Outreach Marketing: 6 Bulletproof Strategies & Examples [2024 Guide]

Effective outreach marketing is essential, especially if your brand needs to make the most of collaborative marketing techniques like influencer or partner marketing.

In addition to finding new prospects and generating leads, outreach marketing is how you find and connect with new people, businesses and brands to work with.

But every campaign can be a challenging and massively time-consuming process, especially if you’re doing it all manually or wasting time and resources reaching out to the wrong people, or even to the right people but in the wrong way!

At it’s core, successful outreach marketing is about finding the right people to reach out to, and then reaching out in the right way to form a connection and develop a relationship.

So, how do you do that, exactly? What are different types of outreach marketing and what are the best strategies to use? 

If that sounds a bit daunting, don’t worry!

For this guide, we consulted the experts behind Woodpecker, a top cold email outreach software, so that we can give you the inside scoop on the most effective outreach marketing tactics.

Today we’re covering what outreach marketing is and it’s benefits, the different types of outreach marketing, and the best outreach marketing strategies to use. We also look at some real-life examples and give you some pro tips and hacks from the experts.

Let’s dive right in!

What is Outreach Marketing?

Outreach marketing can be used for various purposes, such as drawing in customers, forming partnerships with other brands or companies, or collaborating with influencers.

These strategies all involve researching which people or companies it would be best to work with; finding where they are; discovering how to connect with them; and finally, getting into contact with them.

Moreover, you must strategically create these marketing campaigns to avoid looking like spam or an illegitimate business.

As such, the expected outcomes of outreach marketing include:

• Increasing brand awareness
• Advertising your goods or services
• Generating leads
• Improving client retention
• Creating brand collaborations and alliances
• Improving SEO (backlink outreach)
• Gathering important data e.g. by using surveys

You can watch this video by Sleeping Giant Media to learn more about what outreach marketing is and how it works.

 

Outreach Marketing Benefits

Outreach marketing offers a huge number of benefits that range from gaining new customers to forming great business or marketing partnerships.  The benefits of outreach marketing that you can expect will depend on the purpose of your outreach campaign, but some of the most common benefits include:

1.Increased Lead Generation

An outreach marketing strategy can drastically increase the number of people your company comes into contact with.

Due to the fact that you’ll be forming partnerships and collaborations with different people and brands, the chance of someone being introduced to your company is significantly higher; and of course, that’s the point.

As a result of these potential customers being further along in the buyer journey, your lead conversion will be higher as these leads are almost guaranteed to be a part of your target demographic already.

2.Boosting Brand Awareness

Similarly to increasing lead generation, outreach marketing has the added benefit of spreading brand awareness and improving brand reputation.

As you’ll be in contact with and collaborating with people and brands in your nitch, getting the word out about your brand will be easier than ever before. The audience that these collaborations bring in will be mutually beneficial and help to make your brand one of the top brands in your space.

And brand awareness is more critical than ever, as 46% of consumers are willing to pay more for well-known brands.

3.Improved Brand Authority

When utilizing everything outreach marketing has to offer, namely collaborations and partnerships, you’ll also be improving your authority within the space.

As you’ll be working with already well-known and established brands and people, they already have a good name. And by associating yourself with them, you’ll be improving your own name and authority. This gives you both more sway and sales conversions as you’ll be more trusted.

3 Types of Outreach Marketing

1. Social Media Outreach

Social media outreach is the process of interacting with and contacting potential customers or partners on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

The purpose of social media outreach is to build real relationships, whether that be with your customers or with influencers and other brands. You don’t want to seem spammy, as that’s bad for your brand reputation, so a careful, well-executed outreach campaign is a must.

2. Email Outreach

Email outreach, or cold emailing, is a powerful tool to get into contact with people you might otherwise never have reached.

As such, by the end of 2024, email marketing revenue is anticipated to be close to $11 billion, demonstrating just how important it really is. So, why not make use of it?

However, cold emailing can be time-consuming both when it comes to crafting and distributing; and you don’t want to spend too much time on it because time is money. But the good news is there are some great cold emailing tools, like Woodpecker, that help automate and streamline the whole cold email outreach process for you!

3. Cold Calling

The cold-calling outreach approach is very similar to that of cold emailing in that you contact prospects that have never expressed interest in your product or service.

If done incorrectly, cold calling can be fruitless. However, if done right, it can be very successful. As a result, making phone calls to new contacts is considered an incredibly effective prospecting method by 27% of sales representatives.

Outreach Marketing Goals

1. Sales

As is to be expected, one of the main goals of outreach marketing is to boost sales. You want to get your brand and product or service in front of as many relevant people as possible.

The more your target audience knows about your brand, the more authority you have, and the higher your chance of making sales becomes.

2. Partnership Marketing

One of the primary goals of reaching out to influencers and other brands is to begin building partnerships. These relationships are mutually beneficial and help both parties to grow brand awareness and or revenue.

Partnership marketing is when your company or brand collaborates with an influencer who has access to your target demographic, or with another brand, either in your nitch or in a nitch you want to tap into.

3. PR Coverage

Your outreach campaigns can aim to gain your company, brand, product, or service PR or press coverage.

This involves creating and maintaining relationships with journalists, bloggers and influencers before pitching them your coverage idea. If successful, this partnership will help you both prove brand awareness and authority and have the added benefit of boosting sales.

4. Link Building

When your outreach strategies are successful, the goal is to build a network of strong links on other websites that funnel people to your landing or product page.

This primarily helps you to increase sales, but it also assists in building a strong brand reputation.

5. Content Marketing Promotion

Your outreach campaigns can allow you to put a content marketing promotions strategy into place. This involves creating relationships with influential people or brands with the eventual goal of getting them to promote your product or service.

6 Bulletproof Outreach Marketing Strategies & Examples

1. Choose the Right Prospects to Reach Out To

The key to good outreach marketing is carefully selecting who you will reach out to. Doing your research to find the best people to connect with, be they prospective customers or potential influencers, is vital.

Without it, you will waste time and money reaching out to people who aren’t interested or aren’t a good match for your brand.

So, who should you be looking for when you’re doing your outreach marketing research?

Broadly, there are four types of people to consider:

• The Mega-influencers and the Well-known Experts in Your Niche: These are the high-profile individuals or companies in your industry or niche. They either have a massive following or incredibly high authority, or both. While these people or businesses might seem like the most valuable ones to connect with, they’re often much harder to reach and require a much higher value offer to get them to bite.
• Macro-Influencers and Somewhat Less Well-known Experts: These are the people with a large following but are not quite the celebrity figures we covered above. Think macro-influencers, independent experts, and people who are respected (if not that well-known) authorities in your niche. You will get the same benefits, but just on a smaller scale. These people are generally a bit easier to contact, even using cold email outreach.
• Micro-influencers and Community Level Experts: These are the up-and-coming influencers and experts who have a substantial following but are still trying to grow their audience and their authority. For outreach marketing, these people are a lot easier to connect with because they deal with far fewer offers and because your offer is likely to be more valuable to them. This is a highly valuable segment for your outreach and should be considered seriously.
• The Budding Micro-influencers and Individual Experts: These are the ones that are just getting started, with a relatively small following and no firmly established authority outside of expertise or qualifications. Connecting with these people is the easiest of all, and they’re likely to be the most receptive to your offers.

No matter who you’re targeting, it’s important to do your research and find the right contact to talk to and do a thorough background check to see if they’re going to be a genuinely good fit for your brand and find real value in what you have to offer.

If you’re using email for your outreach, you will need an awesome subject line and highly personalized email content if you want to stand out from the hundreds of similar emails they get every day.

2. Use Personalization

Personalization is important across all forms of marketing, but when it comes to outreach marketing, it is essential!

According to the outreach experts at Woodpecker, personalization improves email deliverability and open rates. It is also the key to letting the person you’re contacting know that you’re speaking to them personally, and that they’re not a number on your contact sheet.

When people feel like you are addressing them personally, they’re much more likely to listen and respond to your message. This applies to all forms of outreach, from email to social media to cold calling.

Woodpecker recommends that the focal point of your outreach message should be them and their work, not you or your brand. Refer to something they have said or done, and let them know that you genuinely know who they are and what they’re about.

When you pitch your offer, focus on how it will benefit them and their followers. Keeping their audience engaged and providing value to them is their main priority, so make sure you state clearly how your offer will do that.

Writing emails that are this personalized can be a challenging and time-consuming task, but with the right tools, you can automate this process using snippets that you can insert into the body of different emails as and when applicable (see the image above for an example of automated snippets, which are the sections of green text in brackets).

3. The Magic of Social Media for Outreach Marketing

Social media is a very powerful tool when it comes to outreach marketing. It’s a place where your company and brand can humanize themselves and connect on a personal and emotional level with customers.

Post valuable and entertaining content regularly, and remember to keep a consistent and friendly tone when contacting and interacting with future customers. Social media is where your brand identity and voice can really come to the fore, building your brand reputation and making your brand more memorable and relatable.

In terms of outreach, you can use social media to create targeted and personalized ads, or you can contact potential customers directly, make use of word-of-mouth marketing, and promote user-generated content from your followers.

Using social media for outreach marketing is a balance between keeping existing audiences engaged and producing content that attracts new viewers. User-generated content is a great way to do both!

For example, GoPro, a well-known manufacturer of action cameras, posts user-generated content on its popular YouTube account. Videos shot by GoPro users using their dependable, high-quality cameras may be seen in abundance on this channel.

They’re not directly shoving an ad down people’s throats; instead, they’re allowing their product and existing customers to do the selling for them, gaining valuable social proof and improved authority and trust in the process. The open invitation to submit a video to be featured is an attractive offer for content creators who could benefit from being featured on their channel too.

While this is a more passive approach, it also opens up the opportunity to reach out directly to people to tell them about the opportunity and form new connections.

4. Use Automation Tools to Streamline Your Email Outreach Marketing

Sending cold outreach emails can be a time-consuming and monotonous task, but not if you use the right tools to manage your cold email outreach!

The best and easiest way to automate cold emails is to use a tool like Woodpecker. These tools allow you to automate not only the initial emails but to send automatic replies based on specified parameters – thereby assisting you in scaling your email outreach efforts without compromising personalization!

Using a cold email outreach tool can take your email outreach to a new level; from ensuring things like high deliverability rates to advanced automation that allows you to deploy your whole outreach marketing campaign with ease, using the right tool is the way to go.

5. Use Interesting Email Subject Lines and Content

You have a single sentence to grab someone’s attention, so you’ve gotta make it count!

Most marketing emails are marked as spam based only on the subject line, so you need to avoid things like vague information and too many emojis.

On the other hand, what you do want to do is:

• Create a feeling of urgency
• Make it personal
• Offer something valuable to the reader
• Create a sense of curiosity

Of course, you don’t need to fit all these things into the subject line. In fact, you shouldn’t. A subject line should be anywhere between 50 and 60 characters, so keep it short and sweet.

Then, once you’ve snared them, you’ll need them to keep reading, and studies have shown that personalizing an email’s body can increase a client’s response rate by 32.7%. So keep that in mind when creating the body of your cold emails.

For example, FullStory, a web-based digital intelligence system that helps optimize the client experience, sent a cold email to Kyle Racki, the CEO, and co-founder of Proposify:

This email has an interesting and unique subject line, “Magic Goggles”, that grabs the reader’s attention and piques their curiosity. Moreover, the body of the email is personalized to the recipient and doesn’t talk in vague generalizations. Therefore, it’s a really great example of how to do a cold email right.

6.  Use Emojis to Help You Humanize Your Message and Connect With a Younger Audience

These days, emojis in marketing emails and social media posts are no longer considered inappropriate. Due to these communications being conducted through the medium of text, a lot can be lost in translation.

When reading text, you can’t see someone’s facial expression or body language; and at least when on a call, you can hear emotions and tone of voice. So, as a necessity to make messages and meanings more straightforward, emojis have become an invaluable tool.

They also have the advantage of connecting with a younger, more tech-savvy audience.

For example, in 2015, when Chevrolet introduced the new Cruze, the company sent out a press release that was made up of only emojis. The company did this risky and new thing to try to attract younger people:

However, there is a fine line between using emojis to your benefit and getting your message lost entirely. In 2015, it was more of a novelty and people enjoyed ‘deciphering’ the message. These days, a subtler approach is much better!

Here are some ways to use emojis to your benefit in outreach marketing:

• Use emojis in your email subject lines to boost open rates
• Include emojis that will clearly reinforce your point or convey your tone
• Stick to emojis that will work well across devices
• Use a variety of emojis, such as smiley faces, gift boxes, check marks, etc., to liven up plain text (but use them sparingly)

Conclusion

There you have it, everything you need to know about outreach marketing!

After you’ve read this article, you should have a good understanding of what outreach marketing is and why it’s crucial to use. Furthermore, you should now know your goals and understand the different types of outreach and why tools like Woodpecker are so great.

You have everything you need, so what are you waiting for?

References

Fit Small Business: 31 Branding Statistics Every Small Business Should Know

Statista: E-mail marketing revenue worldwide from 2020 to 2027(in billion U.S. dollars)

CRMNext: 17 KEY COLD CALLING STATISTICS

Backlinko: We Analyzed 12 Million Outreach Emails Here’s What We Learned