What Is Outreach Marketing? Benefits and Strategies

Updated February 3, 2023

Outreach marketing can be a useful method for expanding awareness of your brand and making connections within your industry. Through outreach marketing, you work with influential people and other brands to increase a company's brand awareness and create a personalized marketing approach. If you work in marketing or manage a brand's content, it's important to understand how outreach marketing works so you can use this strategy effectively.

In this article, we define outreach marketing, explain its benefits and provide steps to help you perform outreach marketing effectively to grow brand awareness.

What is outreach marketing?

Outreach marketing is a type of targeted marketing that involves developing relationships with influential people in your industry to discuss partnership opportunities. You can also use outreach marketing to contact other businesses and establish a complementary relationship to grow both your brands. The goal of outreach marketing is to increase brand awareness by connecting with individuals or organizations who share similar audiences. Examples of influential people or organizations can include:

Journalists who cover your industry
Prominent bloggers who write about your industry
Influencers who have a style or interest that relates to your brand
Celebrities or well-known institutions to act as brand ambassadors
Complementary businesses with an interest in partnerships
Subject matter experts, if you're in a technical field
Bloggers who might want to create content for your site

Benefits of outreach marketing

With outreach marketing, you're creating personalized and targeted messages to send to people and companies to develop collaborative relationships. Here are some benefits of using outreach marketing as part of your overall marketing strategy:

Offers a chance to promote your content

By creating opportunities through outreach marketing, you can promote a company's offerings to a wider audience. Outreach marketing can provide opportunities to involve guest bloggers and subject matter experts in the content you post. This content, which may include blogs or social media posts, offers your audience something they can't find anywhere else, which can improve their opinion of the business and inspire them to learn more about it.

Increases your online presence

Outreach marketing can increase your online presence in a variety of ways. If you're successful in finding collaborators to be content creators or brand ambassadors, these people can make their followers aware of your brand. Even if the people you contact aren't able to collaborate with you at this time, you've made them aware of the business in a positive way that might help with later collaborations. Additionally, any positive impact your outreach marketing has on your content can increase your online presence.

Improves your SEO strategy

Outreach marketing often results in an increase in content for your site and content that links back to your site. Links back to your site improve your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, while new content may contain links to other sites that add credibility to your site or target new keywords. Improving your SEO strategy and ensuring your content appears when potential customers search for relevant keywords can help you market to your target audience.

Creates personalization

Outreach marketing can help provide a personalized approach to your marketing efforts. An audience often feels connected to an influencer, blogger or celebrity, and seeing this person share information about a business may encourage them to seek more information or make a purchase. By curating the people you contact to optimize their relevance to your brand, you're personalizing the experience for customers who encounter the content they create.

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How to perform outreach marketing

Here are the steps you can take to perform outreach marketing effectively:

1. Create a targeted plan

Before you contact those you want to work with, create a targeted plan that establishes an initial list of contacts, goals for the campaign and your ideas for each contact. Define different messages for each contact based on their expertise, audience or style. As part of your plan, outline how you plan to measure the success of your outreach marketing efforts and the methods you plan to use to maintain relationships with potential collaborators.

2. Attract their attention

When you're ready to contact the people or organizations you've identified, you want to make sure you attract their attention. This is especially true when your outreach is happening via email to ensure the recipient reads your message. If you're contacting an individual, research their background, experience or interests to craft a message explaining why your brand might appeal to them. When contacting a company or organization, determine the best person to receive your email, such as a marketing director, to explain your proposal for a partnership.

3. Provide a call to action

In your message to potential collaborators, include a call to action so they understand the next steps. Make your call to action clear and obvious. This may include a link for brand ambassadors to sign up for consideration or a personalized email asking someone to perform a specific action. Whatever your call to action is, make it easy for the person to do.

For instance, if you've emailed an influencer about a potential partnership, explain clearly what they can do next if they want to be involved. This might include writing back to you to arrange for products to be sent to them or filling out a form to request a package of brand information.

4. Show how you can help

One reason outreach marketing is often effective is that the collaboration typically benefits both parties. In your initial contact with a collaborator, explain how the potential partnership can benefit their brand. For instance, if your brand creates a line of book accessories, such as reading lights, it may make sense to partner with a publishing brand. When you contact the publisher, you can discuss how collaborating with your brand could help increase awareness of their books.

5. Ask for feedback

As you build a relationship with the people and organizations you contact, you may find it useful to ask them for feedback. You can ask them to provide feedback on the company's products or their experience working with your brand. Use this feedback to help you make improvements to your marketing content and your outreach marketing efforts. If you've contacted a potential collaborator who declined your request, you may ask them if there are improvements you can make to your content or branding to make them reconsider a partnership.

6. Re-evaluate regularly

As you proceed with your outreach marketing, it's helpful to re-evaluate regularly. This may include evaluating the results of active campaigns or collaborations to consider the natural next steps. As you evaluate, you may consider your current content and identify areas you want to improve upon or grow. This step may also involve identifying new individuals or organizations to contact for collaboration, which may include people you see talking about your brand online as they interact with your current collaborators.

For instance, if you have a partnership with an influencer and they have a friend who's an influencer who commented on one of their posts, it might be useful to contact that person as well. This is especially true if they have a slightly different audience than the original influencer. Partnering with multiple individuals and organizations can help you boost your brand awareness and reach a wider audience.