1) When performing outreach, what is the end goal usually?

The end goal depends on the stage you’re at in terms of relationship building with the person you’re engaging with. For example if you’re getting in contact with someone for the first time, the goal could be simply to get a positive response, whereas if you’re talking with a long-term contact it could be to setup a Q&A that generates content tat can be used as a link building opportunity. Typically you’ll be aiming to give the blogger a piece of content that their community will genuinely find useful; if it helps the client to tell their story or share an opinion, even better.

2) What’s your current workflow when it comes to performing outreach?

Excel is your friend when executing outreach! The first step is to identify the topics you can provide an opinion or content on. Then you go and do your desk research; finding the folks you’re looking to contact via Google, Twitter, WordPress or AllTop for example. Then the key is to capture them in a spreadsheet; I have an algorithm that uses Alexa, GPR & Inbound links to calculate relative influence so that they can then be tiered. Then it’s a matter of recording every engagement and making sure that there is an outcome at the end of each conversation.

3) What’s the biggest challenge you wish could be automated, or less time consuming in your outreach process?

The most time consuming element is finding people to engage with in a new sector. At Burson-Marsteller we have a really diverse client set and that means sometimes we’ll be looking to engage with groups for the first time in niche areas. Finding those networks manually is not the most efficient use of time, but conversely, it really helps you to understand the group dynamics at play.

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Andrew Smith, Escherman Limited

1) When performing outreach, what is the end goal usually?

It depends. Clients often say they just want raw “reach” – but if you quiz them further then usually you can start to identify specific audiences and what they want them ultimately to do. In terms of end goals, more often than not, people are looking for sales and/or leads. Part of the challenge is to show the impact that your social media activity has had. So in terms of outreach, activity is usually about trying to identify whether 3rd parties can be used to reach the end audience – and what might persuade them so share your content with their audience. You may wish to drive people to specific content. but you would usually want to know what do people do as a result of consuming that content – using Google Analytics for attribution analysis is helpful to understand both the direct and indirect contribution of your content marketing efforts.

2) What’s your current workflow when it comes to performing outreach?

There are a variety of tools available to help you try and identify relevant people. Buzzsumo is obviously one 😉 – particularly in terms of finding the the right kind and type of content for maximum sharing – as well as the people who are most likely to share particular types of content. Other useful tools include Traackr and Followerwonk. In terms of metrics, that is largely determined by the end goal – if you are simply going for visibility rather than engagement, then looking at follower numbers, etc might act as a guide (of course, you’d always use Statuspeople.com to sanity check that a Twitter account’s followers were real!). If you are going for engagement, the using Buzzsumo to look at things like reply ratio.

3) What’s the biggest challenge you wish could be automated, or less time consuming in your outreach process?

Everything? 😉 In all seriousness, it doesn’t take long to create a first pass list for a potential target group. The time consuming piece is the manual research that goes into checking whether or nor a certain person or outlet would be a valid target and working out the optimal timing of outreach and what type and kind of content would best appeal to your target group.

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Wayne Barker, Head of Marketing at Boom Online

1) When performing outreach, what is the end goal usually?

For us the end goal can change depending on the kind of content that we are creating. If we have produced some image based content that requires people to discover more on the site of client then ideally we would want that link to go to the page. On the other hand if we produce image based content that can live and breathe on its own without any context, this we can happily live with a link to the home page of a client as the source. If we have something that is interactive in nature then we are going to want to drive people to the actual content so that they can experience it.

Despite diminishing returns for infographics in some sectors we still use them and still see reasonable results, so it wouldn’t matter at all. We like to leave it in the hands of the bloggers and writers that cover the content to make the decision.

2) What’s your current workflow when it comes to performing outreach?

We have a pretty simple workflow. We use several tools to find possible people to approach from Buzzsumo to followerwonk and the other usual suspects (Link Prospector, Ontolo, Google, other blogs, blogrolls, serendipity). Each of the guys at Boom have their own preferred methods and it is important not to quash success and creativity with out of date, written down processes.

We keep track of touch points history and relationships via Buzzstream. It is hands down the best way to keep everything under one roof and share as much knowledge across a team with very little friction.

3) What’s the biggest challenge you wish could be automated, or less time consuming in your outreach process?

Whilst the building of lists is relatively quick and pain free, it is the qualifying of prospects that takes the time. If there was some way of automating this side of things that would be quite cool.

If you could run analysis on the topics of a site (in a similar way to Majestic) that lets you quickly unqualify sites based on the relevancy hat would be quite cool. If you had some sort of threshold for this that you set yourself that eliminates sites form the project it could save valuable minutes per site. Whilst that doesn’t sound like a lot, if you have a team of outreachers looking at hundreds of sites a day it soon becomes worthwhile.

A similar issue arises when you are looking for relevant hooks with the people that you are approaching. We all know that in an ideal world we would have a lovely long standing relationship with the people (yadda, yadda) that we are approaching. In the real world that isnt that realistic. We also know that it is very easy to see through the bullshit of someone throwing around false platitudes. If you could automate the process of bringing social account data into the outreach process quickly and easily it would save countless hours of scanning through Twitter and facebook and Instagram just to get an idea of what actually makes people tick – also see: what pisses people off (possible Buzzsumo and Buzzstream tool integration ;))

Also automated link building – that would be cool – noone has thought of that yet have they? I think I am on to winner with that one.

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Paxton Gray, 97th Floor