What Is Outreach and Why Do You Need It?
Next week my new course, Smoke Signals, all about outreach starts – but what even is outreach? Essentially, it’s any activity where you are getting onto a channel that you don’t own to talk about your business, thereby getting in front of new and broader audiences where they are already consuming information and positioning you as an expert in your field. It is a mix of what you might think of as PR, networking and ‘hustling’. It’s also how I got over a third of my sales this year. Needless to say I’m a huge believer in the power of outreach as a method for growing businesses financially, and in terms of brand visibility. If you’re feeling like you’re doing everything you can on your own channels, yet you’re not feeling like people are seeing you, outreach is the missing piece of your marketing puzzle. So let’s delve a little deeper into what outreach can be doing for you and your business…
The Theory Behind Outreach
The Theory Behind Outreach
There are three parts to the theory behind outreach. Firstly, it is not your customer’s responsibility to find you, but yours to give them a map.
How is your customer supposed to find you if they don’t know you exist? When you just focus on your Instagram or on your blog you are relying on your customer stumbling across you in an incredibly busy and crowded space where they don’t know whether you’re any more what they need than the next account they see.With outreach, you take control of this discovery phase in the customer journey. Rather than hoping they stumble across you, you purposefully set out to appear where they are already consuming content and getting inspiration or information. You get your product featured in their favourite magazine, get a mention from their favourite Instagrammer, appear on their favourite podcast. Which brings us onto the second part, which is inferred reputation. When someone finds you via their favourite magazine/influencer/podcast, a little bit of the authority of that platform rubs off on you. They trust that if you’re on their favourite podcast then you must be an expert at the level of the host; they trust that if your product is in their favourite magazine then the quality and aesthetic must be high if the editors are recommending it. Outreach allows you to piggyback on the reputation others have with your audience, and helps to speed up the removal of doubt and building of trust.
The third part is theory of seven contacts. This is based on research that it takes seven contacts with a new brand before a person is ready to buy from them, and in this sense outreach really helps you to increase these contacts. Here's an example:Perhaps someone sees you recommended in an influencer’s Stories (contact 1) and then start following you and see your lastest Instagram post (contact 2). Then they open a magazine at the weekend and see you quoted in an article (contact 3) and remember following you on Instagram so they click to your site and read your latest blog post (contact 4). They see another Instagram post in the week (contact 5) and then hear you on a podcast episode on their commute (contact 6). They subscribe to your mailing list and get an email about your new course (contact 7) which is exactly what they’ve been looking for and they buy.As you can see from this example (which I hope feels familiar to you as a consumer?) without outreach it would take much longer to get those seven contacts.
This is a term I coined to describe a kind of outreach that is a combination of collaboration and PR. Rather than pitching to your favourite influencer to be featured on their blog, ask to feature them on yours – the idea being that they would then promote the interview on their channels, driving their audience to you.
Who am I to do this?
Ok, so now you’ve got a grounding in what outreach does and what it might look like for your business, now the fear’s setting in right? All those feelings of ‘that’s not for people like me’ and ‘what do I have to offer?’ and ‘I could never send a pitch’. I get it, I’ve been there. Which is why Smoke Signals is as much about breaking this all down into tiny achievable parts to build confidence as it is about the theoretical stuff. You can hear a practical example of this in last week's podcast episode.Ultimately, the question is ‘do you believe that what you do will help the people you do it for?’. If the answer is yes (which I hope it is!), then what right do you have not to do this? If your product is the perfect gift for someone’s hard-to-buy for mum, you can save them a lot of stress and bring them a lot of joy by pitching to their favourite magazine. If your e-course is going to help someone save time in their business enabling them to focus more on the life they want to be living, who are you not to go and talk about it on a podcast?Take yourself and your hang ups and fears out of the equation. This is about standing behind your product, believing in the stories you have to tell and thinking about those people you want to serve. If you can do that, the how we can work on together.
