Chapter 13. Influencer Outreach
You can’t do social media alone. We’ve well-established the fact that you need to engage with your customers and followers. There’s another kind of audience to reach, though—one that can provide a huge advantage: influencers. In SEO, they are referred to as the linkerati. The linkerati are social media mavens who command gigantic audiences and determine the virality of other people’s content. If these people link to your site, you’re going to get a lot of attention from humans and search engines alike. So you’re going to want as many influencers to say as many nice things in as many places as possible as often as possible. Not only does this lead to more sales, it also increases your social media following and improves your SEO.
Back in Chapter 2 we described content marketing—an article or video that is designed to be popular and spread through social media like an aggressive virus through a willing host. You can create the best content piece in the world, but it won’t go far on social media unless an influencer takes an interest in it.
Not only does social media provide another venue for searching, it also serves as an invaluable tool for acquiring links. Specifically, social media provides a venue to virally spread your content piece. One good article can put you at the top of Google search results, saving you a ton of money in PPC ad costs.
Of the three pillars of SEO—content, architecture, and links—it’s the links pillar that’s usually the weakest. Looking at sites individually, formulating your approach, sending personalized emails, picking up the phone to speak to webmasters—it’s a hard slog. Yet without high-quality, relevant links, you won’t be able to earn the trust, authority, and importance required to rank, and your optimization efforts will fall short.
Content marketing by itself isn’t sufficient. You need to seed this content piece into social media and social news sites such as reddit and StumbleUpon, using power user accounts within those communities. In other words, you need to be (or be in good with) a social media insider who has wide-reaching influence within that site’s social community. Without a bevy of friends, followers, and fans, it’s much harder to reach critical mass quickly enough. That’s because the algorithms that determine what’s new and hot within social news/bookmarking sites take into account the timespan within which the positive votes are acquired: 50 reddit upvotes in 10 minutes is entirely different than 50 upvotes over the course of a year.
The secret formula really is a formula. Think of it as an assembly-line process: viral ideas are generated, the chosen ideas are researched and written up as articles (or produced as videos), and then they are published to your website or social network page. Next, the articles are seeded into appropriate social sites by influencers within those sites’ communities. The point is to reach the journalists or bloggers who will write about and link to your viral content.
Social news power users spend day and night monitoring various oddball news RSS feeds and other social sites for content. Once they find something, they quickly submit the URL along with a killer title and description before anyone else. This is how users move up in the pecking order within these social sites. The more stories they can get to the front page, the higher their status. If you’re not a power user, you’re nobody; your submissions have a very low probability of making the front page. On the other end of the spectrum, nearly everything that a top-ranked user touches turns to gold; it’s not atypical for the majority of a top user’s submissions to hit the site’s home page.
Before you continue reading up on influencer outreach strategy, you must understand that this is a process that can succeed only if you already have an established following. You must have a social media presence, you must understand your marketing strategy, and you must have a decent-size audience. Without a solid social media foundation, it’s going to be very hard to get the attention of major influencers.
We wish we could say, “this is a quick and easy process,” but it isn’t. It’s going to take weeks or months to reach powerful influencers, but it’ll be well worth the effort.
Nearly everything in this chapter is part or all of a process that journalists use to contact sources for news articles. Nothing here is underhanded or even particularly secret.
Build an Initial List
If you’re active in social media, or if you are socially active in your industry, you should already have a good idea of who the big names are—the people who speak at conferences, the people with huge Twitter followings, the people who everyone circles on Google+. Start making a list of influencers, and use the names you already know as initial items.
Maybe you’re just getting started in social media, or you’re running a local business and don’t go to a lot of conferences. In this case, you’re going to have to identify influencers and begin following and interacting with them through social media. For instance, if you own a restaurant, follow all of the Food Network personalities like Rachael Ray and Bobby Flay, and other celebrity chefs and related public personalities like Martha Stewart.
Fiction book list building can be difficult at first. If you’re writing a science fiction novel, you could follow other science fiction authors, editors, agents, and publishers that publish science fiction. It would also be useful, though, to find news sources that report on topics like science, space exploration, medicine, and other topics that could be related to what you’re writing about.
It’s going to take several hours over the course of a few weeks to build a solid list. And by list, we mean the people you’re following/friending/circling. Every major social network has a way of showing who you’re connected to from your side; that’s your list. Or, rather, over several networks there are several lists, but we refer to them as a single entity here for the sake of simplicity.
This list is going to be broad; it’s going to cover an appropriately wide range of topics and people. At this point, don’t pare down the list at all—make it bigger. Expand out as much as possible. Follow anyone and anything that might be related.
You should also expand out beyond social media a little. If you identify some extremely high-value influencers, subscribe to their blogs, RSS feeds, newsletters, and podcasts. You are not doing this so much to learn from these people (though there’s almost certainly something to learn from them, no matter how much of a guru you are) as you are to get to know them better. Only after you know them are you prepared to interact with them positively.
Begin Interacting
As just mentioned, once you get to know some of the people you’re following, you can begin interacting with them. If they ask a question, send them @ replies. If they post a link to something, comment on it. Retweet or reshare their posts. On Facebook or Google+, post thoughtful comments or links to stories with more information. Repin, tweet (with an @ mention), and comment on their Pinterest photos.
Don’t ask them to link to you or repost your content at this point. Later on, you’re going to contact these people directly and ask them to help share your content or write a review, but you’re likely to fail if you make your request too early. You will have a much higher success rate if you’re already somewhat familiar to them through social media. The whole point of this process up until now is not strictly “greater influence with the influencers,” though that is one of the goals. The point is also to raise your own profile and build your own audience to the point that you are no longer a nobody on social media; you become a budding influencer yourself, which has the added benefit of making it easier to reach your customers and prospects.
Refine the List
By this point, you should either have a solid following, or you should be steadily building it and your target number should be in sight. While you’re engaging your followers, begin to whittle down your initial list of influencers by using reliable metrics. How popular are their blogs and other domains? How much reach do they have beyond their social media followers and fans?
Instead of answering that question on your own, you may want to use a tool like Kred (kred.com), shown in Figure 13-1.
Also useful is Klout (klout.com), which creates a composite Klout Score that shows your own influence (the more influential you are, the better your chances of getting the attention of a more powerful influencer), shown in Figure 13-2.
Some other tools that you may find valuable for the purpose of gauging blogger’s authority based on their proprietary metrics (which we have noted):
- Open Site Explorer
- Measures mozRank and mozTrust
- MajesticSEO
- Measures TrustFlow and CitationFlow
- LinkResearchTools
- Measures Power*Trust
- Followerwonk
- Measure influence
All of these tools have their own algorithms to measure importance/authority/trust. Depending on your industry, product, and/or content, any of these tools may be more valuable than the others. It’s important to note that Open Site Explorer, MajesticSEO, and LinkResearchTools analyze websites and web pages, not individuals.
Ultimately, though, this is not a numbers game; it’s a quality game. If someone were to theoretically only have a dozen followers, but everything he posts goes massively viral, then despite the numbers he is a highly valuable influencer. That would be an unusual situation, but it’s possible. There are some people who are on only one or two major social networks, such as YouTube or Google+; these people can be deceptively influential.
It’s also not a numbers game in terms of how many influencers you must contact. Half a dozen really influential bloggers are more powerful than a thousand small-time bloggers.
Contact the Influencers
Cold calls are always difficult, even when they’re emails. You want something, and you’re contacting someone who is in a position of power and asking her to give it to you. This is not a role that anyone enjoys being in, but the most successful salespeople and marketers put that aside and master the art of initial contact. Think about how much you want social media success (or the business success that is on the other side of social media success). What are you willing to do to achieve that?
All you need to do initially is get your foot in the door with one good, solid influential mention on social media. Then you’ll use that first big mention to get the attention of other influencers. Even among the top people on social media, everyone wants to be in with the cool kids. That first mention becomes the best method of obtaining mentions from others, so invest big in your first major influencer outreach effort. From that point forward, it gets easier.
Before you start sending emails, give serious thought to where you want to claim to be mentioned. On Twitter? On a famous blog? On Facebook? The social network or site where you want to be mentioned will help you narrow down your choices and customize your outreach message.
Pinterest Group Boards
If you are an active and established Pinterest user, you can use group boards to your advantage in contacting and participating with Pinterest influencers.
You can invite a mutual Pinterest follower (someone whom you follow, who also follows you) to be a contributor to one of your boards. This creates a group board. You will always be the administrator of that board, but you can add as many mutual followers as you like. By the same logic, one of your mutual followers can invite you to pin to one of his group boards.
If you can find a way to get a Pinterest power user to participate in one of your group boards, you could inherit a lot of his followers as a result. Similarly, participating in the same group board as an influencer gives you much more trusted and intimate access to him, and a much higher chance of getting a review, repin, or mention from him.
The Twitter Warmup
Why bother with a cold call when you can get more success with a warmup? Even if you’re not targeting Twitter, if the influencer you’re going after is active there, you’ve got to engage her there. High-value targets are almost certain to ignore a cold email, and will require a warmup on Twitter. If you make this effort to engage her with meaningful comments and retweets, it’ll help her become more comfortable and familiar with you.
Tweet @ people. When the influencers you’re watching say something that you can respond intelligently to, reply to them positively. Answer their questions. You can also thank people publicly for recommending something.
Watch their Twitter feed for a while so that you can be sure that they really are as wonderful and interesting as you think they are, and that you like what they’re saying. You may discover that while someone seems to be influential, she mostly posts negative things about companies and products; that outreach effort could be a disaster for you.
Don’t hide behind a brand account; use your full name (your personal account). Or, if you intend to have more than one person represent you on Twitter, you might create a public persona who virtually represents your company. This name will be your public face, and will get all the credit for your posts. It’s not a good idea for an employee (or even a partner or cofounder) to use a personal account for Twitter outreach because if/when that person leaves your company, he’ll take all of his Twitter followers with him and probably delete all of his tweets. All of the work that you’ve done to build up your outreach engine will be destroyed, or at least at the mercy of someone else. If you’re going to create a persona, make it a woman; women (or female names, at least) have a much higher response rate in outreach email.
The Twitter warmup is not a one-time event; it is an ongoing effort that will take weeks to complete.
After you’ve successfully warmed up your target, you can ask for a link to your site or page via Twitter, but contacting her by private email is better.
Getting Contact Information
Certainly, if you can get someone’s phone number and you’re fairly certain he’d be receptive to a quick phone conversation, then give him a call and follow up at an appropriate time with an email.
Some people are more inclined to respond on-network (a message sent on the social network they participate in), and some are more receptive to email. Usually, email is better because it’s more personal and is more easily noticed. Some influencers are so popular that they don’t check their in-network messages at all—they get inundated with notifications and frequent messages from raving fans—but they almost certainly do check their email.
Getting someone’s email address can be tough and time-consuming. If you find yourself spending an unreasonable amount of effort trying to get the email address of someone who has taken great pains to hide it from the public, then fall back to tweeting @ him on Twitter.
First, try looking on the influencer’s blog or corporate site for an email address. Maybe it’s in an obvious spot.
Do you have his business card from an in-person meeting at a conference or event? People usually put their email address on their business card.
Does his blog or corporate site have a Contact Us page? That goes to someone’s email—if not your target influencer, then probably his assistant.
If you add someone on LinkedIn, you can get his email from there. The reply to the invitation comes from his email address. You can also send InMail.
As a last resort, do a whois lookup on the influencer’s blog domain name (assuming it is a real domain name and not a subdomain on a public blogging site like Typepad, WordPress, Tumblr, or Blogger). Every domain has contact information for the domain owner; hopefully that will include the email address of the person you’re trying to reach.
Paying for Reviews?
If you are trying to reach a product reviewer, be warned: some high-level reviewers may ask you for money in exchange for a review. Among journalists this is highly unethical, but bloggers and social media power users don’t always fall into the “journalism” category. In the United States, anyone who posts a product review, whether she considers herself a professional reviewer or not, must disclose the fact that she received compensation (including a free product) for it. This is an FTC regulation; you can read about it at the FTC website.
The FTC puts the responsibility for disclosure on the brand, not the publisher. That means you. So if you send a check with your review materials, or if you tell a blogger or journalist to go ahead and keep the review unit you’re sending, you must check back and make sure that she has clearly printed an appropriate disclosure notice. This even applies to endorsements on Twitter.
Warning
The preceding paragraphs contain really important legal liability information about product reviews. Don’t skip this stuff. Read it twice. We don’t want you to get in trouble with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.
Also, the following paragraphs contain really important information about following rules set by the world’s largest search engine. It would be very bad if it decided to blacklist you, so please don’t skip what’s written next either.
Paying for reviews, or giving free products to reviewers or influencers, is an ethical grey area at best. Usually it’s all right with disclosure if it’s posted to someone’s blog or social media page, but it could reflect badly on you depending on context. In some instances it is definitely unethical—for instance, book reviews or any product review on Amazon.com that is done on a for-hire basis is against Amazon’s rules. Google also frowns upon paid links, so if you are paying a blogger for a review that includes a link back to your site or product page, that is technically in violation of Google’s rules unless the nofollow attribute is applied to the link in the HTML.
Some social media power users offer expanded services for hire. For instance, a popular Pinterest user might solicit money to do a photo shoot with an in-depth review or interview. Food bloggers might offer to publish a recipe and high-quality photos and a review of the resulting product. This is not prohibited by Pinterest, but if you take this route, make sure any links are nofollowed and proper disclosure is printed.
Creating Templates
First, you need good unique content. A lot of social media gurus will tell you that you should try to build followers by linking to interesting stories. That will get you a small amount of success. If you want major success, though, you’ve got to be the source of interesting information, not just someone who links to it first.
Start with a pool of unpublished articles that can be customized somewhat. They should be mostly or completely written, but don’t tell anyone about that. The point of your influencer outreach email is to ask for help or input on an article you’re currently writing. You will, of course, quote or cite the influencer as a source. Quoting experts for articles is the best way to get them to link to you or mention you on social media.
The article you’re customizing should be relevant to a topic that the influencer covers or is interested in. Don’t publish it more than once; don’t try to repurpose a published article unless it is more than three years old and can be rearranged and re-edited to be modern and relevant.
Don’t mass-mail your target influencers. Personalization is hugely important. The message must be personalized. Absolutely do not send a generic message that starts with something like “Hello, fellow blogger.”
Not only are impersonal messages likely to be ignored, they’re also likely to be caught in a spam filter. The same message sent to many addresses on the same network (such as Gmail or Yahoo Mail) can be flagged as spam by the system. Not only will you have completely wasted your time, you’ll also have associated your email address with spam. Your whole domain could get blocked.
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have a standard message template that you start with. It does mean that the template must be customized significantly. To do that, read the influencer’s blog and social profiles; write as if you are familiar with him. Since you’ve been following him and attempting to engage publicly with him for a while, most of this work should be done.
The template should not be long—fewer than 300 words or so. Busy people don’t have time to read long messages from strangers.
Initial outreach
Make the influencer understand that you took the time to read his work; express genuine interest in him. Mention something he did in the subject line: “Just saw your <title of last blog post>”—that will get him to open the email. You can also try mentioning his name in the subject line, or using an actionable phrase like “Need your decision,” “Need your feedback,” “Can I quote you for this article?”, or “One minute to read this upcoming article?”
For the message body, don’t talk about yourself or your background too much. When you talk about yourself to a busy stranger, that’s boring and skippable. Establish yourself in one sentence. If you referenced something he did recently, follow up that reference in the message body. Or talk about something else he’s done recently and how it affected you. Talk more about him than yourself.
If you’re writing to someone who consistently uses an online handle or persona, then go ahead and address him by his blog handle or persona first. If there’s no response to the first outreach, make note of that and use his real name in the follow-up email. Most people use their real names today, but in the old days handles were more popular. People want the credit; they want to be more transparent about who they are.
Close with a request for a reply. You want to encourage more dialogue. Don’t ask for more than that, though—never ask directly for something of value in an outreach email, such as a link or a review. Compliment or comment; ask a question or ask for advice, and ask for a reply or feedback; establish friendly contact; and then work from there.
The time at which you send your message can make a big difference. Each industry has different prime days and times. Look at the posting schedule if you can, and try to figure out the editorial calendar as well (if it’s a big blog, the blogger probably plans out certain themes for content on certain days or during certain months). If it’s a tech blog and you know that the blogger publishes three stories a week, try to get him the day before a story publishes (or the day after), but not on the day. Most of the responses you’re going to get are early or late, when people check email. Very busy people typically check email on a schedule.
Many spammers send their email late at night, so try to be off-schedule from that. Send your email during the day in the afternoon to avoid the spam rush, but before the last email check of the workday in your influencer’s time zone.
Follow-up
If you haven’t heard back from your first outreach within three days, then you should send a follow-up. Following up is more crucial than many people realize. Michael Geneles, cofounder of outreach tool Pitchbox, asserts that following up increases your response rate by 60%. You should have a separate template for follow-up emails; don’t send the same message you sent before.
It rarely pays to go beyond two follow-ups—don’t send more than three emails to someone who isn’t responding to you. If someone doesn’t reply after the third attempt, there is a very low chance of a reply, and you’re better off spending that effort on the next influencer on your list.
Before sending your first follow-ups, get reinvolved on Twitter to make sure you’ve got a solid connection.
Third attempt
If your first two emails didn’t get responses, then the third probably isn’t going to work, either. You’re going to have to take a different approach with your third attempt. Is there a different email address for this influencer? Some people list a Gmail account as a technical contact or as part of a regular Google account, but they rarely check it. Look for an alternate email address for this person, and explain that you’re trying to get in touch and wondering if you’ve got the right address.
You can also try to use in-network messaging through Facebook, LinkedIn, or other social networks in which this influencer participates. If you do this, come up with completely different content for your email; mention that you’ve tried to reach out and haven’t gotten through, note that you love his work and want his advice on something, and ask for a reply.
Tracking Responses
The only way to improve is to measure. Keep metrics on what gets through and what doesn’t. If a particular template or a particular kind of influencer is not working out, then change your strategy.
Was the response favorable? Was there a response at all? How often does the first follow-up work? The second? You may want to make a quick spreadsheet to keep track of this data.
Automating Outreach
Many of the techniques previously mentioned can be automated, or at least partially automated, to help save you time. As noted, it’s never wise to fully automate your outreach, especially where you are reaching out to top influencers. There are, however, tools, systems, and techniques you can use to at least partially automate the outreach, responses, and tracking involved in reaching out to influencers, such as Pitchbox. A number of advanced techniques for outreach automation are laid out in an article by one of our authors, Stephan Spencer, called “Scaling & Systematizing Your Link Building”. While the article speaks specifically to building links, the techniques are equally applicable to reaching out to influencers in the social media world. As the final sentence of that article states: “Of course no tool, no matter how awesome, will ever eliminate the need for creativity in the creation of viral content, but with some systems and workflow in place, you will be able to achieve scale with your outreach in ways you never thought possible.”
Offering Giveaways
If you’re selling a product or service and hope to get a review from an influencer, you should consider arranging a giveaway as part of that effort. Regular product reviews are helpful, but in the grand scheme of things they aren’t usually a major influence on sales. One thing you can do to easily enhance the impact of a product review is to add a giveaway. Not only does this encourage engagement with and sharing of the review, it also helps your influencer look good because she’s enabling her readers/followers to get free stuff.
There are many ways to offer giveaways—social media apps, websites, desktop software programs, and the capabilities built into sites like Goodreads and LibraryThing. One site that we find particularly effective across multiple media and sites is Rafflecopter. Configure a giveaway that will launch with the review, and pitch it to your target influencers as an exclusive extra bonus that you’re offering for their readers. You can create a different giveaway campaign for each influencer, if necessary. Don’t forget to ask for reviews and social media mentions from all of the giveaway winners!
Using Other Approaches
If you totally strike out despite your best efforts, then try a more indirect approach. Try to get through to the people who your target influencer follows. These are her friends and close colleagues, and people she admires. Likewise, if you do manage to get a positive reply, ask the influencer who else she knows who could contribute to the article or provide a quote. Oftentimes you’ll get names, phone numbers, and email addresses of other influencers—and with a personal referral!
Nothing establishes initial contact like actual in-person communication. Go to industry conferences and meet your influencers in person. Have coffee with them. If they are not accessible in person, then build relationships with their friends; they will become your references. Take a long-term strategy. Or play golf with them—or whatever social activity is appropriate to the industry.
Watch for Mentions and Links
If you were successful in getting a positive response, then keep a close eye on the networks that you’re targeting. Watch for links and mentions that involve you or your company. This might not happen immediately. Often an article costs you a lot of money or time, so don’t wait too long to see if it gets published or mentioned. If you get an agreement, follow up after a week and see if there’s anything else you need to provide. If you don’t get a publication date, ask nicely for one.
Twitter is the hub for monitoring what’s new on the Internet, so that should be your place to watch for mentions. It may not come in the form of a hashtag or an @, so watch your target influencer’s feed closely. Social media monitoring will be infinitely easier if you use one of the many social listening tools out there, such as Trackur or Radian6.
Tread Carefully on reddit
reddit seems like a gold mine for outreach because whatever becomes popular there will be popular everywhere else. All you need is upvotes, and you’ve got it made, right? Wrong. While it may be OK to solicit follows and friend requests on other sites, soliciting upvotes on reddit is a good way to get yourself downvoted, attacked, and blacklisted.
reddit is quirky and aggressive. Outreach to influencers on reddit (moderators, top posters, top commenters, people with a lot of karma points) will likely prove more harmful than valuable. Anyone soliciting reddit interaction via upvotes or submissions is almost always seen as a spammer, and treated harshly.
Every once in a while, a reddit influencer (typically a moderator of a significant subreddit) is publicly exposed (and humiliated) as being corrupt or as a shill for some site or company. As a result, it’s difficult to appeal to reddit influencers without looking like a selfish spammer. There is no reliable strategy for influencing reddit moderators or power users. All you can and should do on reddit is try to participate normally and submit your viral content along with a lot of other people’s great content to the correct subreddits without the appearance of self-promotion.
Establish Yourself on Google+
Google+ can be a good platform for outreach, but it requires a lot of work. While it is growing rapidly, it’s still tech-heavy. So if you’re doing outreach for clothing, it could possibly be worth it to get established there and connected to influencers in that industry who are there, but right now that effort will probably be better spent on Facebook or Twitter.
However, Google is forcing Google Account logins for everything it does now, so you’re probably already using Google+ without knowing it. It’s worth it to set up a presence there and circle your influencers. If they seem to be in a ton of circles and have a lot of engagement, then give it a shot and track your progress.
A prominent etailer who wishes to remain nameless wanted to generate critical mass for a content marketing campaign. The company sells premier designer swimwear brands and styles, many of which have been featured on celebrities and in leading fashion magazines. Since the company’s launch in 2000, it has established itself as the go-to place for fashion-forward swimwear.
It was successful enough that it reached the limits of what traditional ecommerce techniques, such as email campaigns and banner ads, could provide. At the same time, the influence of traditional media was declining and consumers increasingly began to rely on social media for information and trustworthy recommendations. The company decided that social media was a must-have marketing channel, for several reasons:
- Increasingly, it’s where consumers were going to find out what’s new and what to buy.
- Content on social media sites could help build credibility and loyalty. People choose which brands they want to follow, and trust the brands they choose.
- Relationships with authoritative brands would drive traffic to the company’s own website, boost its domain authority, and improve its search engine rankings.
- Exposure via social media could help offset shrinking publicity opportunities in traditional media. With declines in advertising revenues, the company was finding fewer traditional media outlets and the outlets that remained had less editorial space than before. And with fewer opportunities, the competition for placements had intensified.
The Initial Content Marketing Strategy
The company’s social media strategy was to offer high-quality content to influential bloggers and independent media outlets. It quickly realized that traditional marketing/public relations techniques were entirely unsuited to this new channel, which left it with no established tools to use or methodology to follow.
The world of independent media is a classic long-tail market; instead of a few key influencers with wide reach, it contains vast numbers of outlets. There are a handful with huge audiences, and many more with fewer but highly loyal followers. Because this world is fundamentally based on social relationships, the company couldn’t simply blast out one-size-fits-all content to everyone. It had to cultivate relationships and develop trust with influencers, and create content that was unique and tailored to each opportunity. The company started with a seat-of-the-pants approach: come up with content ideas, Google search to find some blogs that look good, poke around on the sites to find contact info, send emails pitching the ideas, and see what came back.
That approach seemed to work at first, but once the company tried to scale up past the first 15 or 20 opportunities, the process quickly became impossible to manage. Hundreds of responses to its outreach were coming in, often days or weeks after the initial email had been sent, and many arrived from email addresses different from the one the company had originally sent the message to. When it ran new searches to identify more placement opportunities, the problems compounded; someone had to check these leads against ones already in the pipeline to be sure they didn’t overlap. With all of these administrative challenges, the campaign wasn’t scalable. It wasn’t a question of how many opportunities were out there, it was a question of how many opportunities the company could manage. It was putting in more and more effort, and costs were rising, but results weren’t following.
Cutting back wasn’t an option because independent media campaigns must reach critical mass to be successful. A mention here or there doesn’t create momentum. The buzz starts when consumers—and influencers—start seeing your name pop up everywhere.
Stopgap Measures
Next, the company tried setting up Excel spreadsheets that contained lists of contacts and related information, such as the initial and last contact date for each. Even with this higher level of organization, it still took a lot of time to manage these spreadsheets—time that would have been better spent cultivating relationships, pitching ideas, and creating content. As time went on, the pipeline began to clog. Opportunities stalled, and in each case the company had to go back and figure out why. Was the ball in the company’s court, or the influencer’s? Did the contact owe the company feedback? Had the contact gone dark and nobody had noticed? Soon, the company found itself creating more spreadsheets and other ad hoc systems to try to keep up with these issues.
A CRM (customer relationship management) system seemed like the next reasonable step. The company looked at several, but the logic and the language were a poor fit because CRMs are set up for sales, not for media outreach. For example, most are built around deals—how much a sale is worth, how far along it is, who the decision makers are, and so on. That logic doesn’t work for a media campaign. Similarly, CRMs didn’t have metrics for social media, such as Klout scores or domain authority, or a good way to track and report results.
Automating the Outreach Campaign
In 2013, the company became a beta tester for a new prospecting and relationship-building platform, Pitchbox, that automated most of these administrative tasks (Figure 13-3). What appealed to the company was that Pitchbox wasn’t just a repurposed CRM. It was built specifically around the tasks involved in social media outreach. For example, it starts with a search function that looks for new opportunities on a scheduled basis, and then strips out contacts that are already in the pipeline. It ranks the opportunities by influence—using criteria that the user can define—which helps the company prioritize its efforts. It automatically identifies contact info and allows the company to reach out individually (for the most important contacts) or using templates to scale. Then it follows each opportunity through the entire pipeline—from initial contact through placement. Along the way, it flags stalled opportunities, shows where the campaign stands overall, and guides the user to the next step.
The automation of these administrative tasks revolutionized the company’s outreach efforts. Using the same resources as before, the company saw placements go from approximately 10 per month to 50 per month. Administrative tasks were no longer throttling the campaign, and the amount of time spent on these tasks declined from approximately 75% of total hours to 15%. That freed up time for staff to spend on high-value activities: cultivating relationships, coming up with ideas, and creating content. In addition, the retailer was better able to forecast results, allocate resources, and hit goals. For example, it can look ahead and see how many placement opportunities it is likely to have in upcoming months, so it can allocate resources to create the content needed to fulfill those opportunities. Or if the company sees that it needs more opportunities in the pipeline to meet its goals, it can deploy more resources toward outreach instead of content creation.
Achieving Critical Mass
Automation is critical to any long-tail business because long-tail markets have too many events happening to manage individually. The same principle holds for social media campaigns. They need to scale—reaching hundreds or thousands of influencers in a highly fragmented market—in order to reach critical mass. And to be scalable, they need tools and techniques to help manage these events. Enter, Pitchbox.
Summary
If you’re just starting out in social media from a commercial perspective, it can feel a lot like you’re at the foot of Mt. Everest with no guide or equipment. If you want to climb that mountain, you have to be a positive contributor at base camp; you have to make friends with the experienced guides and knowledgeable climbers; you have to pull apart the term social network and be social and network with those above you in the hierarchy.
Influencers are people who spend a lot of time, personally and professionally, on social networks. If you’re a successful entrepreneur, then you don’t have time to be an influencer yourself, but you should always make time to try to build a relationship with one. Don’t think of this as one-sided; you are providing something valuable, and so is the influencer. Your goal is to align interests.
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