How we got influencer outreach to work for us
Three years at Hiver has taught me a lot about SaaS marketing. The most important is perhaps the realization that SEO for SaaS is vastly different from that of traditional industries.
SaaS keywords have low buying intent. If your prospects are to convert, you’ll have to nurture them carefully. Unlike traditional businesses that have 1–5 keywords for each product, SaaS products typically have 50–150 keywords. To run PPC campaigns for that number of keywords is not practical.
The bottomline is that the ROI on traditional marketing vehicles is low. How do you compensate for this? Strong organic search engine visibility, and of course, generating word-of-mouth. One channel that fit the bill was influencer outreach. We knew it would help us on both fronts.
Although we were familiar with the concept, the implementation wasn’t as smooth as we thought. It barely fetched us any results in the first few months — only a handful of brand mentions and no major boost to the organic traffic.
What helped us was that we started it on a very small scale; gave us the chance to get a feel of things, understand how the system worked, and optimize it as we went along.
Influencer outreach might sound simple on paper, but it isn’t — not one bit. The worst thing you can do is take influencer outreach lightly. Imagine sending an outreach email like this:
You will end up getting called out by the influencers — significantly damaging your reputation.
The key is to remain patient, be courteous, and not transactional about these relationships. This approach will yield great results over time, making up for all the additional time, resources, and effort you had to put in.
Outreach has certainly helped us widen our reach, establish ourselves in the market, and improve our search visibility. In this article, I’d like to share influencer outreach insights we gained in the last three years.
Read on to find out how we did it and what we learned in the process:
We have sent out a significant number of influencer outreach emails in 2 years. The steps you’ll find below are a culmination of that experience.
1. Identifying your niche
According to ogilvy.com, the many faces of influencers include:
- Journalists
- Academics
- Industry analysts
- Professional advisors
- Celebrities
- Individual brand advocates
This meant we had a lot of people to consider. We started out by contacting a few influential journalists in the technology space.
The results were poor. After a bit of introspection, we realized this required a more targeted approach. We made a list of keywords that are relevant to our business and zeroed-in on influencers who created or shared content around them.
As Hiver is a Gmail addon that helps teams manage and collaborate over emails, some of the keywords we targeted were collaboration tools, email management tools, productivity tools, productivity hacks, Gmail Plugin, Chrome extension, and so on.
For content discovery, we used tools such as EpicBeat, FlipBoard, DrumUp, Scoop.it, BuzzSumo, etc. Here is a list of more content discovery tools.
2. Rapport Building
This is perhaps the most important step of the process. Sending email pitches to influencers out of the blue doesn’t work anymore. Most influencers get about 10–20 pitches every day; it is easy for your emails to get lost or ignored.
We quickly learned that it is always better to establish a rapport with the influencer before pitching them. For this, we framed a step-by-step approach where we made use of platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, and the comments section of the influencer’s blog.
Here’s how we went about it:
- Share their content on our social network profile
- Post an informed comment on their blog
- Learn from their content, implement the tips they offered, and share the results with them
- Sign-up for the blogger’s email list
- Engage with them on Twitter/LinkedIn/Google Plus.
- Send the outreach email
To take this up a notch, you can also review their podcast on iTunes or their ebook on Amazon.
It might seem like a long drawn process, but is worth every bit of it:
a) The knowledge we had about the influencer made it easier to draft an email that won’t be ignored.
b) As the influencer is already familiar with us, they were more likely to read and respond to our emails.
We always made sure to approach these influencers from our personal social media profiles and email accounts. It gave the whole process a personal touch and made it look less spammy.
3. The Email
This is where we drove it home and got that brand mention or review. My advice to you would be that don’t copy random outreach email templates.
We always wrote really personalized emails. There was also a conscious decision to send the emails only after we built a rapport with the influencer.
As for the email body, we followed a 10–80–10 rule. We personalized the first few lines by talking about an article they published recently, the good work their organization is doing, or by referencing a Twitter exchange we had earlier.
Then comes the template — the portion of the email that talks about our product.
The last couple of lines is our pitch or what we want from them and what’s in it for them. Every pitch will vary according to the influencer’s profile.
We also made it a practice to mention the name of the influencer in the subject line. It is a great way to catch their attention and get the email opened in the first place!
Whom do we pitch (plus a few examples)
Example 1: Journalists and Tech Writers
In the case of tech journalists or reviewers — the aim is to get a review, or a mention, or a story on a product feature.
Example 2: Industry Blogger
If the influencer writes about products or services from our niche, we ask them to check out our product and consider adding it to an existing article or mentioning it in one of their future articles.
Example 3: Roundup-Meisters and Podcasters
If the influencer regularly does interviews, podcasts, round-ups or webinars on their blog — we let them know we are interested in participating. In addition to getting brand mentions, it is a great way to establish yourself as a thought leader or a subject matter expert.
Wrapping up
Influencer outreach has fetched us great results both in terms of search ranking rankings and traffic. We managed to get mentions on major websites like Lifehacker, Inc, Business Insider, Small Business Trends, and so on. Along with additional traffic, it has helped improve our domain authority significantly.
More than promoting your product, influencer outreach is about building lasting relationships. That’s how you get it to work for you. On the whole, it requires a long-term mindset.
