We talk about the outreach marketing approach and its types. We explain clearly and simply how it works on the example of well-known companies and tell you how to use the advantages of the method on any, even the smallest project.

In the final part of the article we give step-by-step instructions on how to implement the outreach method in any project with visual examples of messages to send.

We will also give recommendations on how to conduct successful negotiations with site owners, with the help of which you will quickly build up quality link mass and get all other related benefits.

What is outreach

Outreach (from English outreach – “reaching out”), although in the world of modern marketing it is far from charity, but rather a personalized offer that is difficult to refuse.

In other words, outreach is an active process when a particular company establishes communications in different directions. For example, with potential customers, partners or bloggers.

You can’t just write a text or make a video on outreach. Because the concept includes a multi-level strategy of building relationships with the audience and potential partners to achieve the company’s marketing and commercial goals.

In order not to perceive outreach as something spherical in a vacuum, it is important to understand that this is one of the marketing approaches that are actively used in the modern world.

Other approaches are also well known to you – content marketing, PR (Public Relations) and SMM (Social Media Marketing). And we will definitely talk more about them in other articles.

Outreach cannot be called the invention of one person – this strategy appeared and evolved together with the development of marketing in the early twentieth century. Outreach is an abstract marketing method like any other, so no one owns the rights to it.

And these five interesting facts will definitely expand your understanding of outreach:

1. There is another, older version of the translation. According to it, the word “outreach” appeared in the nineteenth century in the context of religious missions and meant “preaching on the street.
2. Outreach is effective only if the target audience is properly selected and the content of messages is carefully adapted to the interests of specific people or groups of people.
3. In today’s world, outreach is actively represented in all segments of Digital, where the target audience or partners can be sent a message in one form or another.
4. Outreach will not have an effect after sending one message, it is a systematic, strategic work aimed at building relationships with potential customers, partners and other stakeholders.
5. The higher the quality of the message, the more noticeable the effect of outreach. Only convincing arguments and confidence in what you offer will help build trust with anyone.

Who is using outreach today and how

Apple interacts through outreach with app developers. For example, it offers tools and support for new iOS developments.

Airbnb attracts new hosts to the platform through outreach. In return, they receive support and favorable terms of cooperation. They also have less trouble finding clients.

HubSpot uses outreach to attract new customers. They like free or affordable webinars, video tutorials, templates, ebooks, and other useful materials. This is how the brand builds its reputation as a sales and marketing leader.

SEMrush interacts with bloggers through outreach. Everyone who agrees to become a partner can publish their articles on the platform and also get access to valuable content marketing and SEO tools. This is how SEMrush builds its reputation in the market and expands its audience.

Popular blogger Neil Patel actively promotes his content and services through outreach. He collaborates and records interviews with influencers from different fields. This way Neil pumps up his personal brand and increases the number of followers.

Why outreach is necessary

A modern specialist from the field of digital and marketing understands outreach primarily as a tool for developing the external profile of an Internet resource.

The marketing approach in this case is based on agreements with site owners to place content with a link to the site, brand or event on their resource. In most cases, this is a backlink or banner. The main secret of success is to competently integrate them into the posted publication.

Outreach is a popular method of SEO-promotion, as well as a great way to tell about your product or service through viral advertising. By the principle of action, the algorithm is very similar to linkbuilding, but with a focus not on search engines, but on Internet users.

Thus, we can conclude that outreach is something between traditional link building and crowd-marketing. At the same time, the method combines all the advantages of each of the directions.

Some companies use outreach not for commercial purposes, but for mutually beneficial exchange of links.

Backlinks remain one of the key factors for promotion in Google. An outreach marketing specialist selects sites to publish links in such a way that they meet the requirements of search engines and help improve the position of the site.

1. Outreach can also serve as an additional source of traffic. With proper preparation of content and selection of successful sites, there is a chance to get a significant number of conversions to the site that is being promoted.

You need to place backlinks on resources where the target audience of your product or service is located to attract new customers.

What tasks are solved with the help of outreach

1. The main objective of any outreach strategy is to build a quality pool of backlinks to the client’s website. These links play an important role in improving organic search engine rankings and attracting additional targeted traffic.

Backlinks remain one of the key factors for promotion in Google. An outreach marketing specialist selects sites to publish links in such a way that they meet the requirements of search engines and help improve the position of the site.

Posting links on authoritative platforms helps improve a website’s ranking and visibility in search results.

2. Outreach can also serve as an additional source of traffic. With proper preparation of content and selection of successful sites, there is a chance to get a significant number of conversions to the site that is being promoted.

You need to place backlinks on resources where the target audience of your product or service is located to attract new customers.

3. Additional goals may include building reputation and brand awareness. While increasing online presence is more challenging, many promotional professionals often avoid focusing on this aspect.

Many webmasters and marketers use simplistic methods to save time. Nevertheless, even a small number of links to successful case studies, author materials or personal research can significantly build trust in your brand.

The final result also largely depends on what types of outreach to use as part of a website’s external profile development strategy.

Types of outreach

Cold – you form messages for potential partners with whom the company has not yet had contact. This is somewhat similar to cold sales over the phone – the result can always be unpredictable.

Agree, how can you predict the response of an unfamiliar blogger, to whom you wrote a letter with a request to publish on his resource text with a link to your site.

Warm – you address potential partners who have already been in contact with the company in one way or another. For example, subscribed to social networks, used a free product, left a contact, and perhaps already ordered a product or service. For example, among your social media followers there are bloggers you know and you ask them to comment on your new post about new trends in crowd marketing.

By recommendation – you approach potential donors on the recommendation of partners or regular customers. This method is considered more effective than the previous ones, because the company has already gained a certain amount of trust thanks to the received recommendation.

For example, you write to the owner of the site with a request to exchange links. But not just like that, but on the recommendation of a familiar colleague who maintains and administers a similar Internet project.

By content – you use webinars, videos, podcasts or articles to attract potential partners or customers and start contacting them on a regular basis. This category includes not only publications on third-party resources, but also the placement of unique content on the main, official website of the company.

For example, in one of the comments on a thematic forum you publish a link to the material of your site, where the topic of the selected branch is disclosed in detail.

With the help of tools – here we mean the use of automated mailing lists or contact search platforms to attract partners or customers.

For example, with the help of a special tool you can select the contacts of all sites that echo your type of activity and send to the mailboxes specified in the contacts a proposal to publish a ready-made article with a backlink.

On social media – search for potential partners or customers through social media and then try to establish a strong backlink with them. For example, publish interesting content on social network X or Facebook with the hashtag #outreach to attract specialists in that particular field.

It is important to realize that outreach, like any marketing method, has no golden formula. The selection of techniques, tactics and strategy depends on the specifics of the company’s work, the conditions of the tasks and goals set, as well as the specifics of the target audience.

With an understanding of the basic principles of the method, you can gradually move to the launch of the first campaign.

Stages of an outreach campaign

Donor search

Everything starts with the search for donors. The more quality resources for placing links, the more return you will get from the launch of the campaign.

We recommend searching for donors using a simple and clear step-by-step algorithm:

1. Identify the target audience and sites that will be of interest to potential clients, visitors, readers, partners. Fix the topics of such sites, traffic intensity, audience geography, brand voice, design features, level of service, nature and range of products, services and other important, in your opinion, points.
2. Use Ahrefs, SEMrush, Majestic and other tools for traffic and other metrics to find sites directly relevant to your niche, with high traffic intensity and good rankings.
3. Analyze content on competitor sites that are popular with your target audience. This will help you develop the right content plan and determine the right format for communicating with future visitors.
4. Pay attention to such a metric as site authority. The main indicators here are Domain Authority (DA) or Page Authority (PA), the higher they are, the more active search robots promote such resources to the top of the output.
5. Create a list of potential donors that can benefit your site, break them into groups, fix a link to each resource and try to establish contact with the administration of each site.

Which donors to consider first

Topical blog. For example, you sell bicycles and offer the author of a popular blog about bicycle travel to post an article about your site, which will describe the range and services that you offer to bicycle enthusiasts.

News portal. Press releases are in vogue here, for example, messages about the release of a new product or the launch of a new service. Naturally, in the text put a link to your site.

Forum. For example, on a forum of cycling enthusiasts you can create a topic: “In what cases you should buy a chosser (bike for long trips on the highway and for traveling around the city)”, put a link to the site and indicate that the expert on the subject is ready to answer all the questions of visitors.

Learn more about these links in the article: What are crowdlinks and crowd marketing?

Reference resource. It may already have three or four bike stores in your city. Let yours be the fifth. This is the main advantage of a good reference resource – on it you can find absolutely everything that is available in the city. Be sure to supplement the information about the store with a link to the site.

Important! Unfortunately, on many sites you will be refused. Especially on the request for free placement of links. Sometimes the administration will require payment or barter. For example, will also want to place their content with a link on your site.

When the approximate pool of donors is formed, they should be subjected to primary filtering.

Primary filtration

Primary filtration can be divided into five stages:

1. Theme analysis – at this stage, look at how much the theme of the donor site corresponds to your niche. For example, if you sell bicycles, you should not try to look for donors among online resources on plumbing or electrics.
2. Assessing authority by DA (Domain Authority) or PA (Page Authority). Of course, you can arrange to place content on a site with low authority. And it will be much easier to do so. But the usefulness of publishing an article with a link on such a site will tend to zero.
3. Analyze the content – do not try to place your publication for the sake of a check mark. Bypass blogs with uninteresting articles that are not read, liked and reposted. It is unlikely that such a site will be a good donor and will add weight to your link mass.
4. Placing on sites with low traffic intensity is as bad an idea as agreeing to publish on a resource with low authority and poor quality content. The result will not be worth the effort.
5. Check a potential donor for over-spamming, too intrusive promotional mailings, spam and poor quality content. Backlinks from such resources will not bring anything good either.

Examples of primary filtration in practice:

1. SEO agency looking for donors for a client that manufactures and installs plastic windows. Primary filtering by topics of production, repair and maintenance of plastic doors and windows.

According to authority metrics indicators from 30 and above. Quality of content – blog with articles not for seo-promotion, but with materials that are really interesting to read before ordering installation or repair of windows.

2. An online store is looking for donors in the niche of upholstered furniture sales. Primary filtering on the topic of upholstered furniture, but which has fundamental differences from our product, so that the products can complement each other.

Authority metrics show a score of 40 and above. Minimum traffic of 1000 visitors per day, no spam in the mailing list and no overspam in the content.

Important! It is categorically not recommended to skip the initial filtering stage. For your resource, it is much better to select five donors of ideal quality and place on their resources than to organize 20 publications, which will not bring visible results.

Contacting the domain owner

Probably the most interesting stage of outreach, where you have to enter into negotiations and dialog about cooperation. If you don’t know where to start yet or want to systematize the process, use these simple and step-by-step instructions:

1. We look for contacts directly on websites and social networks that interest us. Using tools like VoilaNorbert and Hunter.io can help speed up the process.

2. By no means do we send template emails. But non-template does not mean that you change “Hi, Vasya!” to “Hi, Petya!”. It’s important to let the person know that the message is written specifically for them from the first to the last letter. Yes, it is time and effort consuming, but it is worth it.
   

Tell us how you feel about the site’s activities and content, and in a personalized email, tell us why you want to post your content on this resource with your link.

3.  Make a special emphasis on how your publication will benefit the site owner and his resource. For example, you have been writing for large resources for a long time and you are sure that you will make a material that will attract a large number of readers.

Maybe you optimize the text for SEO at an advanced level, including images and meta tags and you can compete for a place on the first page for specific queries.

Or maybe you’re ready to offer all together plus a hot topic that popular bloggers haven’t yet had a chance to speak on. For example, how to optimize, accelerate and improve the effectiveness of outreach strategies using artificial intelligence.

4. Try to formulate your offer as clearly as possible, immediately make it clear what you want from the owner and how you will be useful. A person should understand from the first lines that you are offering the publication of an article with a link or a reciprocal exchange of links.

5. Observe business etiquette, use a professional but friendly tone in your correspondence. Never impose your offer or pressure the site owner in any form.

Here are a couple of sample messages that can be customized for your donors:

What do you need to be prepared for after sending such requests?

• Not all site owners will like your message, there is a chance that most of the proposals will be rejected;
• mentally prepare to send requests to at least a few dozen site owners, not two or three, otherwise you simply will not get results;
• do not bore site owners with repeated messages, some people may be busy, but may give a positive response to your message after some time.

What results can realistically be achieved if the time and budget allocated to outreach is spent wisely?

Conclusion

Imagine what a powerful boost in promotion your site will receive if links to it appear on many authoritative resources from your niche. Search robots will definitely pay attention to the noticeably increased link mass and positions in organic search will inevitably go up.

As additional bonuses you will get new, unique visitors to the site, grateful readers, improved behavioral indicators, increased traffic, and eventually new customers for your products or services.