Bloggers bring influencer marketing to new heights. Here's how to conduct a blogger outreach campaign and how to find great bloggers to promote your products.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Power of Celebrity Advertising and Influencer Marketing
Blogging Influencers: A New Era of Online Marketing
Blogger Outreach Campaign: Digital Word of Mouth
What Are Blogger Outreach Campaigns?
Why Blogger Outreach is Essential for Influencer Marketing
How To Design a Blogger Outreach Campaign for Your Brand
How to Find Relevant Influential Bloggers for Your Campaign
Meltwater Offers An Easy Approach to Finding Influential Bloggers
How to Approach Bloggers in Your Industry
Nurturing the Relationship: The Key to Successful Blogger Outreach Campaigns
Common Influencer Outreach Mistakes
5 Insider Tips for Blogger Outreach
Conclusion: The Endless Potential of a Blogger Outreach Campaign
Introduction: The Power of Celebrity Advertising and Influencer Marketing
It seems everywhere you turn these days, people are bombarded with celebrity advertising. On TV, you often see an influential actor or athlete promoting a product to improve brand awareness and increase sales.
Remember Michael Jackson’s Pepsi commercial? Or how about, more recently, Britney Spears’ 2002 commercial, also for Pepsi?
Pepsi Co. has done a remarkable job at using influential entertainers to help them promote their brand as “cool” and hip to target a new generation of Pepsi drinkers.
Whether most people hear the phrase “influencer marketing,” they think social media platforms. But it may be time to broaden your thinking — blogger outreach campaigns can be an equally effective way to get your message out.
Tip: Learn how to scale your influencer outreach and how to approach influencers through emails.
Blogging Influencers: A New Era of Online Marketing
Online businesses are looking toward bloggers more now than ever before to help them increase their brand awareness in social media. If you don’t already know, having a blog is a valuable tool for your content marketing strategy. If you want traffic, social media shares and ultimately, customers to sell to, a blog can do just that.
Finding bloggers to promote your products can expose your content to a larger audience, thereby increasing your brand’s exposure.
While we’re sure having the endorsement of actors and celebrities will provide your brand global recognition, this isn’t always feasible, appropriate, or even attainable.
Blogger Outreach Campaign: Digital Word of Mouth
Online businesses can benefit greatly from a digital word-of-mouth approach to their marketing campaigns. Social media influencers in your vertical are great allies to have because, unlike traditional marketing strategies, influential bloggers are often more personable, relatable, and trustworthy to your target demographic.
More notably, consumers are looking toward blogs for resources when considering the purchase of a product or service.
What Are Blogger Outreach Campaigns?
We define blogger outreach campaigns as the intentional act of finding and reaching out to bloggers to make connections. These outreach campaigns serve as the starting point for blogger influencer marketing.
Once you make successful influencer connections, you can start collaborating with bloggers who fit your needs. Bloggers can promote your products and brand in a number of ways, for example, linking to your website, offering discounts on purchases, doing product reviews or unboxings, or doing giveaways.
Why Blogger Outreach is Essential for Influencer Marketing
So, let’s break this down. Why should part of your influencer marketing efforts rely on a blogger outreach campaign?
- Online shoppers trust bloggers’ product and service research. What do most consumers do before buying a product or service? Many do their research online. According to a study by Research Now (now called Dynata), 46% of online shoppers consult blogs to research a product, and 84% have purchased products based on descriptions they read in a blog.
- Blog posts serve as a catalyst for online purchase decisions. According to Moz, 70% of consumers online read blog posts, not ads, to learn about companies. Moreover, 65% are heavily influenced by brand mentions in blog posts.
What does this mean for online businesses? It means your audience trusts what influential bloggers say about products — and other information on their blogs — to decide whether or not to purchase a product or service.
By recruiting influencers in your industry to promote or mention your brand, your efforts will result in more social media attention and traffic, leading to more sales. An influencer loyalty program based on your customers could be helpful for you!
How To Design a Blogger Outreach Campaign for Your Brand
Before embarking on a blogger outreach campaign, it’s critical to consider the following:
- It’s a long process. Campaigning for influential bloggers takes a lot of time, work and practice. Expect failures along the way.
- When setting up a blogger outreach campaign, plan it out. At Klear, we offer an organizational method using our lists. Based on the categories you set, you can effortlessly add every blogger you uncover to your list and organize them in an uncomplicated viewing layout.
- Set goals. Stay true to your marketing goals. Do you want to use bloggers to increase sales, broaden brand recognition, attract prospects, or drive more traffic to your site?
- Develop relationships with influential bloggers. It’s essential to treat bloggers as people and approach them that way. Your success depends on how you approach bloggers. Sending spammy emails and broadcasting your blogger outreach campaign isn’t going to attract the quality bloggers you’re looking for.
How to Find Relevant Influential Bloggers for Your Campaign
Once you’ve decided on an influential blogging marketing campaign, it’s imperative to identify relevant bloggers to help you. While it’s tempting to contact the most popular influencers in social media who have the most influence with their audience, this doesn’t always work out. Certainly, a travel blogger will not be interested in makeup products, so approaching them is wasted effort.
Here are three ways to find the right bloggers to elevate your brand. Also, learn how to find influencers to partner with your brand.
- Google search. A quick Google search can be surprisingly beneficial for small-niche industries like ecotourism. Simply type in “niche + blog” to get a list of top bloggers in your vertical. Depending on your niche, though, this won’t always yield the information you need — and it can be time-consuming.
- Social media platforms. Using specific hashtags on Twitter or searching directly on Facebook or LinkedIn can provide a list of top influential blogs. But it requires plenty of legwork on your part, and you may not find influencers who meet your needs, especially if they don’t use the keywords you’re searching for in their bios.
- Use Meltwater. We offer a straightforward way to identify influential bloggers in your industry by accessing your Network. Our influencer marketing suite keeps tabs on all your followers who mention your brand and any conversations about your brand. Businesses can quickly access this crucial information when identifying the right blogger, thus helping them with their marketing strategy.
Meltwater Offers An Easy Approach to Finding Influential Bloggers
Using influencer marketing tools to kick-start your blogger outreach campaign comes in handy when you want to target multiple influencers in your industry.
The Meltwater influencer marketing suite makes it easy for you to identify important bloggers and to find them quickly based on the specific criteria you provide.
Using our Influencer Search Engine, the Meltwater influencer search, you can input a niche skill and location to find the right influencer in your industry.
For example, if you own a food product business and want a prolific food blogger to mention or write about your product, Meltwater can help you access those bloggers. In the Influencer Search Engine, type in “food” and a location, and you will receive a rich list of influential food influencers and bloggers in your niche.
You can narrow your list down by only selecting “power users” or “casual” influencers you want to approach. If your marketing campaign requires influencers of a specific age group or gender, Meltwater allows you to filter for those, as well.
With the information in hand, you can now work toward opening a line of communication with your list of bloggers. The following are some easy ways to initiate communication with an influencer in your market:
How to Approach Bloggers in Your Industry
Beginning a line of communication with the methods laid out in the previous section is a step in the right direction; your brand will be on the radar of your influencers.
This process can take some time, so it’s always a good idea to approach multiple bloggers of different popularity standings. Don’t discount bloggers who may not have a large social media presence; you may be able to connect better and faster with an influencer who has a small following but great loyalty from their audience.
While influencers are constantly inundated with pitches, queries, and comments, and you need your efforts to cut through the noise.
Approaching influencers for collaboration can be tricky. Many times, there are gaps between the expectations of brands and those of influencers, including the preferred method of outreach.
Emailing is one of the best ways to reach out to influencers. It’s reliable, personalized, and efficient. Usually, emails have high deliverability rates. This means your target influencers will be more likely to receive your emails.
Let’s look at how you can use email as part of your outreach strategy.
Get to Know the Influencer
Before approaching a blogger, do your research. Read their blog posts and see how your product can benefit their readers. You may find that their blog doesn’t coincide with your brand messaging. So, save everyone some time and read blogs from the influencers you want to approach.
Even if you know loads about your influencer, you need to dig a little deeper before reaching out to them. The better you know your target influencer, the more appealing your pitch will be.
Learn their real first name. (Hint: check their social profiles or blog). Learn who handles their business (themselves vs. an influencer agency). Dig into the social feed of your target influencer and try to understand the brand values close to their heart. Your aim is to understand if the influencer you are targeting is a good fit for you.
For example, if you’re an organic food brand, you can’t collaborate with an influencer who promotes animal testing.
Burt’s Bees is one brand that understands the power of authenticity in influencer marketing. The brand manufactures all-natural lip balms and cosmetics. They partnered with 44 influencers for their World Earth Month campaign. All of the influencers were nature or wellness enthusiasts who believed in the concept of sustainability, just like the brand.
To find an influencer who fits your brand values, check out their bio and posts. They will reflect the causes that the influencer champions.
Check Their Reach and Engagement
An influencer’s influence can be gauged by the engagement their content gets. If the number of likes, comments, and shares is adequate, you’ve found a winner even if the influencer has just a few thousand followers.
Research shows that micro-influencers have 22.2X more “buying” conversations (such as product recommendations) than other people.
The quality of conversations in an influencer’s account also makes a big difference. If the comments on their posts are just emojis or generic comments, that doesn’t count as real engagement. On the other hand, if the influencer’s followers ask them for reviews or recommendations or comment on something specific about their post, the influencer can be considered a bankable partner.
Relevant reach is equally important. Check out the follower demographics of your target influencers. They should align with your target audience so you get access to new and engaged audiences that might be interested in your brand.
Give Your Emails a Personal Touch
Once you are sure that the influencers on your list are well matched and verified, it’s time to compile your outreach emails. Ditch the generic approach when it comes to composing and scheduling your emails. Everyone likes a bit of personal attention, and influencers are no different.
Addressing influencers by their name, customizing the content to match their tone, offering them things that they crave, and sending them emails when they are most active are some ways by which you can personalize your outreach.
Even if you plan to use an email template, tweak it to add a personal touch. Here are some ways to do that:
Personalize Email Subject Lines and Salutation
Even if you’ve crafted a great collaboration proposal for an influencer, it will be a waste unless they open the email.
Tip: Download your free influencer marketing proposal.
To increase the chances of them opening your emails, include their first name to make your email stand out in their overcrowded inbox. Use words and phrases like “collaboration,” “proposal,” “business opportunity,” or “let’s work together” to grab their attention. Be friendly but respectful in the salutation.
Spammy keywords in the email subject line and body can trigger a bounce. Avoid all words/phrases that make you look manipulative, needy, or sleazy.
Personalize Your Sender Details
Use your professional account to send the email. You don’t want an influencer to think the email is coming from a bot or an impersonal automated platform. Include your complete contact details in your signature so they can respond easily.
Include a Compelling Offer
Before asking a blogger for anything (a product review, mentions, etc.), remember that it’s a game of reciprocity. If you do something nice for a person, most likely they will return the favor. You may want to consider influencer gifting; everyone loves getting free stuff, and when done right, it can be a great way to get bloggers excited about reviewing your products. Influencers work for different things, including money, exposure, free products/services, and emotional satisfaction. If you know what motivates your target influencers to accept a proposal, you can pitch them more effectively.
Be upfront about what you bring to the table. Make the offer more appealing by adding frills like free product samples for them to try. Try to match the industry standards for influencer pricing.
Clarify Your Expectations
Make your email as transparent as possible. Mention your intent for this relationship. This helps influential bloggers understand the true purpose of your communication and more likely to open your email.
Lay down your expectations in unambiguous terms. What should be the influencer’s deliverables? What is the timeline of the delivery? How will you measure their performance? These are some questions you need to think about while drafting the email.
While it’s good to be honest, try not to overwhelm them with stringent guidelines and unrealistic goals. Content creators crave freedom of expression, and you should respect their boundaries as well.
Pro Tip: Busy influencers don’t have the time to go through lengthy blocks of text about your company’s background and campaign ideas. Use video editing tools to create slick videos and showcase your brand story and value proposition visually. Your influencers might appreciate your ingenuity and effort.
Here are a few more things to keep in mind:
- Make your emails mobile-friendly.
- Schedule them for early business hours on weekdays.
- Include a clear CTA about how the influencer should proceed after receiving the email.
- Follow up within a week if you don’t hear back from them.
- Follow email deliverability best practices if you don’t want your email to land in the spam folder, like 45% of all business emails.
Lastly, have a system in place for following up with influencers who reply to your emails. You’ve done plenty of hard work to this point, so make sure you don’t let interested influencers fall through the cracks.
Maintain your relationships with your influencers by continuing communication and giving them social attention. If they are open to it, influencer content collaboration might make sense. This can result in increased sales and traffic growth.
Nurturing the Relationship: The Key to Successful Blogger Outreach Campaigns
Your efforts have paid off, and your blogger outreach campaign is a success. You connected with key influencers in your market, developed solid relationships and enlisted them to promote your product, services, or content.
What’s the next step in your influencer management strategy? To maintain mutually beneficial and successful relationships, it’s time to reciprocate — promote your influencer’s content as well as your own. Your combined efforts will reach a larger audience and benefit both brands.
Common Influencer Outreach Mistakes
The relationship between a brand and influencers is always a work in progress. Even though it’s a professional one, it does require a lot of personal nurturing and care. Building your outreach strategy around relationships can help you build more authentic, fruitful connections.
To make sure you are able to instantly hit it off with your influencers, here are three things you should never do while trying to build relations with influencers.
1. Don’t Send Irrelevant Messages
Influencers are busy people. To nag them with a mass email blast or irritating email forwards can automatically threaten your relationship with them.
Make sure you’re only sending relevant emails to influencers that make sense for your brand. You can’t send a SaaS content piece to a travel blogger, for example; it will be dismissed right away by both the blogger and their readers.
2. Don’t Expect a Free Ride
Don’t expect freebies from influencers just because you wrote some sweet lines of praise. To an influencer, their blog is their bread and butter, and creating content requires time and skill. To expect a service without paying for it is unprofessional and disrespectful.
Keep a set budget for your influencer marketing that allows you to provide product samples as gifts to influencers. These gifts should aim at introducing influencers to your product, and it needs to be done without any hidden agenda. Keep in mind that even though you gave out a freebie, you might not get anything in return.
3. Don’t Nag
Influencers appreciate it when you praise their work, but don’t fake it. Being superficial will take you nowhere. What’s more, you’ll want to avoid sending constant follow-up messages to see if they’ve tried the sample and if they will feature you in their blog.
To avoid becoming a nuisance, use smart tools and techniques to enhance productivity and reduce friction in your communication.
For instance, follow up with influencers by creating a Slack community, a forum of like-minded professionals discussing common topics. Use the real-time chat platform to network with your influencers and pass along relevant information. Influencers would be more than happy to use this forum as it will keep their inbox clutter-free.
But remember, even though a Slack community is more approachable, be mindful of being active at hours which might be inconvenient for community members. As part of Slack etiquette, fix a reasonable time to chat with everyone in your community.
5 Insider Tips for Blogger Outreach
To learn more about what works in outreach campaigns, we connected with five bloggers who are influential in food, fashion, and lifestyle. We asked them a simple question:
“A company approaches you and offers to collaborate. What would it take for you to say yes?”
The bloggers’ answers were honest and straightforward. Here are the blogger outreach tips they’ve shared with us.
1. Learn How to Communicate with the Influencers
“I think great communication is the key to keeping everyone happy. There’s nothing worse than sending an email, and not receiving a reply for several weeks. If both parties are communicative, everyone knows where they stand and things run much more smoothly — and with a lot less frustration!” (Becca Pusey, Amuse Your Bouche)
“The pitch from the brand has to be personal. I like to know that the person has clearly done their homework and knows at least a little about me and my blog. Their email addresses me by name, might mention something they like about my blog, audience, content, etc. I just want to know that they actually care and it isn’t a canned pitch.” (Molly Stillman, Still Being Molly)
Takeaway: Before reaching out, be familiar with the influencer’s content. Know what they publish, and later be friendly and communicative.
2. Make Sure It’s a Perfect Audience Fit
“In order for me to say yes, the post would first have to be relevant to my blog and audience.” (Kait Hanson, CommuniKait)
“It has to be the right fit. If the brand isn’t the right fit for my blog, audience, or demographic, it doesn’t matter — I won’t do the campaign. I have had that mantra since I started and will always keep that mantra.” (Molly Stillman)
Takeaway: The influencers know their audience. So should you. Use audience demographics data to know exactly who are the people who are part of the influencer network, their age, country, gender, and content preferences.
3. Be Transparent about Compensation
“I would say yes to a brand who is paying money for a collaboration and is a good fit with my audience.“ (Heather Mann, Dollar Store Crafts)
“$$$: While certain campaigns can be done for “trade,” when a company respects the fact that my blog is my full-time job/business and that I do charge for certain things, I really appreciate that. It has taken many years to grow my audience, create my content, etc. and I work hard and I really appreciate that brands treat partnerships/collaborations like any other type of advertising and respect when it costs money. “ (Molly Stillman)
Takeaway: The bloggers put a lot of time and thought into their content. They need to be fairly compensated for it. Be transparent about it and figure out what’s the right model for you both.
4. Visualize Any Potential Content
“Before saying yes, I research the brand and their products to visualize any potential content.” (Romy, Ymor Beauty)
“It is time-consuming (reading reviews, brand philosophy, product ingredients, etc…), but if exploring the potential content before even agreeing, I can then imagine what type of work I can create. I need to have a clear picture and a clear direction of how I can integrate the brand into my personal brand before saying yes.”
Takeaway: Help the influencer understand the brand’s visual guidelines and style on social media. Share examples from previous campaigns you’ve run or choose a post by the influencer that reflects the brand’s style. The more they know about your marketing strategy, the better they can see how they might fit into it.
5. Go the Extra Mile
“I like it when brands are willing to do something more personalized and customized to best fit BOTH our audiences… it makes it more fun and that much more engaging!” (Molly Stillman)
Takeaway: You’re probably not the first one who has reached out to the blogger, so why should they choose you? If an influencer is going to invest time in your brand, then you must show them that they are appreciated as an individual and not as a marketing tool. Be unique or offer them something special. Keep in mind what’s in it for them.
One answer we got had everything in it. It incorporates all of the takeaways above. Read Emily’s answer carefully:
“I say ‘yes‘ to brands who offer me something that I feel is a natural fit for my blog, and is valuable to me. If a brand reaches out who doesn’t fit with my blog then the answer is always no. If a brand reaches out and their message or product is a good fit for my blog, then it’s still just a ‘maybe’. If a brand has a message and product that I really believe in, and fits my blog, but they aren’t willing to send me the product or compensate me in a way that makes it worth my time to write about them, then I will still say no.” (Emily, Emily Reviews)
If you’re a marketer looking to form close relationships with influencers, following these bloggers’ answers can help you better understand their points of view. It will be hard to please every influencer or perfectly meet each of their requests, but taking their needs into consideration will give you a better chance of acquiring influencers.
After all, a good partnership takes understanding, mutual respect, and close care. Listening to the influencers' needs is a good place to start.
Conclusion: The Endless Potential of a Blogger Outreach Campaign
Using bloggers as a marketing strategy to elevate your brand is easily accessible and highly influential. Don’t complicate the process by seeking out influencers on your own.
Meltwater provides a wealth of data and can help businesses access key players by uncovering the top influencers in your market. Our influencer research tool can also narrow down your choices to a specific location, gender, age, or skill — making it simple to tailor your influencer marketing efforts for maximum benefit.
And once you’ve found those perfect influencers, the Meltwater suite can help with managing your influencer relationships.
When you’re able to identify, locate, and approach the right bloggers through your blogger outreach campaign, the potential for growth is endless.
Enlisting influencers, then, is a powerful marketing strategy for any business that you can’t afford to overlook. Learn more when you schedule a demo:
