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Understanding Outreach

Outreach makes up a large part of any successful offsite SEO campaign. It comprises of sourcing prospects specific to your industry and beginning to develop and build up long lasting relationships with bloggers, webmasters, and editors of online publications. These relationships are key as they provide a channel for voicing your brand, sharing your news, and building your authority as a business. Planning and carrying out your outreach requires a clear vision of strategy and implementation.

Choosing the Right Strategy

Determining outreach strategy is dependent on the company itself, its product offering, and the market it sits within. Certain niches tend to lend themselves better to different outreach strategies. Reviews and giveaways for example would potentially be more valuable to e-commerce businesses in the lifestyle sector.

Here are three recommended actions to complete when planning your outreach approach:

  1. Research and understand the online community of your sector. What’s the primary content format on their websites? Is it text based or visual content? What types of content are they sharing with their readers? Are they often linking to useful external resources? How could you engage them with your brand?
  2. Check out niche specific forums and identify what questions are being frequently asked. What information and resource are people seeking? This can help sculpt your onsite content plan.
  3. Based on your research, assess what assets you have on your site currently that you could promote to influencers in your sector. Do you have a downloadable PDF guide to pensions for example? Or an interactive mortgage calculator?

Once armed with information relating to the above, you can begin to create your outreach plan and select which strategies are going to best fit with your objectives and benefit your business.

Below is an overview of our three broad strategy classifications and a few examples of methods within those strategies.

You can also download a handy infographic here.

Blogger Engagement and Creative Outreach

  • Existing asset promotion – marketing your onsite resources to prospects in your sector.
  • Reviews and giveaways – products, services, or even a work experience placement.
  • Charity partnerships and careers opportunities – pursuing coverage of your charity work and career opportunities.
  • Interviews, features and Q&As – offering your voice as an industry expert to online publications.

Content Marketing

  • Proposed asset promotion – designing and creating a shareable asset such as an infographic or a downloadable “Destination Guide” to promote via multiple channels.
  • Specialist blogger contribution – injecting your onsite content with comment and opinion from industry influencers to encourage engagement and sharing.
  • Mood boards and collages – Putting together visually inspiring image based content such as gift guides or interior look books to promote.

Technical Acquisition

  • Brand mentions and references – Identifying where you’ve been talked about online and inviting publishers to provide further context to the article by linking back to your website.
  • Link reclamation – Identifying any broken links and requesting they be re-pointed to the relevant page of your website.
  • Reverse image lookup – Requesting accreditation where your website images have been used around the web.

TIP: Download our infographic: Understanding Outreach. Click here!

Conclusion

The backbone of a successful and sustainable outreach approach is research, relationship development and asset creation.

Research allows you to get a feel for the online landscape of your market and learn what’s going to work well and what you can discount in your strategy planning.

Relationship building will enable you to gradually develop your bank of prospects and is an invaluable source for gaining feedback on your ideas from your established contacts.

Asset creation will open new avenues and create more opportunities. The more areas of conversation you create around your brand, the stronger your outreach foundations become. Through asset creation, you also form a base for relationship building and can begin to develop brand trust and recognition.

Remember to download the infographic: Understanding Outreach.

If you’d like more information on the above strategies and getting them put into practice, contact WMG today.