Content Outreach Strategy: The Ultimate Guide

What Is a Content Outreach Strategy?

A content outreach strategy is a plan through which you directly promote your content to influential people who have an audience similar to yours. The purpose here is to get them to share your content with their audience that increases your exposure to the potential clients. 

To begin with, you need to prepare an effective content outreach strategy that will help you to build your brand’s overall visibility.

How to Execute a Content Outreach Strategy?

Since content marketing has become an integral part for business today, there is a sharp hike in the number of marketers who leverage content for marketing. To do so, presenting you a birds-eye-view of the steps to build an effective content outreach strategy:

Perform a Content Audit

To create a content marketing plan for 2021, you need to begin with an audit to examine your current performance- what’s working and what’s not. This will help you understand what new content outreach strategy you need to add and which old ones you need to discard.

Due to an increase in consumption of digital content this year, content marketing in 2021 will be different. While carrying out the audit, the following details need to be checked:

• Top performing content
• Low performing content
• Ranking keywords
• Content publishing frequency

The more you understand the current performance, the better it will be for you for developing a content outreach strategy for the future. 

Set Your Marketing Goals for 2021

No matter how effective your content outreach strategy is, you will not get an return on investment (ROI) unless you have a fixed target. Decide on the type of content to publish in 2021 and the specific elements of your content outreach strategy that you want to showcase. Without accurate goals, your marketing activities will lose focus and it will become difficult to gauge the success and failure. Make sure you eliminate any possibilities that may affect your process of preparing a content outreach strategy for future content.

With the help of proper content marketing, you can achieve the following goals:

• Brand awareness
• Lead acquisition
• Lead nurturing
• Sales
• Customer satisfaction

No matter what goals you have, all you need to do is, set them properly so as you succeed in your content marketing outreach activity. With the SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound) method, you will be able to set goals effectively. Most importantly, your goals will be based on the sales funnel you are creating content for. Your goals will determine the type of content to create, ways of promoting your content, and similar activities.

Perform Content Research

It is extremely important for you to know for whom you are creating the content. To make your content outreach strategy successful in 2021, make sure to find out the following:

• Who are you delivering your content to?
• What type of content do they like?
• Do they prefer a formal or an informal content style?
• What type of content do you need to create for them?
• What channels should you use?

An extensive audience research will help you in answering all the above questions. You can start your research by building a profile and performing link building activities.

Decide the Type of Content to Be Published in 2021

Initially, content was referred to the documents that we in a written format. Over the years, it has grown and various other content forms have gained popularity. Apart from written content, the other formats include:

• Videos
• Infographics
• Podcasts
• Presentations
• Webinars

If you are unsure about the effectivity of the various forms of content suitable for your audience, try and use each of them to examine which ones are the most consumed. Based on your audience’s preferences and the different channels you are using, experiment with different kinds of content mix and then you will be able to produce high quality content and finalize on the content outreach strategy.

Create a Content Calendar for 2021

It is important to be consistent while producing content to attract your audience. To maintain an effective content marketing strategy, make sure that you have a SEO outreach strategy for maximum reach. You need to keep in mind that it takes time to achieve results with content marketing, making the entire process extremely effective for your whole team. In order to grow, you will have to keep sharing your content and deliver a positive experience. 

With a content calendar, you will be able to plan your content publishing at your preferred frequency. The calendar will also provide you with a visual overview of your content outreach strategy. Team members will be able to follow progress on individual content pieces and make the entire process smooth for the team. 

The following elements should be a part of your content calendar:

• Content format
• Due dates for content submission
• Publishing date
• Promotion channels
• Team members responsible for individual content pieces

The easiest way to create a content calendar is through Google Sheets. You can also use Editorial Calendar of WordPress and maintain your own dashboard. 

Draft a Plan for 2021 Content Promotion

Apart from content creation based on your content outreach strategy, you need to promote it too for effective marketing. Pick out the most suitable hacks for creating content and promote them through various channels. 

Some of the top platforms to promote your content are:

• Social channels 
• Search engines
• Guest Posts
• Emails
• Advertising
• Forums

You will also need to set the frequency of promoting your content on each platform and research about the best practices of promoting content through them.

Best Practices to Measure Your Content Marketing Success And ROI in2021

To get positive results from content marketing, you need to execute an outreach campaign. After the completion of the campaign, you will need to track your performance. You will need to use different metrics in order to track the performance of your outreach campaigns and prepare an effective content marketing plan to improve your ROI.

Measurement processes in the digital space are constantly evolving and as a result it takes some time to track, analyze and prepare a report on performance. As you build your measurement processes, here a few things to be kept in mind:

Collect Actionable Metrics

Collect data that is extremely relevant for your business. Figure out what serves as the most actionable data for you like the number of email subscribers, email engagement rate, event registrations and time spent on your website. You will be able to examine whether the current content outreach strategy is working or not.

Track Conversions

While some metrics are easy to track (like followers on Twitter or traffic on website), they are hardly useful independent of other data. It is important to track the growth on social media as it helps us to look at the anecdotal and trending information which shows us on which platforms most shares and conversion are happening. In 2021, it will be important to track the conversion rates of email subscriptions, topics of interest, and registrations for CMI activities such as content marketing due to the rise of digital marketing activities. This will help in adjusting your content marketing plan and provide enough confidence that you are delivering content as per your readers’ interests. 

Be Ready to Adapt

Content marketing is integral for modern business strategies. To make the most out of your content marketing activities, take relevant actions to improve the metrics. Fine-tune the processes of looking at the email deliverability, opt-outs and completed profiles to improve the effectiveness of your content marketing done by sending an email. Make sure that you evaluate your list of metrics quarterly, bi-annually, or annually to capture the data that best answers your key questions. 

Automate the Data Collection Procedure

An automated data collections procedure helps in providing accurate information and eliminating manual time consuming procedures. Tools like Google Analytics and Salesforce give you an automated dashboard, making the data collection procedure seamless. The best practice is to look at these dashboards each week and update your key performance indicator (KPI) document. 

Take Time for Accurate Data Analysis

Collecting data and adding it to a spreadsheet is just the beginning of measuring your performance. After accumulation, you need to analyze the data and understand the areas of improvement needed. Measuring your data from time to time will help you in learning what your audience likes and how you can use that for improving your conversion rates. It will surely lead to impressed prospects, satisfied clients and most importantly a successful management. 

Understanding user behaviour and actions is not an easy feat, but with an effective content outreach strategy, you can surely move in the right direction. Continuous adaption of latest metrics will serve the purpose of explaining why your content pieces will get shared and in turn help the business to survive in the competitive world.  In case you hit a writer’s block, trust Machintel to come to rescue.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can marketing improve products?

Marketing helps to improve products in the following ways:

• Educates the audience
• Engages the audience in conversations
• Builds a brand reputation
• Builds relationships
• Sells your products
• Grows your business

What is content outreach?

Content Outreach is the way of establishing contacts and influencing them to share your content. It comes with a bunch of benefits for your brand- it can position you as an expert in your field, it will show potential customers that you can be trusted, and it will help to increase your brand visibility in a competitive market.

How do you create a content outreach strategy?

The most effective way of creating a content outreach strategy includes:

• Prospect the right contact
• Use a catchy email subject line
• Add personalization
• Demonstrate value
• Add a call to action (CTA)
• Take a follow-up
• Track your outreach campaigns