How many of your household essentials were recommended to you by a friend? It’s easy to imagine that you bought most of your daily necessities thanks to a friend’s recommendation. In fact, you’re probably reading this blog on a phone, PC, or tablet a friend recommended to you.
Luckily, in the marketing world, there’s a method of exploiting recommendations in your marketing strategy—through outreach marketing. In fact, one of the tactics in outreach marketing leverages recommendations to entice conversions. Incidentally, customers are 91% more likely to continue patronizing your brand if you give them personalized recommendations.
Here, we’ll give you a rundown of how outreach marketing campaigns work and how to incorporate them into your marketing strategy effectively.
What Is Outreach Marketing?
Outreach marketing is a marketing tactic that involves reaching out to potential customers, influencers, and other brands that resonate with your audience. Outreach marketers use various channels to contact their prospects, from phone calls to reaching out through social media.
However, finding new patrons isn’t the only goal in outreach marketing. Outreach marketing can help you achieve objectives like:
- Brand awareness
- Lead generation
- SEO outreach to promote backlinks
- Data collection
- Customer retention
- Offer promotion
Through outreach marketing, your customers can use different avenues to find your brand and products.
Advantages of Outreach Marketing
Okay, so what? Sure, you know what outreach marketing is, but what can it bring to you?
Outreach marketing presents unique opportunities to promote your brand value. It opens possibilities for collaborations with different brands and brings brand awareness to customers you otherwise wouldn’t reach.
So, let’s look deeper into the advantages of outreach marketing.
#1 Finding New Customers
Outreach marketing lets you find prospective customers without expanding your budget into digital ads or other expensive campaigns. And the three methods for finding new prospects with outreach marketing are by identifying your target audience, locating your customers, and personalizing content to them.
- Identify your target audience: One of the first techniques used in outreach marketing is to create buyer personas. Through buyer personas, you get a clear picture of what audience most resonates with your products and services
- Locate customers: Outreach marketing can identify where to reach prospects best. For instance, Youtube content heavily resonates with Gen Z, making Youtube live streams an ideal opportunity to reach Gen Z customers
- Personalize content: After learning your buyer persona and where to reach your audience, a personalized message can create better communication that encourages customer engagement.
When you leverage outreach marketing, buried opportunities become possible—prospects you otherwise might have ignored become conversions.
#2 Improves Lead Generation Efforts
You can level up your lead generation strategy by leveraging collaborations through outreach marketing efforts. For instance, collaborating with a popular Youtuber within the same niche can bring new faces to your brand.
Take Khe Hy’s collaboration with Ali Abdaal, for example. Khe Hy is a coach whose average youtube views barely hit 1,000. However, his collaboration video with Ali Abdaal about how to boost productivity with Notion reached an audience of nearly 200 thousand.
Ade’s follow-up videos on Notion also had an average view count of 10k, with one, in particular, garnering views in the 160,000 range.
#3 Heightens SEO Performance
Discoverability is crucial in getting people to find your brand, which outreach marketing promotes. That’s why one of the main tactics in outreach marketing is working with similar brands in your niche to get your content out there by backlinking to your website.
According to Google’s search engine results guidelines, backlinks are the second most weighted item determining how high you rank on Google search results. If you didn’t know, less than 1% of people bother to check the second page of Google results—So, in short, you’re improving your SEO score and leveling up in Google searches through outreach marketing.
Tactics for Optimal Outreach Marketing
You now know what benefits outreach marketing brings. The question now is: “How do I use it?”
Here are five tips to leverage social channels and optimize your outreach marketing strategy.
#1 Social Media Outreach
73% of marketers agree that social media is one of the most influential business promotion channels. So, needless to say, it’s essential to keep social media in the back of your mind when planning out your outreach marketing strategy.
Use Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to engage with customers. Additionally, leverage social media sharing options to advertise your content.
#2 Leverage User-Generated Content for Outreach
So, you’re using social media in your strategy, but are you also watching your prospect’s accounts? Monitor your customers’ and prospects’ accounts to find opportunities to reach out.
For example, suppose you’re in the SaaS space and find your prospects complaining about a recent data breach. In that case, you can use the situation to promote your services that might help address your prospect’s issues.
Using social media to promote your products, services, and content is just the first step of a social media outreach strategy. Monitoring your prospects for opportunities to strike up a conversation will lead to more conversions.
#3 Personalize Email Outreach
Do you know how many business offers people find in their inboxes daily? 121.
Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. Would you open an email from an unknown address randomly promoting their products? Probably not. That thing’s getting marked as spam ASAP.
Instead of going straight to a hard sell, begin email campaigns on a personalized journey. Begin with an introduction email. Then, once you’ve established a relationship, find the opportunity to transition into the sales talk.
#4 Aim for the Moon
Aim big if you’re planning a collaboration with another brand or content creator.
Sure, you’re more likely to work with smaller brands or content creators, but if you don’t aim to work with brands or creators with the largest reach possible, you might lose opportunities you otherwise would have nailed.
As they say, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
#5 A/B Test
It’s unlikely that 100% of your outreach attempts will succeed. So, it’s vital to A/B test your messages to determine the most effective strategies.
For instance, between 100 prospects, use LinkedIn messaging to contact the first 50 and email the rest. Then, check which channel receives the most replies. After determining which channel is most effective, focus on that channel, or tweak your approach on the platform that’s not performing as well.
Outreach Marketing: Your Ticket to More Conversions
Cold outreach is a daunting task. Contacting 100 prospects and receiving less than ten replies can be discouraging.
However, disregarding outreach marketing campaigns will limit your brand’s growth. With the right strategy, lead generation and customer conversions can increase 10-fold. At ScaleUp Sales, our team of experts is ready to tailor the perfect outreach marketing campaigns to fit your particular niche.
Contact us today to begin your outreach marketing journey!
