When things are looking tough and the economy is not in a great place, everyone is looking to make cuts. Unfortunately, marketing is often first on the chopping block.
In 2024, everyone is looking to make the most out of their current digital marketing budget. One tactic that’s worth a shot, especially if you haven’t tried it before, is outreach marketing.
While not as straightforward as PPC or as glorified as SEO, outreach marketing can deliver exceptional results, no matter your niche or industry. In this guide, we’ll give you everything you need to know about this marketing strategy so you can start today.
What is outreach marketing?
Outreach marketing requires finding contact details of influential people who might be willing to promote your product and offering them an incentive to promote it. Also called influencer marketing, the aim of this strategy is to connect with people online who have audiences that overlap with your target market.
Ideally, the influencer promotes your product in a legitimate, authentic way, prompting their followers to purchase from you.
In theory, it sounds like a rather simple case of marketing outreach, but it is a proper collaborative marketing effort that can not only raise brand awareness but also bring immediate sales from one or more social media channels.
How is outreach marketing different from email marketing?
On the face of it, outreach marketing sounds pretty similar to email marketing. After all, both types of marketing imply that you’re reaching out to someone, via email, hoping for more business growth and a bigger online presence.
The main difference is in the type of audience for an outreach campaign. With email marketing, you’re sending out emails to a known audience and a list of emails you’ve (hopefully) collected yourself using tools like Bouncer’s email verification service. You built a connection with this audience, and they already know about you and your brand.
Last but not least, you’re selling directly to them.
In email outreach marketing, you’re reaching out to people who don’t know you, hoping to elicit a response from them. If they agree, you can hope to make sales from their broader audience of potential customers, who also never heard of you.
The end goal is the same – making sales – but the road to that goal is vastly different with these two marketing strategies. To succeed, you need an outreach marketing plan and a great marketing strategy in place. Today, we’ll show you the benefits of outreach marketing and how to woo potential influencers to promote your brand.
Pro tip: And to ensure a high deliverability rate, consider using Bouncer’s email list cleaning service for your outreach campaigns.
The pros and cons of an outreach marketing strategy
An outreach marketing strategy can work if you do all of the steps right. But what are those steps and how do you become good at this strategy if you’ve never tried it? Before searching for your next influencer partner, let’s go through the downsides and benefits of outreach marketing.
✅ Pro: The ROI is great (but not as great as email marketing)
PPC is an incredibly effective channel, as anyone with more than a day in marketing knows already. Influencer marketing is even more effective. In fact, it has 11x the ROI of paid ads.
✅ Pro: You can do a lot with a small budget
Depending on the follower base of a specific influencer, you can get them to promote your product for as little at $100 per post. Compare this to PPC or SEO efforts where you’ll need thousands just to get started and you’ll see the ROI is clearly on the side of an outreach marketing strategy.
It’s an inbound marketing method similar to doing content marketing, where building relationships goes a long way.
✅ Pro: building social proof
Even if their audiences know that you’re paying to promote your brand, it is still great social proof. Being endorsed by actual people is a way to form strong relationships with existing and potential leads and perhaps even get press coverage.
You’ll be able to show who you are to millions of followers of the people you hire and some of them could turn to loyal customers. Relationships with influencers create a compounding effect and you can use them to attract various types of people to your brand.
✅ Pro: You can see the results quickly
Unlike an SEO campaign that needs several months for results to show up, outreach marketing can yield results almost instantly. Depending on how you set up outreach marketing campaigns, you can see conversions coming in and you can attribute them to a specific influencer.
❌ Con: There are many variables to master
You’re not working with your own audience so you have to rely on a lot of luck and instinct to find the right person to promote your product. You could spend months and thousands of dollars before you find a formula that works for you. If you run a small business, this type of lead generation can be costly.
As a form of inbound marketing, there is much that can go wrong – the social media influencers could be using an automation tool to grow their follower base, they could harm your business goals and more. This is why many B2B businesses opt for working with agencies rather than building a direct connection with influencers.
❌ Con: There are a lot of fake influencers
Choosing an influencer is hard and it becomes even harder once you realize how many of them have fake followers.
Having a high follower count is great, but it almost never correlates with sales for your business and a growth in potential customers. You have to do a lot of research to find influencers that really deliver the results so you don’t risk your brand authority and lose money in the process.
❌ Con: It can be hard to measure results
There are traditional ways to measure the results from outreach marketing campaigns, such as a promo link with UTM tags or a coupon code. However, if you’re looking to increase your share of voice, strengthen your brand, or something along those lines – it’s pretty hard to measure.
It’s the same with different types of outreach marketing – it’s not like email outreach campaigns where you have solid metrics.
How to run an outreach marketing strategy in 5 easy steps
Now that you know the basics of outreach marketing, you’re hopefully aware that anyone can do it with the right outreach marketing tactics and personalized emails.
All you need for outreach campaigns is a small budget for promotion and some free time to explore the best accounts and people to promote your product. Here are all the steps in chronological order.
Step 1: Find a list of influencers you want to reach out to
If you’ve been in an industry for a good bit, you probably already know the shakers and movers. You’re aware of the biggest influencers in your industry and niche and you know you want to get in touch with them to promote your product. If not, you may be familiar with other influencers that well-known brands work with.
However, power is not always in numbers. As explained above, sometimes those large accounts on Instagram, YouTube or Tiktok can have inflated, fake follower numbers. And besides, you can actually get more with less.
Micro-influencers are people with a follower count of 10-100,000 and they may be a better choice for your brand. For one, their engagement rate is 60% higher compared to macro influencers. And according to the same research, their conversion rate is 20% higher.
Many times, their content quality is on par with the industry leaders – they just don’t have a massive following yet.
So, focusing on smaller accounts brings more engagement and higher conversion rates, which is incredibly important with smaller budgets. You can use built-in search engines in social media platforms to search for these influencers, or you can use specialized platforms such as InBeat, Awario, Klear, Hypeauditor or Upfluence.
Step 2: Filter the list to find the most valuable contacts
At this point, you should have a short list of potential accounts you want to reach out to. But before sending an outreach email, do your due diligence and make sure you’re doing outreach to accounts that really move the needle for you.
Most of the tools mentioned above do more than just help you search for influencers on social media. With these tools, you can also check for:
- Fake followers
- Engagement levels
- Target audience breakdowns
- Topics they cover
- Current ranking in a certain industry or niche
This will help you get a much more detailed overview of a social media profile compared to just checking out their TikTok, Instagram or YouTube page. You can look beyond the follower count and into the metrics that really matter for an outreach marketing strategy.
The most successful outreach marketing tactics focus on offering valuable content to a smaller audience rather than going for every influencer under the sun.
Step 3: Find the email contacts of those influencers (and validate them)
If you’re in the B2B sphere, you’re probably used to tools such as Hunter.io where you can just load up a company and a name and get an email that works. Unfortunately, things are not as simple with outreach marketing.
Problems arise once you realize that influencers are regular people and could have any random Gmail or Yahoo (yes, I’m that old) address in the world. Traditional email finder tools don’t really work for social media accounts.
You can cross your fingers and hope that the influencer left their email in the social media account bio, but in most cases, that won’t happen. The truth is, there are probably hundreds of brands like yours looking to spam them to death with their own outreach marketing efforts.
And if you DM them hoping to get a reaction, you’ll be drowning in a sea of other people and brands hoping to get a reply. They most likely get many sales pitches every day, so DMing is not an effective method to warm them up.
Instead, use some of the tools mentioned in the previous section to look for influencer email contact addresses. You’ll get more relevant results and you get to emailing them.
But first, make sure to validate their email address with a tool such as Bouncer. You’ll be able to find out if the email is legitimate and if you’re risking your sender reputation by reaching out. It’s a small step that can save a lot of time and money in the long run. Bouncer can improve your email deliverability and ensure the success of your email campaigns in general.
Step 4: Reach out with a personalized message and offer
This is arguably the most important part of outreach marketing as so much of your success depends on it. You have the email of the influencer you want to reach out to, you’ve validated it, you made sure that their engagement is genuine and now, you need to get them interested.
Step 1: write a short but effective subject line
Step 2: state clearly what you want in the body of the outreach email – don’t beat around the bush and send a direct message about your needs
Step 3: show the influencer what they get out of the collaboration and how it’s a beneficial relationship for them
Step 4: follow up a few times in case the first email doesn’t get a response. Try other communication channels if email does not work
Step 5: kick off your outreach marketing campaign and wait for your list of leads to come in
This part of outreach campaigns is similar to your typical cold email outreach, but with one key difference. You’ve (hopefully) studied the recipient well enough, you know their target audience and what you want to achieve. Therefore, creating a highly personalized and relevant email should not be so difficult compared to cold emails.
Step 5: Measure your results
Measuring the results of an outreach marketing strategy is pretty straightforward. Consider the amount that you spent on a specific outreach marketing campaign, including the amount you paid the influencer and the time you spent researching and reaching out. Then stack that up against the sales that you were able to get with that campaign.
You’ll find out that measuring lead generation efforts for your small business is actually easier with this great strategy. Compare it to SEO for example, where you create a blog post hoping to turn passive web traffic into more sales, often not knowing if it is working or not.
You can measure things such as new social media followers, new conversions, number of products sold and more.
Pro Tip: Use outreach platforms and social media customer service tools together. They help you respond quickly to inquiries, keeping influencers and their audiences engaged.
Start creating outreach campaigns today
Outreach marketing is an incredibly effective way to supercharge your marketing efforts. With a fraction of a budget for SEO or PPC, you can get in front of the right target audience and get new sales coming your way. An outreach marketing strategy may sound a bit complicated in the beginning, but the extra effort is worth the laser precision targeting and incredible ROI.
And if you’re doing outreach marketing the right way, you must validate your email addresses first. One too many emails sent to an invalid, outdated addres,s and your sender reputation is gone beyond repair. Sign up for Bouncer today so you know exactly who you’re sending emails to, every time.
Frequently asked questions
Q: Is outreach marketing legal?
A: Yes, as it is a form of cold email. However, it’s best to make sure you comply with GDPR and your country laws. While email is one of the best channels for outreach, there are legal limitations when using it to execute outreach marketing.
There are various outreach strategies that are completely legal. Just make sure that your list is acquired through legitimate ways.
Q: Is outreach marketing the same as sales outreach?
A: It is similar because the end goal is to create new sales. In outreach marketing, the goal is primarily to build a strong relationship with potential partners so you can benefit from mutual collaboration.
One advantage of outreach marketing is that you’re not trying to sell something to the person you’re reaching out to. The ultimate goal is sell, but along the way, the influencers can make money too.
Q: What are outreach platforms?
A: If you don’t want to sit and type out emails, you can use outreach tools to contact the right influencer. These tools automate the sending and the follow-up of emails for marketing campaigns. However, don’t expect an amazing response rate if you’re using AI to build relationships with people.
You can base an email outreach strategy on outreach software and use it to build connections with influencers. However, bear in mind that email personalization is the key to success with this strategy.
