10 Yetis Insight Blog: A Beginners Guide To Influencer Outreach

Admittedly a lot of time and effort needs to go into locating influencers and building a relationship with them, but if you do your influencer outreach right then it can really pay off for you and your clients.

If you’re new to this, here’s a few simple tips to get you started out;

1. Determine your audience

The first place to start is to decide what sort of bloggers and social media influencers it is that you want to contact. For example, if you’re looking to PR a makeup or beauty brand / product, you don’t want to be contacting sports bloggers, health bloggers and male lifestyle bloggers. You will, however, want to look into contacting beauty bloggers, women’s lifestyle bloggers and possibly even mummy bloggers (they like makeup too, you know).

2. Start compiling your list

Google and Bloggabase are great places to start to building your list of potential bloggers and social media influencers on the topic that you’re covering. Google will throw up pages and pages of websites that match your keywords and from here you want to be creating a list of names and websites in order to delve a little deeper. Similarly, Bloggabase is a website which bloggers can sign up to themselves, helping to bridge the gap and target those specifically within your field of interest.

3. Begin to refine that list with the use of social media

Whilst search engines and websites can provide you with a list of potential bloggers, the research doesn’t end there. No doubt your list so far will be quite long and include newbies and small-time bloggers who aren’t particularly influential. In order to weed these ones out you’ll need to delve a little deeper. One way to do this is to have a look at their social media accounts, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and look at the number of people following them and watching what they post. Some may have blogs that look impressive, but their following may be quite small, and they’re not likely to get you the level of coverage that you want if you build a relationship with them.

4. But do they get the traffic?

Websites such as Compete.com and Alexa.com allow you to enter a websites URL and get a rough idea of how much traffic their website receives. If you’ve got access to Precise or a similar service, you can typically find the influential bloggers on here, most of whom have disclosed their website circulations. This is great to know because it’s all good and well them writing about your product on their website, they may have tonnes of followers on social media, but what you really want is for their followers and fans to go to their website and really read about your product.

5. Read their blogs and social media posts

A great way to determine if an influencer is right for you is to have a read through their work and ask yourself a few questions about what you want; If you want them to review a product, firstly do they do reviews? If so, are they likely to want to review what you’re offering? If you want them to run a press release or feature on your product, do they tend to announce new products or publish any product roundups? The worst thing you can do is approach a blogger with an offer that is of no interest to them, when you could’ve realised that yourself by taking 2 minutes to read their blog – chances are you’ll either get ignored or receive a somewhat unhappy reply.

Your list should be getting shorter with the research that you’re doing, and that’s great. You want to build relationships with influencers who have the whole package; a great blog, a mass following and a consistently high level of traffic to their website.

6. Don’t be scared to start a conversation

Now you’ve got your list you will need to make contact. This may seem like a scary thing to do, but they’re people too – they may be someone with fans, they be may be admired by a large group of people, but they’re no different to you and I. Don’t dive in headfirst though with a full-on sales pitch; be nice to them, flatter them a little and make it clear that you’ve read their blog, like their work and think that you may have something of interest to them.

7. “Now I ain’t saying she a gold digger”

I recently did some influencer outreach myself within the beauty sector and thought I’d try my luck with quite a high-profile beauty blogger. I won’t name any names, but I almost spat my drink out when her rep told me for a product review we’d be looking to shell out £15,000. This won’t be the case for many of the influencers you’re looking to contact, but you may be looking at anywhere in the region of £500 to £5,000 per post, review or video. Whilst this may quickly add up the more bloggers you want to work with, you need to think of the benefits of this; the exposure, the links back to your website and the trust the potential sales.

8. Sound too much like hard work?

Obviously if you don’t want to manage your own influencer outreach you can always hire a Digital PR Agency to do that for you. You may find yourself needing influencer outreach for a variety of reasons, such as crisis communications, a product review, organising a blogger-based event or just to help share information about your brand, products and services. You can always contact us to find out more.