Although you have taken the time to write great posts, you may have found that your blog gets little traffic. But let’s be honest. You aren’t only creating content for fun, you are doing it to build your brand and increase your sales.
If you want to get more traffic to your content, you need to focus on cultivating relationships with influencers in your industry. Here is why outreach is essential for successful content marketing.
What Is Outreach Marketing?
Outreach marketing is a concept that focuses on returning to the roots of marketing by seeking out individuals and organizations that have shared interests that are related to what you or your company does. In most cases, outreach marketing is used for branding purposes to spread your content and brand to wider audiences. However, it can also be used to improve lead generation and increase sales.
It is important to note that outreach marketing is not the same as guest blogging. While guest blogging is about creating a post for a publication as a contribution, outreach marketing focuses on getting influencers to share a link to your content from an existing or future post.
Relationship Building Is Essential for Content Marketing
Instead of focusing on promotion, outreach marketing embraces relationship building. This form of marketing is essential to the success of your content strategy because your brand needs people who actively want to engage with your brand and are excited about what you have to offer.
What makes outreach marketing powerful is that it isn’t about a one-off promotional trick. Just like business networking in the real world, outreach marketing is a long-term investment. Here are some of the major benefits of relationship building with outreach marketing:
- Build high authority links. As you develop relationships with influencers in your industry, these individuals will promote your content by linking to it.
- Maximize the reach of your published content. Notify your influencers of new content that your brand has created and they will help you to promote it. These influencers will share your content with their own followers.
- Attract new customers and leads. Although, outreach marketing is most often used for branding purposes, sharing your content with influencers may help to increase your conversion rates because of the similar audiences and goals that your influencers have in common with your brand. (We recommend to do this affectively you use our Email Address Scraper and Social Media Scraper).
- Establish your brand as an authority. As a result of your content being shared by authority figures in your industry, your audience will in turn recognize your brand as an authority as they see your content being discussed or shared on other websites.
That said, you are not likely to form a relationship with an influencer on your first contact. You will need to work to maintain the relationship over a long period of time as a part of a dedicated strategy. If influencers get the idea that your relationship building efforts are generic or automated, they may not want to continue partnering with your brand.
Incorporate Outreach into Every Step of Your Content Strategy
Traditional content marketing campaigns include outreach as one of the last phases of a campaign after the content has already been created. However, the Content Marketing Institute recommends incorporating outreach into every step of your content strategy to improve your results from your content marketing efforts.
Here are the steps you should take to revise your content strategy:
- Brainstorming: Have someone on your team that understands the type of content that needs to be created for maximum share ability.
- Research and planning: Reach out to the sources for the data that will be included in your content.
- Content creation: Focus on your audience to find the appropriate design, style, and voice for the content.
- Promotion: Reach out to influencers.
- Tracking: Track your results and follow up with influencers.
By following the above steps, every piece of content that you create will be perfect for outreach marketing in order to maximize the performance of your content.
How to Select Content to Promote
To create content that is ideal for outreach marketing, your content must be highly informative and valuable. Consider your audience and make sure to use the right content style to portray the information that you want to share. For example, if the content that you are creating is data-heavy, an infographic might make it easier for your audience to digest the content.
How to Find Influencers
While all of this advice is great, none of it really matters if you have no idea how to find influencers for your outreach marketing! Fortunately, there are a number of tools that can help you to locate people and organizations who would be most interested in your brand.
A person or organization that qualifies as an influencer offers valuable context and credibility for your brand. Besides these tools, there are other ways that you can secure influencers for your brand, including your own participation in the industry and talking to your marketing and public relations staff.
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