Outreach Marketing: Basics and Benefits

Article by: Ben Janse

Last update: January 22, 2024

Outreach Marketing: This article explains Outreach Marketing in a practical way. Next to what it is, this article also highlights why it’s important, the benefits of outreach marketing, email outreach versus this marketing approach and tips to set-up an effective outreach marketing strategy. After reading, you’ll have a basic understanding of this marketing approach. Enjoy reading!

What is outreach marketing?

Outreach marketing is a marketing strategy that involves reaching out to potential customers or other influential stakeholders of a company.

The purpose of this is to both increase brand awareness and promote products or services.

Influencer marketing also falls under outreach marketing, as it is about reaching individuals in audiences that are relevant to the particular industry or niche.

Other experts suitable for outreach marketing to take a business to the next level are:

Bloggers
Journalists
Brand Ambassadors
Entrepreneurs
Social media influencers

In summary, outreach marketing aims to achieve several goals:

Generation of new leads
Promotion of products or services
Boost brand awareness
SEO strategy (i.e. through backlinks or affiliate marketing)
Customer retention
New partnerships or collaborations

At the heart of this form of marketing is identifying and finding individuals who share the same interests, needs, and issues as a company’s target audience. Once companies have identified these people, they can be addressed directly.

Why is outreach marketing important?

Building and maintaining a strong brand is not easy. It requires serious effort and continuous development. Determining and reaching the right target group is an important part of this.

A mention of your brand or product on a popular website can make a huge difference to your online visibility.

Higher visibility means more authority on the web, more organic traffic, and more potential conversions and revenue.

In addition, many people tend to buy things that are promoted by their favorite company or influencer.

Benefits of outreach marketing

Large companies often have enough money for large-scale marketing campaigns. Smaller companies can nevertheless become involved in the same type of activities, partly thanks to digital developments that offer relatively cheap solutions.

Many companies have a strong marketing strategy. The outreach element in it is important for a number of reasons. These are explained below.

Promotion of product or service
Building new relationships
SEO strategy boost

1. Promotion of product or service

Research shows that approximately 70% of (online) marketers agree that content marketing drives engagement and brand awareness.

However, it is not enough to build a nice website and publish some articles or videos on it.

Content can be brought to the attention of the public via outreach marketing in various ways, for example via influencers or community websites.

2. Building new relationships

It is difficult to become successful completely by yourself. Most of the time, other people are needed to make the whole thing grow. This challenge forms the second benefit of outreach marketing: network expansion.

The most obvious activities include building the company through influencers whose audiences are very similar to your own target audience.

Building relationships with like-minded brands is also valuable, especially for smaller companies or brands that view collaborations with others as their primary expansion strategy.

3. SEO strategy boost

Outreach marketing helps a business to become more visible and findable in search engines. When well-known and established domains place a link to your own website, Google sees this as a positive ‘review’.

This may reward the domain with a higher position on the results page. This depends, among other things, on the performance of competitors.

These kinds of high-quality backlinks are the second most important factor for Google to give a domain a higher search position. To get high-quality backlinks, you need to reach websites with high domain authority.

In this scenario, a DA PA checker can help you precisely check the domain authority along with some other things including spam score, page authority, etc. These aspects will make you easily and quickly know the backlinks-worthy websites.

Email outreach vs outreach marketing

Outreach marketing focuses mainly on people who don’t know a company yet: prospects. These prospects are found by:

Searching social media platforms and other databases
Studying competitors
Identifying or developing a target market

Email marketing targets people who have chosen to receive information from you.

For example, these people are:

Subscribed to your newsletter
Subscribed to promotional emails
Signed up for a trial period and agreed to receive emails
Active on your website with an account

Conducting email marketing also involves building an email list. Compiling such a list is easy when it comes to people who are loyal customers of a company, but it is more challenging to see ‘strangers’ register themselves for your emails.

Finding the correct contact for your email outreach campaign is crucial, and you may increase the success rate of your campaign by using reverse email lookup to locate them.

How to do: tips for executing an effective outreach marketing strategy

Below are some tips on how to start or take an outreach marketing strategy to the next level.

1. Define objectives

Before taking any action, an outreach marketing plan must be drawn up. Among other things, this clearly sets out the objectives of the campaign.

Each goal must be clearly defined, such as how you want to collect more high-quality backlinks. One way to set goals is to use the SMART goals method.

2. Choose the right influencers

It is important to be extra picky and careful when doing this step. There are a number of types of influencers:

Sharks: the most successful and biggest influencers category. They are followed by an audience of millions because of their expertise or niche
Big fish: not as big as sharks, but these influencers have a large audience and are sufficiently respected
Small fish: Their audience size is smaller, but good partnerships can still come from them, because they are ambitious and often interested in those partnerships
Spawn: These influencers are just getting started and don’t have an audience yet

3. Personalized communication

Research shows that the majority of recipients of a message are willing to read the message and consider its content when it’s personalized.

Personalized communication isn’t just about mentioning someone’s name. It is also about examining the person thoroughly and offering them something of real value to them.

4. Do not spam

When you are just starting out with outreach marketing, you will notice that not everyone answers (quickly). That’s not a bad thing, nor is it a reason to stop contacting others. A follow-up can be a good idea.

Don’t do this endlessly though. It must be prevented that you become annoying in the eye of the other. The starting point should be to build good relationships, not to get that one backlink.

Another effective tactic to increase the efficiency of your email marketing efforts is DMARC configuring and taking other email security steps.

5. Use an attractive subject for the email

Emails with an attractive subject are opened more often than emails with a boring, generic subject.

Therefore:

Keep the subject line short and sweet
Use text with complements like emojis to appear personal
Avoid caps lock and bold text/special characters

Now it’s your turn

What do you think? Do you recognize the explanation about outreach marketing? Do the tips in this article help you? Do you use influencers for the marketing strategy you are working on? What other forms of marketing do you know? Are you missing something in this article? Or do you want to add something? Let us know in the comments.

Share your experience and knowledge in the comments box below.

More information

Wright, A. J., Veríssimo, D., Pilfold, K., Parsons, E. C. M., Ventre, K., Cousins, J., … & McKinley, E. (2015). Competitive outreach in the 21st century: Why we need conservation marketing. Ocean & Coastal Management, 115, 41-48.
Alkindi, S. S., & Al-Suqri, M. N. (2013). Social networking sites as marketing and outreach tools of library and information services. Global Journal of Human-Social Science Research, 13(2), 1-14.
Pavlov, O. V., Melville, N., & Plice, R. K. (2008). Toward a sustainable email marketing infrastructure. Journal of Business Research, 61(11), 1191-1199.
Jin, S. V., Muqaddam, A., & Ryu, E. (2019). Instafamous and social media influencer marketing. Marketing Intelligence & Planning.

How to cite this article:
Janse, B. (2022). Outreach Marketing. Retrieved [insert date] from Toolshero: https://www.toolshero.com/marketing/outreach-marketing/

Original publication date: 07/22/2020 | Last update: 01/22/2024

Add a link to this page on your website:
<a href=”https://www.toolshero.com/marketing/outreach-marketing/”>Toolshero: Outreach Marketing</a>

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Article by:

Ben Janse

Ben Janse is a young professional working at ToolsHero as Content Manager. He is also an International Business student at Rotterdam Business School where he focusses on analyzing and developing management models. Thanks to his theoretical and practical knowledge, he knows how to distinguish main- and side issues and to make the essence of each article clearly visible.