Blogger outreach is when businesses and bloggers work together to create powerful and results-driven content. It’s a great strategy and we really recommend learning more about how you might be able to work with bloggers (if you’re not already!).
So, do you already have a solid blogger outreach strategy in place? If so, is it leading you towards your short-term and long-term goals? An outreach strategy will typically cover the following steps:
- Setting goals
- Finding the right bloggers
- Pitching your ideas
- Collaborating with bloggers
- Tracking and measuring results
Blogger outreach can be a time-consuming process, including writing pitches, monitoring response rates and tracking performance. This is a lot to consider, especially when looking at multiple links.
Luckily, you have access to a range of blogger outreach tools that can help to simplify these complex campaigns. Using the right tools can lead you towards your end-goals faster, including increased traffic, sales and revenue.
In this guide, we are going to summarise some of the most popular outreach marketing tools, and how we recommend using them as a digital marketing agency.
What is a blogger outreach tool?
Before we dive into what each tool can offer, let’s establish what an outreach tool is and what role they will potentially play in your digital marketing campaigns.
An outreach tool is designed to automate or simplify different steps and work that needs to be done throughout the process. Although you don’t need to use tools, we would recommend doing so for faster, and more efficient results. Benefits include:
- Finding the right bloggers for your business
- Building profiles for your contacts
- Managing auto-mailing
- Maintaining relationships with bloggers and influencers
We’ve narrowed this guide down to 4 tools:
Let’s take a closer look, starting with BuzzSumo:
BuzzSumo
This is a large-scale tool that offers a range of features that go beyond outreach – it breaks the features down into the following categories:
- Content Discovery
- Research
- Influencer Marketing
- Monitoring
All these features are highly relevant to outreach marketing. We would use it to find prospects and learn how to target them. It works by tracking data that can provide you with insights into how well a blogger or influencer is engaging their followers.
There are a lot of bloggers out there – so we would recommend using the data BuzzSumo can provide, to find the most valuable bloggers for your digital campaigns. We’ve explained a bit more about what the tool can offer below:
- Measure content performance – BuzzSumo can detect content gaps, perform deep social media dives, and pull helpful Q&As from top websites. With this information, you can start to develop high-quality content that is suitable for your outreach targets.
- Capture comments – Receive an alert when content involving your brand or your competitors’ brand is shared online. Keeping up with news stories, articles and discussions can ensure you’re not missing any opportunities for outreach.
- Discover ‘power sharers’ – As well as finding bloggers and influencers, you will be able to find the users who are boosting or engaging with their content to make it successful. This is another important aspect of targeting.
Pitchbox
The core focus of Pitchbox is on reaching out to highly valuable and relevant influencers. The influencers that Pitchbox matches you with will depend on the nature of your business, your campaign and your digital marketing goals.
It’s an outreach tool that is designed to understand your niche. You can find major bloggers in your niche by searching for keywords relevant to your brand. Once you find bloggers you’d like to connect with – you can sort them into profiles and categories.
Features include:
Advanced influencer prospecting – You can quickly locate contact information and then use a personalised outreach to connect with bloggers that can benefit your business.
Email integrations – You can reach out to influencers directly through an emailing feature within the tool. You will be able to send bulk emails, plus organise and automate emails based on the responses you receive.
Helpful Analytics – Once you’ve sent your messages to prospects, you will be provided with data and reports to measure the success of your campaigns. For example, you will know how often your messages are read, who is reading them, and who is not engaging. This can tell you what you are doing right or wrong when approaching users.
Ninja Outreach
Ninja Outreach offers a range of features that can help you to build effective influencer marketing campaigns by filtering through millions of influencers insights.
Once you have found the right bloggers for your campaign – you will be able to find their social media profiles and contact information. The focus on social media targeting on YouTube and Instagram, is what makes this tool different to the ones we have already highlighted.
You can search for popular Instagram and YouTube personalities by usernames, keywords or even engagement rate and followers. This is ideal if you’re aiming your digital marketing efforts towards either of these platforms.
An overview of the other features available:
Search by social media platform: Refine your search to target Instagram influencers, Youtube influencers, or even media like podcasts.
Extensive internal CRM tools – Ninja Outreach helps you stay connected to influencers with Customer Relationship Tools. For example, you can add status tags to any relationship or track your last contact.
Manage multiple projects – Organise all your projects, clients, and conversations with built-in CRM. Use filters, leave notes, and set access rights for each team member.
Just Reach Out
Just Reach Out is another outreach tool that is designed to help businesses perform advanced searches for outreach and press opportunities. You’re able to reach out to relevant journalist and influencers using the tool’s pre-populated pitch templates that have yielded the highest response rates.
If you’re newer to digital marketing or outreach marketing in particular – the site offers a range of training videos and resources to make the process more straightforward. You will be able to:
Discover broken links – Quickly identify broken links that are leading users to pages with no content. You might be able to claim these pages if there is opportunity to do so.
Contact information verification – This is helpful when reaching out to a high number of potential influencers or journalists. The tool will verify any contact information so that you can avoid bounce backs.
Final Thoughts
Using the right tools will help you to simplify your outreach marketing process. Once you establish the right tool or tools for your campaign – you’ll be able to automate the time-consuming tasks and ensure you’re reaching out to bloggers with high potential to benefit your business. The majority of outreach tools will offer a free trial – so there’s no harm in experimenting.
Here at Summon, we know how to connect businesses with the right kind of bloggers, and build impressive content strategies that bring loyal customers to our clients. We completely understand it can be complex – which is why we avoid all the technical digital marketing talk when working with brands.
Feel free to contact us if you’re interested in working with us on your next blogger outreach campaign.