members in more than 200 countries. That number is bound to include those influential figures you can partner with for your marketing. Over 67 million companies–also your potential partners–are on LinkedIn as well.
There are also other advantages of adding LinkedIn to your outreach strategy:
- LinkedIn allows you to reach specific people based on their location, industry, company size, job titles, and job functions. You can also use custom lists from your CRM for better targeting. That ensures you reach specific and relevant audiences.
- Accelerated relationship-building: LinkedIn facilitates networking by showing users’ mutual connections, backgrounds, and interests. These help establish personal connections and build trust more effectively than cold email outreach.
- High engagement: Since LinkedIn enables direct, targeted, and personalized messages, marketers enjoy higher open rates versus email marketing. Furthermore, you avoid overcrowded inboxes and spam-wary email users.
You can easily connect with potential partners on the platform by sending:
- Connection requests to people who aren’t part of your network
- Direct messages to direct connections
- InMail messages to any LinkedIn user
- Message requests to people in your LinkedIn groups.
Your first LinkedIn outreach message shouldn’t be about your main pitch. You want to send an ice-breaker first. Get them to talk to you by highlighting points of commonality or raising topics that interest them. Showing interest and engaging with your target’s work is also a sure-fire way to grab their attention. Asking a relevant question boosts your chances of receiving a response as well.
Check out this excellent LinkedIn outreach message. It combines many of the strategies I mentioned above:
But don’t just focus on your outreach messages. To ensure recipients read them in the first place, you must optimize your LinkedIn profile. Your recipients are receiving messages from someone they don’t know (you). They’ll naturally check your LinkedIn profile first before responding. Do you think they’d take the time to reply if they saw a profile with no picture? I’m pretty sure you already know the answer.
See how I optimized my LinkedIn profile.
Apart from including my picture, I also included relevant keywords (SEO,QR codes, and Uniqode) in the bio and description, letting people know what I do.
3. Cold call outreach
Cold calling is the oldest outreach strategy on this list. It entails using telephones to contact potential partners. It has become niche, with digital outreach methods gaining more popularity.
Also, cold calling can be stressful. You must be able to guide conversation flow while keeping the people you call interested. Plus, finding the best time to call without being intrusive is difficult. Remember, these people don’t know you.
But it doesn’t have to be a nerve-wracking, rejection-filled activity. Cold calls can be an effective outreach technique. Call scripts, for instance, can decrease stress and boost the chances of call recipients taking action.
Successful cold call scripts have the following:
- Introduction: your name and purpose for the call.
- Problem: open-ended questions to learn the recipient’s pain points.
- Solution: ways your proposed collaboration can help address problems.
- Objection handling: ways to answer objections.
- Closing: next steps for future communication.
Here’s a script template you can use for outreach.
Hi [Recipient’s Name],
This is [Your Name] from [Company Name]. I’ve been following your work at [Prospect’s Company, blog, or social media account]. I’m very impressed with your work in the [Field/Industry] space.
I’d love to connect and see if there are any opportunities for us to collaborate or share insights around [their pain point or goal].
At [your company name], we specialize in [value proposition]. A partnership would be mutually beneficial.
Can you discuss this now?
Option 1: Yes.
(discuss the proposal)
Option 2: No.
I understand your time is valuable. Can I email the pitch for you to review at your convenience?
This call script works because it opens opportunities for further discussion if the recipient is reluctant or doesn’t have time.
Here are other tips to increase your chances of success:
- Practice call scripts
- Establish rapport by mentioning past work or mutual connection
- Make a powerful positioning or value statement
- Keep a conversational tone
As a final tip, make sure you get to the point quickly. Always bear in mind that the people you’re calling are busy. If you beat around the bush, they’ll likely hang up.
4. Outreach using other social media platforms
Social media is a must-have outreach channel. I already discussed LinkedIn as an avenue for outreach marketing, but it’s not the only one. Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok also offer ways to reach business and individual influencers.
Facebook is the most popular social media platform, with over three billion users. That means your potential customers are likely on Facebook, too. So, partnering with influential figures or brands who are active on the channel and can promote your brand there might be great for your marketing.
But why send your outreach message via Facebook, too?
Well, these influential figures, brands and organizations are already active on Facebook, right? So, the chances of them reading your outreach message are probably higher than if you sent it via another platform.
Facebook also has advanced data and analytic features. The features enable you to measure the influence of B2B and B2C influencers. You want to ensure they’ll make an impact in your campaign before you send your outreach message.
To make your Facebook outreach effective, follow these tips:
- Optimize your profile
- Engage with influencer content before reaching out
- Personalize outreach messages
You can combine Facebook outreach with other outreach strategies as well. There’s always that chance a potential partner prefers a different channel for other types of communication, even if they’re on Facebook.
Check out how the marketer above also gives the message recipient the option to communicate over the phone for a more detailed conversation.
There’s no better place to find B2C influencers to partner and connect with than on Instagram. There are more than 64 million Instagram influencers you can tap into for your outreach marketing. They can promote your brand to over 2 billion monthly active users, who are likely to include your potential customers as well.
Just follow these tips to make your Instagram outreach effective:
- Optimize your profile
- Engage with influencer content before reaching out
- Personalize outreach messages
- Tag influencers to your posts or stories to grab their attention
- Use hashtags to increase your visibility
As I mentioned earlier, make sure you choose the right influencer/company to partner with before sending your pitch via Instagram as well.
The content your chosen influencers create should align with what you sell. In the Instagram outreach message below, for instance, you see the brand, which sells self-care products, pitching a potential partnership with an influencer who creates content on these types of products:
When choosing a company to pitch to, just make sure it’s not a direct competitor. It wouldn’t make sense for a clothing company to ask another clothing company to review the former’s new product, right?
X
X is the platform where industry thought leaders share insights and spark conversation. These include journalists and C-level executives. That makes it the best place to find and connect with these influencers.
Here are tips to make your X outreach effective:
- Optimize your profile
- Use hashtags to increase visibility
- Host or join X chats
- Personalize outreach messages
As with your other outreach messages sent using other platforms, make sure you don’t pitch your collaboration in your first DM or post. Engage with your potential influencer’s content first. You can also tag them in your posts. The great thing about X is that users can tag each other. This can happen even if they don’t know each other. Just make sure you tag the potential influencer/brand in posts that are likely to elicit a good response. For example, if you want guest post opportunities, share a blog post from the website you want to pitch. Praise them for it!
TikTok
TikTok is the fastest-growing social platform. It’s also the birthplace of many viral social media trends. The video-based platform is popular with Gen Z influencers and audiences. So, B2C businesses find more success marketing on TikTok than B2B companies.
You can send outreach messages via TikTok to influencers on the platform if you want to reach this type of audience, too.
To make your TikTok outreach effective:
- Optimize your profile
- Create branded hashtags
- Engage with influencer content before reaching out
- Personalize outreach messages
Note that you have to be mutual followers with the person/brand you plan to reach out to. If they don’t follow you on TikTok, they must accept a message request before you can send them a direct message.
In closing
Outreach marketing is a powerful tool for growing businesses. It helps meet business goals through valuable partnerships with influential figures, companies, and organizations. It’s a digital marketing strategy you shouldn’t ignore.
Navigating influencer outreach can be challenging. Knowing which influencers to collaborate with and how to reach them can be confusing. The good news is, I shared four tactics that give you the best chances of finding and connecting with the right partners.
Depending on your business, you may use a mix of these. Don’t forget to use outreach marketing tools to accelerate the time-consuming process.
Good luck!
Author bio
Claron Kinny is a content specialist at Uniqode (formerly Beaconstac). He enjoys collecting customer feedback using simple tools like QR Codes. He then turns that feedback into clear steps to solve business problems. LinkedIn: Claron Kinny