Outreach Campaigns for Link Building Process – How to Plan and Accomplish

Planning and utilizing outreach campaigns is an important aspect of a successful link-building campaign. This blog will explore the importance of outreach campaigns for a successful business, and how these efforts can be optimized best to reach the right audience. The article will explore a complete overview of outreach campaigns and how to perfect them. Read more to find out.

What Is Link Building?

Link-building is a vital part of an effective strategy for Off-Page SEO. It is the process of gaining high-quality, and relevant backlinks from authoritative sites.  These links increase brand awareness, drive in potential customers, and consequently raise the domain authority of your website, making it rank higher on search engine results. 

The process can be broken down into link prospecting and reaching out to the identified link prospects through a detailed outreach marketing strategy. This can result in opportunities to provide guest posts, getting successful bloggers to share guest post content, or even simply providing inbound links through blog comments. Read along to find out how you can apply the perfect outreach strategy.

What is an Outreach Campaign for Link Building?

An outreach marketing campaign is a process of reaching out to potential link prospects to provide inbound links to your website. It is the art of building relationships with influential individuals that run authoritative sites and can provide links from their platform to yours. 

However, you don’t want to be an outreach email that doesn’t gain the attention of your link prospect, becomes spam or is a time-consuming read. 

That’s why you need to know how to plan and accomplish an outreach campaign, especially to gain the attention of and receive a positive response from your prospects. Here’s how you can plan a successful outreach campaign.

How to Plan an Outreach Campaign? 

Your outreach efforts will go in vain without proper planning behind your outreach campaign. Here are some steps you can take to ensure you plan out a campaign that will aid in business growth.

#1 Identify Your Link Opportunities

Outreach campaigns are based on the link opportunities available For example, if you are trying to reach out to a site with a broken link, you need to ensure you have the relevant content to use the existing link to direct to landing pages in your website. 

But how do I find these broken links? The key step here is that you identify where you have link opportunities available either using tools on Google, advanced search operators or hiring a company to find them for you.

#2 Find Qualified Link Prospects

When looking for link opportunities, certain tools will let you filter by domain authority which will show the authoritativeness of the site. This is critical data because it tells you how these websites rank on the SERP, and you should gain links from sites with higher authority. 

It is also important that these sites are relevant and will bring in specific audiences related to your niche. Once you have located the link prospects, browse through sites or social media platforms to find out the relevant people in charge that you need to contact, and build a list of their contact information.

#3 Gather Data for the Outreach

The first two steps make it clear that there is no successful outreach campaign without qualified link prospects. Once you do have it, you will need to make a list of these qualified prospects. 

According to your research for link opportunities and prospects, you have to gather all the information you need about what your business can provide to the link prospects in return for the links, what your expectations are from these links, the type of content creation needed to reach out to different link prospects, URLs you intend to get links to for different sections of the site, and even keywords to your anchor texts. By collecting and organizing this data, you can easily guide your outreach marketing campaign to build relationships for your business.

#4 Reach Out to Contacts via Email

This is a pivotal step as it is the first introduction to you and your business. Before you send out the email, ensure you have identified the pain points or the opportunities you can provide for the link prospect. Sending out personalized emails that don’t get lost in the multitude of other email outreach campaigns has to be your goal. Want to know how to send out the best cold outreach campaign? Read on as we’ll guide you through three effective components you have to optimize to create a successful cold outreach campaign.

#5 Manage Your Outreach Campaign

Once you have sent out your email, be on the lookout for the possible responses you can receive. There are four possible types of responses such a campaign can result in for your business. 

Offer Accepted 

Follow up with a thank-you email specific to the type of link opportunity before you proceed with the respective link of your 

Offer Declined

If your offer is declined follow up with an email thanking them for the response, and asking for their expectations of your business for them to provide links.

Offer Countered

If your offer is countered your prospect will state what they need to link to your content. Check if these requirements align with your business goals, and construct the offer accordingly.

Offer Ignored 

If you do not receive a response within a week, don’t be afraid to send a follow-up email. Follow-up emails have a proven response rate, so your new client will probably respond to your offer the second time around.

# 6 Track the Data

Building links with reliable partners is not going to be something you do just once. The benefits are immense and you are bound to repeat these efforts to reach your target audience and generate leads for business growth. Here are some metrics you can keep track of from your  outreach marketing efforts.

• Link building strategy
• Link target (prospect) URL
• Contact information of link prospects 
• Dates you send out emails 
• Outcome (A-accepted; D-declined; C-countered; I-ignored)
• Status of link or guest posting – Placed/ Published 
• Date of link placement/guest-post publishing
• Linked URL
• Keyword anchor texts used
• Thank you email status
• Email subject lines

How to Create a Cold Email Outreach?

According to a study by Backlinko in 2019, only 8.5% of cold outreach emails receive any sort of response. So how can you ensure that your cold email outreach marketing is terrific enough to receive a positive response? 

The first is to keep in mind that this is not a sales outreach marketing campaign for existing customers or new ones. The purpose is entirely different, and the target audience is the audience of the site where your link will be placed. Once you have established that your cold outreach campaign has a solid foundation. Use the content strategy below to optimize the three components of your email’s content to build on the cold calling foundation you have set.

Strong Subject Line

An effective subject line – short and strong! 

Avoid a sales approach, be tactical and whip out subject lines that draw attention to it. A/B testing subject lines for your outreach email marketing has a proven increase in open rates of at least 49%. 

Creative Introduction

Clear and concise content is everything. Once you’ve brought them in, don’t immediately lose them with boring and lengthy introductions. Aim to introduce yourself and your business in 2 lines at the most, but be creative and don’t forget some humor. This makes your email less generic and stands out from the bot emails.

The Pitch

Remember the key to successful cold outreach email marketing is ensuring it doesn’t resemble a sales outreach. Here are six aspects of the pitch you need to pay attention to create a successful outreach marketing strategy.

Simplicity

Don’t put your content marketing efforts to waste by writing over 3 lines of boring content. Be clear, concise, and directly mention your link requests, and add a hyperlink to the landing page or assets you are targeting.

Customization

Tailor your content to fit according to the purpose of your email, rather than sticking to the same template. Mention why your specific content whether a guest post or blog article is relevant to their website rather than using generic templates that abruptly say “our content matches your needs”. 

Customized templates have a lower risk of becoming a spam email, and also show link prospects you are aware of what you do, and not jumping on the bandwagon of mindlessly sending out bulk emails.

Personalization

Personalized messages are a winning mantra for content outreach campaigns. From your subject lines to your conclusion, show that you know your audience. This makes your email build relationships by being genuine and not generic. 

For example, if you’re reaching out to a blogger, commend their recent influencer marketing efforts. If you’re reaching out to small businesses, mention relatable content that is relevant to their business and niche. These practices act as social proof of your authenticity and raise your chances of securing backlinks.

Provide Content Worth Sharing

Your outreach email marketing cannot succeed without the support of high-quality, relevant content that your link prospects find valuable. While you can link to many assets, content-based assets have played a huge role in increasing the domain authority of sites in comparison to others. Offer valuable content that link prospects cannot say no to.

Value Proposition

Your link prospects are looking for valuable content for their existing customers and target market. Be clear about how the content you are providing is useful to your prospect’s audience or addresses the pain points of your prospect. Providing a value proposition convinces prospects to provide you links because of how they have benefited from this exchange. 

Call to Action

Conclude your outreach email with an impactful call to action that fuels them to take action, without leaving any room for second thoughts. 

Conclusion

An outreach campaign is a significant part of building links once you have identified qualified link prospects. For your outreach campaign to be successful it has to have an extensive outreach plan. The plan starts at identifying link opportunities, followed by choosing qualified link prospects, gathering and organizing the relevant information to send out a campaign, reaching out to prospective link providers, looking out for responses and tracking these data to optimize this process for successful link building.

A key aspect of this process is sending out emails with a personal touch to link prospects. The email and its content have to be concise, clear and convincing to the link prospect that it is a valuable asset for them to reach their target market. By ensuring the content of your email is optimized to securing backlinks, you can guarantee a successful outreach campaign, that will help you secure quality links to increase brand awareness and generate leads for your business.