Your Guide to Organic Outreach Marketing

Businesss collaborations and organic outreach marketing concept. Vector of businesspeople reaching an agreement after successful negotiations

CopyPress

November 4, 2022

As marketing teams, we’ve got a lot of tools to turn to when starting a marketing campaign. Unfortunately, most of them end us costing us. Organic outreach marketing is one of the only strategies that we can execute at scale, without actually paying for traffic. Yet, a lot of teams overlook organic outreach in marketing, mainly because it takes a little more effort to get it right. In this article, we’ll be diving into organic outreach marketing, walking through exactly how you can make this a winning tactic in your marketing department. Let’s dive right into it with the following topics:

What is Organic Outreach Marketing?
How Does Organic Outreach Marketing Work?
What Are the Goals of Organic Outreach Marketing?
Advantages of Organic Outreach Marketing
Paid vs Organic Outreach Marketing Strategies
Tips for Creating Your Organic Outreach Marketing Plan

What is Organic Outreach Marketing?

When creating a content marketing strategy, teams have to choose between organic or paid traffic. Paid traffic is—you guessed it—where you pay for the clicks and views that come in. PPC campaigns would fall into this category. On the other hand, an organic outreach strategy helps you create a stable base of content to distribute using unpaid methods.

People then encounter your content in search, across social, or on another digital channel that your business publishes to. So instead of pushing content in front of audiences through tactics like paid ads, they stumble across it naturally.

How Does Organic Outreach in Marketing Work?

One factor that links different streams of organic outreach marketing is where the content comes from. Instead of paying for views, you’re investing directly in the creation of the content. Whether it’s paying your marketing team or working with freelancers, the money spent on the campaign goes back into the content.

By creating high-quality content, you’re providing value-driven resources to the general public. As you’re posting these content pieces on channels that you own, you don’t have to pay to get them out there. Organic content can be a major driver of traffic, with many established blogs bringing in thousands of clicks each month.

When you use your brand’s marketing channels, like social media, email outreach, and connecting with people in your industry online, you’re able to push your content further for free. Contracting journalists, influencers, brand ambassadors, or a field expert can help you connect your high-quality content with people that are interested in it. While organic outreach marketing might be slow in the beginning, it starts to pick up and becomes a leading form of traffic generation.

What Are the Goals of Organic Outreach Marketing?

Without having to funnel lots of capital into your outreach marketing, an organic system helps cut costs while still allowing your business to reap the benefits. Most of the time, organic outreach marketing plans focus on connecting with the people in your industry. You may already have an idea who these people are.

For example, they could be a segment of your social media following or your newsletter subscribers. However, the majority of organic outreach in marketing will be to individuals that you don’t already have contact with. This allows you to onboard new people, help expand your brand’s reach, and boost recognition. With this in mind, there are some key goals for an organic outreach marketing campaign:

Increase brand awareness
Generate new leads
Outbound backlink generation
Find opportunities for collaboration
Promote products and services
Gather customer data

Typically, your outreach strategies will focus on a few of these goals at once. For example, your first organic outreach campaign may touch on brand awareness and new leads. The second could then focus on gathering customer data, or even on the SEO side in gaining backlinks. Depending on the goals of your business at the time of launching your campaign, your main marketing KPIs and aims will shift.

Advantages of Organic Outreach Marketing

As a leading content marketing strategy, organic outreach can help your business thrive. Beyond just saving money, you’ll get a range of benefits from this marketing strategy:

Creating Brand Trust

Image via Edelman (Global Communications)

A large part of organic marketing is about getting your content out there. Whether people naturally find your content on social media or on search engine results pages, you’re able to build up a level of familiarity. People will start to recognize your brand as they encounter it more times. This is a part of integrated marketing, where you span across many different marketing avenues in order to increase your visibility. If you routinely appear on customers’ pages, providing high-quality content, they’ll learn to trust your business.

And according to Edelman, a global communications firm, over 81% of customers state that they need to trust a business before purchasing from them. Without this level of familiarity, that trust cannot begin to form. Organic outreach marketing will help increase exposure and will lead to trust building faster.

Building Your Audience

Of course, at the heart of any outreach campaign is a desire to increase the range of your audience. If you’re only working within one customer segment, organic outreach can be the key to breaking into new audience segments. For example, organic channels like social media, free content distribution platforms, and guest posts can provide additional methods for promoting your content and getting it in front of the right audiences. While your content may generate clicks and engagement all by itself, outreach gives your brand an extra push. And you can use your top-performing content to further support your organic strategy through email updates and newsletters.

Finding High-Quality Leads

An organic outreach strategy can help your business or brand find high-quality leads. Organic outreach helps get your content in front of the best people for that specific format and industry topic, increasing interaction and motivating interest. By carefully calculating which people you’re going to reach out to, you can steer your outreach toward leads that will be most beneficial for your business. And with better leads, your business can boost conversions and increase customer lifetime value.

Obtain Customer Data

Increasing the scope of your outreach campaigns can help your business get even more information on your customer base. Understanding which social media platforms you get the best results on and which strategies work for you will help you develop a strong marketing strategy going forward. You’ll be able to see which social media platforms your audience interacts with your posts most on.

Let’s say your audience enjoys LinkedIn. If that’s the case, then focusing your paid strategy on these spaces will also help you get fast results. Your organic research can yield data that works in all forms of marketing. But without a clear idea of which outreach platforms work for you, you can’t access the best results as quickly. You can even treat organic outreach marketing as an across-the-board platform and strategy test. Data is power, with organic outreach getting you as much as possible without breaking the bank.

Paid vs Organic Outreach Marketing Strategies

No company can thrive with a fully paid or fully organic outreach marketing plan. No matter what industry you work in, you’ll likely be using both streams. With that in mind, it’s good to know which categories fall into each section. Most of the time, the distinction is fairly clear. If you’re paying, it’s paid. If you’re not, it’s organic. That said, here’s a list to help you pinpoint which strategies your brand uses more:

Paid Outreach Marketing Strategies

PPC ads
Influencer marketing
Social media ads
Paid display marketing

Organic Outreach Marketing Strategies

Blog content
Social media content
Social media outreach
Contacting journalists with stories
Forming mutual promotions strategies
Online giveaways
Guest blogging
Customer reviews and testimonials

Tips for Creating Your Organic Outreach Marketing Plan

Organic outreach marketing can be one of the most effective parts of your content marketing puzzle. When done correctly, you can launch your brand to a completely new pool of clients. From increasing your visibility to securing new leads or maybe even building some new business relationships, the benefits are endless.

Yet, a few missteps and organic outreach can do more harm than good. Luckily, we’ve got you covered. Here are six tips to keep in mind when creating an organic outreach marketing plan:

1. Create a Content Bank

When doing organic outreach, you’re going to want to put your high-value content in front of new audiences. You’ll need something of substance that targets the people you’re addressing and hooks them in. In order to interest people, you’re going to need high-quality resources. Select and optimize content for your organic approaches.

And if you haven’t already, you should focus on creating a blog for your business. Companies that prioritize creating an educational blog for their audience see 13 times the ROI compared to those that don’t, according to HubSpot. Not to mention that companies with blogs typically bring in about 67% more leads per month than companies without blogs. Creating a content bank will help start to generate organic traffic.

Without that baseline of content, you’re unable to reach out to anyone with anything of substance. If you’re really stuck on what to produce, check out what your competitors are doing. Wondering where to start? Use the CopyPress content marketing analysis tool. With this resource, you’ll get the data you need for revealing your competitors’ top- and lowest-performing content, as well as your brand’s, so you can adjust and improve your organic outreach strategy. Then, you can use these topic areas to create high-value content that connects to your organic outreach methods.

2. Find Potential People and Businesses

When beginning organic outreach marketing, you need to make sure that you have the right kind of people in mind. One form of content interaction you’ll generate will be completely passive. This will come from SEO efforts as you begin to rank on SERP engines like Google. Most of the time, clicks here will already be in line with the people you’re looking for, as they’re the ones searching and finding your content.

But, when it comes to organic outreach, you can get even more specific with who you’re looking for. For this kind of outreach, you want to make sure that each connection results in as much yield as possible. For example, directly contacting a customer might result in one sale. If you reach out to someone that becomes a brand ambassador and starts marketing on your behalf, you could see much larger impacts. To get started, make a list of potential people and businesses to network with, such as:

Journalists: Journalists can be extremely advantageous team members to work with. For instance, a journalist can cover a story about your company’s upcoming events to create more engagement.
Bloggers: Bloggers can create original, high-quality promotional materials or insightful posts on your business’s top products or services. Hosting these on their sites can then give your brand quality backlinks, positive reviews, and even more exposure to a new audience.
Similar brands: Similar brands to yours publish the same types of content under similar topics in your business niche. Reaching out to these brands can help you form B2B content partnerships and even lead to syndication opportunities.
Influencers: Social media influencers are not to be overlooked, often having large audience bases you can leverage. Using organic marketing with influencers can drive your brand messages further, reaching new leads and increasing the potential for conversions back on your business website.

Across these areas, you’re likely to find a few high-quality candidates. Remember, social media and the SERPs are your holy grail here. Search for keywords, see who comes up, and start connecting with these potential outreach opportunities.

3. Narrow Down the Candidates

Once you’ve got a list of people and businesses, narrow down the top potential choices. While you could spend time going through every single person, you’re going to be wasting a lot of time. Some prominent figures simply won’t respond to you, some will be inactive, and some might not be a good fit for your business. So keeping this in mind, go through each of your potential candidates and give them a score for:

Overall popularity: How many followers do they have, and what’s their social reach?
Engagement rate: Use a tool like Socialblade or an SEO tool to see the engagement rate of their social media account or blog.
Activity frequency: When did they last post, and how active are they?
Business fit: Do they mesh well with what you’re offering?

While working through this list, you’ll quickly find a few candidates that are best suited to your business and outreach goals. Remember: you’re looking for people with a good reach, high engagement rate, frequent activity, and someone with values similar to your company’s. Contacting these people can help put your business in conversation with high-impact figures. And these are the individuals and brands that you’re going to start your organic outreach on.

The more you personalize your outreach, the more likely you are to get a reply. And with this form of outreach, the goal is to gain interest and then the person creates content on your behalf. For example, maybe they’re a journalist and create a press release for their online publication. Or maybe they love your product and become a brand ambassador, helping you get more clients. Just note, email isn’t the only form of organic outreach marketing that you could conduct. Think of social media marketing, email newsletters, and even connecting with people on LinkedIn.

5. Provide Value

Organic outreach in marketing doesn’t always have to come directly from emails. You can find passive ways of doing this that make the strategy truly organic. No matter where you’re sending or posting your outreach content, just make sure that it always provides value. You want to demonstrate to the public why your service is going to help them.

Although you’re getting something from this partnership, you shouldn’t structure it that way. You want to show the world why you’re useful, what you do, and what your benefits are. Always focus on the value you can provide. Whatever your USP is, include that in your outreach marketing, helping to show the world why you’re different.

6. Respond Quickly

Organic outreach marketing, in whichever format, is already a difficult endeavor. While organic marketing goes a long way in getting leads and interactions with minimal effort, that’s not to say there isn’t any work involved in the process. If you’re lucky enough to have people inquiring about your business or reaching back out, then capitalize on the process.

But don’t wait long. Try to send your response immediately. You don’t want to fumble any opportunities that may come your way. If someone’s come across your content and wants to learn more, take the opportunity they’re giving you. Being alert and active is one of the most important elements of organic outreach marketing. Alternatively, you should leave a paper trail of resources for them to follow.

Optimize your social media accounts, create templates that you can personalize for outreach, and be sure to produce a continual wave of new content for your blog. With these three things actively occurring in your business, you’ll be more than ready to make organic outreach a core marketing strategy for you.

Plan a Content Marketing Strategy That Converts

Organic outreach marketing can come in many forms. You’ve got the passive strategy of creating content and putting it where people will see it. You’ve also got the more active strategy of finding high-quality outreach candidates and contacting them directly. The best approach is often a little bit of both, helping your results to snowball as quickly as possible.

Curious about content marketing for your business? Get in touch with the team at CopyPress and share your goals. We’ll help you dive into the data you need to plan content strategies that support your brand’s bottom line. Increasing traffic? Check. Boosting reach? Check. Diverse approaches to content promotion? Check. With our team, your business gets the tools it needs to create, manage, and distribute high-quality content—every time.

Lauren Oliver

Digital Marketing Manager at CopyPress