Blogger outreach is the buzz term of marketing at the minute and if you aren’t clued up on it, your marketing plans may well suffer. Bloggers have been around for a while but in the past couple of years they’ve made the step into the mainstream with everyone having a favourite Instagram star whose feed they love to scroll through or a top website to spend their commute consuming.
Blogger outreach is a great way to utilise the popularity of influencers to help your brand grow and there are various different ways that a brand can work with bloggers that’s beneficial to all. From gifting them products in return for a review to gaining backlinks in their posts back to your site and full blown advertising campaigns, whatever your budget you can find a way to incorporate blogger outreach into your marketing strategy.
Why should you spend some of your marketing and advertising budget on blogger outreach though? It’s all very well seeing someone has a high number of followers but will working with them really do anything for you? Here’s a few things your business could gain…
Improves brand visibility
Working with bloggers who have a large following will help to get your brand in front of more eyes. Imagine how much you’d pay for an advert in a magazine whose readership was 700,000 people. Convert that into 700,000 engaged Instagram followers and you can see why influencer marketing and blogger outreach can be a big money game.
Many bloggers and influencers have built up an engaged and niche audience who are interested in similar things to them. Therefore if you can find a blogger who fits well with your brand and target demographic then the likelihood is their audience will too. Increased brand visibility in your target market can only help with boosting sales.
Gain customer trust
Fancy marketing tactics and big budget ad campaigns are all well and good but one of the most important things to help your brand grow is gaining customer trust. You need people to trust in your products and services and a fancy TV advert isn’t always going to help with that.
People trust personal recommendations from friends and family or at least from people who have first hand experience with the product. How many times do you read reviews of a hotel before you book it? Of course the hotel will say it’s the best in the area and use the nicest pictures but the only honest feedback you can trust is from people who have already stayed there.
If people are engaged with a blogger they follow then it’s likely that they trust their opinions and reviews, so if you can secure positive feedback on your products and services on a bloggers platform, their audience are also likely to have a positive impression of your brand meaning they are much more likely to turn to you over a competitor.
Improve your website’s SEO
Gaining backlinks to your website from a site with a strong domain authority is a great way to improve the SEO of your website. The more high quality links you have pointing to your site the more Google will view your site as one with relevance and authority, helping to boost you up the search results.
One way of working with bloggers is on a link building basis where they write a post based around your product or market area that includes at least one follow link to your website. This allows the links placed to look natural and won’t throw up any red flags to Google but will also help to not only boost your SEO but to direct traffic to your website and, if you’ve chosen bloggers whose audience will be interested in your brand, should help to reduce bounce rate and improve sales.
Boost your sales
At the end of the day, if you’re running any kind of marketing or advertising campaign then your end goal is more than likely to boost sales. It’s no good investing in your marketing if you can’t see any ROI. A positive of using bloggers is not only the fact that they have a ready made engaged audience for you to tap into but because everything is online, they are able to track precisely what sort of impact their posts are having. This means you will easily be able to find out how many people are clicking through to your site or how many sales are being made off the back of their link referrals. Handy, huh?
Bloggers are also a sign of the times. As the digital world continues to grow, traditional mediums such as print and radio are facing a decline with less people likely to pick up a glossy magazine and from those that do, even fewer are likely to actually engage with adverts in there. Meanwhile social media and bloggers are becoming more ingrained in our lives with people choosing a morning scroll of Instagram over a morning read of the paper.
A good marketing strategy will look at how their target audience absorbs information and if for you that’s online and via influencers, then setting aside time and budget in your marketing plan is almost certain to improve your brand visibility and convert into sales.
I’m Sam Crawford, Squarespace expert and founder of by Crawford, a multi award-winning Squarespace web design studio.
I have built over 400 Squarespace websites for clients across every industry all around the world. I am also an official Squarespace partner, approved Squarespace expert, Squarespace educator and Squarespace Enterprise member, meaning you get an unrivalled experience – and a flawless website.
