6 Reasons Why Blogger Outreach is Key to a Successful Startup Business

Blogger outreach

Working with bloggers has quickly become an effective marketing tactic for small and large businesses alike. Consumers are becoming more review-driven. They trust the opinions of family and friends, and then bloggers, before making purchase decisions.

For startups, blogger outreach can provide the much-needed boost to your visibility and credibility. As powerful as word-of-mouth, blogs provide an avenue for promoting your brand through quality content.

Potential customers are more likely to trust your brand when someone they already trust refers it. So incorporating blogger outreach in your marketing arsenal powers the growth of your business for the long term if you think about it from that perspective.

Aside from that, here are 10 other reasons why blogger outreach is key to your successful startup business.

1. Cost-effective

Blogger outreach does not require a large budget which makes it effective for startups. There are cost-effective ways to work with bloggers, and some do not cost anything but your time and patience in building authentic relationships.

Remember that not all bloggers take sponsored or paid posts, but they would want something worthwhile to share. Whether you compensate the bloggers financially or in-kind, it’s important to recognize their hard work to maintain the loyalty of their audience.

Find something that you can do to provide value. For startups that are on a tight budget, try to negotiate. Offer other skills that you may have such as video production, editing, or publishing.

If you decide to pay the blogger, you need to set a realistic promotional budget for each blog post. Best to ask bloggers how much they charge for features, product reviews, sponsored posts, competitions, etc. This will give you an idea of their preferences. Depending on your budget, you can contact these bloggers again for other campaigns.

2. Improves trust and credibility

As a startup, building trust of potential customers is one of the things that you need to pay more attention to. It is a crucial deciding factor whether you are going to sustain your business or not.

Bloggers are respected and trusted by their communities, more so than traditional advertising media. So when high-authority blogs promote your content on their website, it signals that your brand can be trusted.

Blogs drive purchase intent
photo credit: Neil Patel

By reaching out to influencers in your target market, credibility can be achieved. With credibility and trust, you build a loyal following, thus resulting in more sales and conversion.

3. Provides better brand visibility

Creating a strong market presence takes time. But blogger outreach helps you gain traction within a much shorter period and promote your brand to a larger audience at the same time.

Reliable and high-authority blogs make their audience loyal to them forever. If the audience likes the blog content, they’ll share it with their family and friends. This leads to increased social signals that help create strong brand recognition for your business.

Don’t underestimate the power of micro influencers. They may not have millions of followers, but they have the ability to drive a more meaningful ROI because of a more engaged and loyal audience.

Why micro-influencer
photo credit: Mavrck.co

4. Greater targeted reach than traditional ads

One of the aspects where blogger outreach stand out is its ability to connect you with your target audience.

Finding niche bloggers who are genuinely interested in what you offer can help you reach and influence potential customers. Since niche bloggers are already publishing related articles, it is easier to position your brand with your specific audience.

Niche customers also love to share their passion with the people in their community, so this as an opportunity to grow your audience through social proof.

5. Boosts your SEO

When you promote your content on blogs that are already ranking well on Google, it creates a high-quality backlink that signals to Google you are a trusted and reliable source.

The more quality backlinks you get from trusted and high-authority sites, the better your site ranks on SERPs.

One link-building technique that you may find effective is to get customers to link to your site. Ask your partner bloggers if they can also include a link in their post that directs potential customers to your site’s intake form, where they can leave their website URL (if they have a site).

Track these customers. Create a separate email list for those with a website and send them links to your most valuable content, useful infographics, or free stuff. Let them know they are free to share or use the links in their posts. The more valuable the content you share, the more likely they are to include it on their website.

Outreach list
photo credit: Mttr.io

6. Provides a measurable ROI

The KPIs (key performance indicators) for blogger outreach are almost the same to other digital marketing campaigns. That includes web traffic, impressions, reach, engagement, and amplification.

Focus on what you can measure. Track blog posts, comments, and likes, etc. to see how well your campaign is doing. Better yet, provide bloggers with a link that can be traced back to your website to see how many people visited your site from a specific blogger.

Here are some tips on how you can set a data-driven approach for measuring success of your outreach activities:

  • Determine your goals. If it is lead generation, find out how you can measure that as opposed to traffic, clicks, or social media shares.
  • Build a landing page to link back to that will draw in those leads.
  • For brand awareness, try tracking social metrics.
  • For gaining new customers, use Google Analytics to keep track of all new visitors from a particular guest article.
  • Compare your totals based on your goals. Analyze each blog and each tactic, and then look at the results it generated. See if the total amount of shares, leads, clicks is improving as you establish more guest posts and relationships.

Conclusion

Establishing mutually beneficial relationships with influential bloggers can help increase awareness and credibility for your startup regardless of your budget. So think beyond just giving out products to review. Focus on building genuine relationships.

Determining  your passion and expertise, and aligning it with the blog’s content, provides a unique user experience that builds a lasting connection — both to the blogger and to your audience.