Everything You Need to Know About Outreach Marketing

Outreach marketing, when done right, can drastically improve your lead generation strategies.

With outreach marketing, you can proactively look for leads while preventing your messages from being marked as spam. This strategy tends to be more personal, which translates into better engagement and better results.

We’ll tell you everything you need to know about outreach marketing and explain how to create effective outreach marketing strategies.

Let’s get started.

Quick Links:

1. What is Outreach Marketing?
2. Main Benefits of Outreach Marketing
3. Outreach Marketing Tools
4. Outreach Marketing Ideas: 3 Examples and Techniques Explained
5. Outreach Marketing Plan Templates
6. Tips to Create an Effective Outreach Marketing Strategy
7. FAQ

What is Outreach Marketing?

Outreach marketing usually refers to a strategy with a strong focus on using influential people who share their target audience with the marketer.

Also called influencer marketing, outreach marketing can drastically raise brand awareness in multiple social media platforms and can boost a company’s online presence faster than with other marketing strategies.

Since the company partners with influential people, the outreach campaign taps into an existing market. Content promotion from an influencer tends to be more effective than paid ads and focuses more on building relationships than making a quick sale.

Main Benefits of Outreach Marketing

Here are the main benefits of using an outreach marketing campaign:

Potentially helps with increasing organic web search traffic

Outreach marketing can help boost your SEO efforts. You can develop an outreach marketing campaign that will keep attracting links and give you passive web traffic by using a lead magnet or another incentive.

You can also find influential people who have high-authority sites to talk about your brand, permanently linking your website to evergreen content.

Increase brand awareness and reputation

By using an influencer to place your brand in front of the right target audience, you can quickly create a lasting impression.

Investing in someone to become your brand ambassador allows you to immediately place your brand in front of their audience.

This allows your target audience to create a perceived connection between your influencer’s persona and your brand’s identity.

Helps build trust with potential clients

People follow influencers because they like them and their content. By attaching your brand to them, you can let the audience know you’re supporting the influencer they like. They will also know that the influencer trusts your brand enough to promote it.

This validates your brand and helps position it as one that influencers like, trust, and use.

Empower collaborations

Outreach marketing is more than just reaching out to Instagram influencers. It’s an overarching digital marketing strategy that can include all kinds of content creators.

By reaching out to companies with a valuable online presence, small businesses that aren’t competitors but share a common audience can pool resources to attract each other’s audiences.

Look for businesses with complementary products or services. For example, a restaurant could partner with someone offering eco-friendly food packaging, or a SaaS could find the creators of other online tools their target audience is using and partner with them for a webinar.

These kinds of third-party recommendations can be an effective strategy not only to generate leads but to build relationships with other small businesses and thought leaders.

Outreach Marketing Tools

Outreach marketing tools can streamline your outreach marketing strategies, making them easier to plan and execute, ensuring optimal performance.

Here’s what you need to know about outreach marketing tools:

Common Features

Here are some of the common features you should look for in outreach marketing tools:

• Automation capabilities: Outreach marketing tools can help you with boring and repetitive work by automating it for you. This allows you to plan a larger, more effective outreach marketing strategy.
• Can integrate with other tools: The right outreach tools should work with the tools you’re already using. That way, you can send an outreach email and follow up with your CRM or email marketing tools.
• Can grow with your business: Most outreach marketing tools are made with business growth in mind. These tools allow users to enjoy the benefits they can afford and to grow as you use them for successful outreach efforts.

Advantages of using outreach marketing tools to reach potential customers

Here are some of the advantages of using outreach marketing tools:

• Increase your reach: These tools allow you to reach more people, increasing your leads and your ability to keep track of them.
• Personalize your strategies: Outreach marketing tools allow you to personalize your reach through simple and powerful automations.
• Make data-driven decisions: Most outreach marketing tools will allow you to track your data so you can test your marketing strategies and gain valuable insights.

Examples

Here are some examples of outreach marketing tools:

Uplead 

UpLead helps you fill your outreach email lists by empowering you to find the right prospects through multiple methods. 

With UpLead, you get access to millions of business profiles you can use to develop email lists with updated and valid data.

Why Uplead is one of the best outreach marketing tools today

Unlike most other companies, UpLead is capable of backing up its data with a 95 percent accuracy guarantee.

This helps you build prospect lists with reliable information so you can know you’re not wasting time on bad data. UpLead also allows you to learn more from your leads through its Chrome extension. You can use the extension to generate business data as you’re browsing business websites and LinkedIn profiles.

Do you already have lead data? Use UpLead to enrich your lists so you can effectively segment your audience and update your lists with fresh contact information.

Pricing

UpLead’s pricing starts at just $74 per month for 2,040 credits annually in a single user account. This includes mobile direct dials, verified emails and phone numbers, CRM integrations, and more.

For $149 per month, you get 4,800 annual credits in a single user account, plus technographics, data enrichment, company news alerts, and more. Finally, at $299 per month, you get 12,000 credits annually in a team account of up to five users, plus full API access, competitor intelligence, and more.

Try UpLead for free, and see if it’s a good fit for you.

Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is an all-in-one content marketing tool that allows users to get performance insights and content research.

With it, users can develop social media strategies and gather valuable data from Facebook, Reddit, Pinterest, and Twitter to scale content analysis, keep track of influencers, and more.

Pricing

Buzzsumo offers a free account with up to 10 free searches a month and includes one content project and one custom feed, as well as backlinks, influencer searches, and various reports.

Pricing starts at $79 per month for the Pro tier, which also includes unlimited monthly searches in an account of up to five users with up to 10 custom feeds and unlimited projects and items.

The Plus tier starts at $139 per month, grows to 20 custom feeds in an account of up to 10 users and includes a few more advanced features. Finally, starting at $239 per month, the Large tier fully unlocks the tool, allowing for up to 15 users, 50 custom feeds, and access to advanced features like social media analyzers and top author searches.

Outreach.io

Outreach.io is a sales engagement and intelligence platform built to help companies improve their efforts through valuable and insightful data.

Used by companies like Adobe, Okta, and Tableau, this platform allows users to mix sales engagement, revenue intelligence, and conversation intelligence and get all their insights through a streamlined platform.

Pricing

Outreach.io’s pricing is only available upon request.

Mailshake

Mailshake is a powerful emailing platform that allows users to build cold email campaigns from the ground up.

Users can connect the platform to their Gmail account and social media, use it to make phone calls, and gain access to webinars and other educational tools.

Pricing

Mailshake’s pricing starts at $44 per user per month, which includes mail accounts, email personalization, automated email sequences, and some basic integrations. 

For $75 per user per month, users also get an in-app phone dialer, custom tasks, unlimited calls within North America, and more.

Outreach Marketing Ideas: 3 Examples and Techniques Explained

Here are some outreach marketing examples and techniques you can use: 

Create accurate buyer personas

If you want to attract your audience, you first need to know who that audience is.

You can then use this data to quickly and accurately segment your audience into the right user personas and engage them with personalized email marketing campaigns.

Apply this tactic:

Start creating an accurate user persona by conducting detailed and accurate research into who your buyers are. 

Tap into your analytics and your marketing data to create profiles of the kind of personas who interact with your business. Look into their levels of engagement to separate hot leads from inactive prospects.

If you already have a lead list, you can use data enrichment tools like UpLead to enhance your list with updated information on their location, social media presence, and demographics data.

Tap into the community

The basis of outreach marketing is getting your audience to know your company. The best way to do that is by becoming a part of your audience’s community.

Find large and engaged communities related to your audience, and learn ways to become a part of them. 

Apply this tactic:

Start by finding the right influencers according to your customer persona. These influencers should appeal and connect with the right target audience, so make sure it fits with yours.

Study the market to come up with copy and promotions that are relevant and appeal to your audience. Identify the causes your target audience is concerned with, and find ways to support them. You can even find influencers who already support those causes, and find ways to publicly support them with sponsorships and platforms.

You can also build your online presence by joining the conversation through Reddit AMAs or Twitter conversations.

Offer free content

Good content is expensive, so free content is an offer that’s hard to reject. After all, blog posts can help you to place your content and brand in front of a fresh new audience. Plus, it also aids your SEO efforts, creating backlinks and traffic so Google and other search engines pick up your website and feature it on answers to users’ queries.

Apply this tactic:

If you’re already creating content, offer to create guest posts on other relevant blogs. Start by determining which companies share an audience with you but aren’t your direct competitors.

Locate their editors and offer to develop a particular topic. Don’t forget to add relevant samples of your previous work. 

Here’s a simple template to get you started:

Hi [NAME],

I’m [YOUR NAME] from [YOUR BRAND], and I’d like to ask if you’re looking for new guest bloggers.

I currently write for [WEBSITE] about [MAIN TOPICS], and I’d love to write a guest article for your blog on [TOPIC].

The article would be 100% original and written exclusively for your website. I would only like a simple author bio and the option to add on the article a mention and link to my website.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

[YOUR NAME]

Outreach Marketing Plan Templates

Here are some useful outreach marketing plan templates to get you started:

Small Business Marketing Plan Template

Source: Smartsheet

This small business marketing plan by Smartsheet allows users to streamline or elaborate their strategies with this flexible and customizable marketing plan.

With it, users can describe the company’s identity, current problems, short-term and long-term goals, and much more.

Download it for Word, PDF, or Smartsheet.

Strategic marketing plan

Source: Aha!

Made by Aha!, this simple spreadsheet template helps users show the connections between their marketing goals, initiatives, and activities.

You can download this simple and versatile template for use in Excel or Google Docs.

Get it here.

Simple marketing plan template

Source: Venngage

This simple marketing plan template by Venngage is a streamlined way of expressing marketing plans in simple terms.

The template starts with an overview and continues establishing goals, milestones, and important dates, covering all the bases of a marketing strategy.

Download it here.

Tips to Create an Effective Outreach Marketing Strategy

If you want to keep track of the right KPIs, define success, and determine how you’ll achieve it, you’ll need to create an outreach marketing strategy first.

Here are a few tips and best practices to keep in mind while developing your outreach email strategy:

Prove your value

Regardless of the kind of outreach marketing effort you’re going for, your aim should always be to show your brand’s value to your audience.

Whether you’re writing a script for an influencer, the body of an outreach email, or the copy on a landing page, your focus should always be on showing your audience why they should be using your brand.

Keep your content fresh, personalizing and reinvigorating your value proposal periodically.

Personalize often

When developing a marketing strategy, it’s easy to see users as numbers instead of individuals. Your users will recognize this.

Personalization is key to an effective outreach marketing campaign. However, personalization goes beyond making sure you have all the data you need to address your users by their name.

Personalize the content your audience gets by learning enough about your audience so you can effectively segment them. You can use outreach marketing tools to find the right influencer and gain enough information to personalize your approach to them.

Ensure your influencers share your target audience

The last thing you want is to invest in an influencer only to find out their audience isn’t interested in what you have to sell.

To help prevent this, make sure the influencers you choose indeed influence your target audience. Perform research with outreach tools about your potential influencer channels, and make sure they’re seen as enough of an authority to promote your product effectively.

Know how to approach influencers

After choosing the right influencer channels, you need to know how to approach them.

You’ll first have to identify the decision-maker, which may not necessarily be the influencers themselves. Remember that they likely receive multiple emails a day, so make sure you’re optimizing your subject line and email body as much as possible.

Start by properly introducing yourself. Then you can mention why you believe you could create a relationship that’s beneficial to both of you. You may also wish to include relevant examples of your work.

Add one or two CTAs just as you would with your marketing emails, and make sure to let them know what information you expect in their reply.

FAQ

Here are answers to some questions regarding outreach marketing.

Do I need an outreach specialist to do outreach marketing?

Not necessarily. Although outreach specialists can help, you can develop effective email outreach campaigns and establish genuine relationships with thought leaders without their help.

The best way to develop a successful outreach campaign is by using the right tools to automate and streamline your work, allowing you to focus on creating effective campaigns with data-driven insights.

What is the difference between email marketing and outreach marketing?

Unlike marketing emails, outreach emails go to users who aren’t yet aware of your company, whereas marketing emails are sent to audiences who have opted in to your marketing campaigns.

What are the best practices for outreach marketing?

In short, the best practices for outreach marketing involve user personalization, developing accurate user personas, gaining accurate knowledge about their communities, and using data-driven decisions to find the right thought leaders and influencers.

Using the right outreach marketing tools can also help you create effective campaigns, engage with your audience, and create relationships with your leads.

How does the outreach marketing process work?

The outreach marketing process follows a simple workflow. It starts with identifying the individuals and businesses already influential among your target audience, then approaching them and asking them to promote your brand.

Is outreach marketing expensive?

Outreach marketing can be expensive, especially when compared to other efforts like SEO or inbound marketing. You’ll often have to pay for the right outreach tools and influencers.

Is it possible to do outreach marketing for free?

Yes, although it’s not necessarily easy. Instead of offering money, you can offer free content or find other ways to develop mutually beneficial relationships with the right influencers.

Conclusion

As we’ve seen, outreach marketing can be an extremely effective way of gaining long-term customers. Start generating leads and enriching your prospects’ data with UpLead, and get all the data you need to acquire new leads and personalize your approach. 

Try UpLead for free, and see if it’s a good fit for you.