Content

A guide to hiring an agency for campaign outreach

May 4th, 2016

Campaign outreach is a strategic marketing exercise, which involves forging relationships with influential bloggers (the ‘outreach’), capturing data, creating and distributing high quality, shareable content and amplifying its reach through social and ‘earned media’ (the ‘campaign’)

There are benefits for both parties: the blogger receives high quality content which is bespoke to their own and to their audience’s needs. For the client, the exchange of content helps to boost their brand awareness and strengthens their website’s organic search (SEO) profile by creating strong, natural backlinks.

We’ve recently expanded our Campaigns, Earned Media and Outreach teams at Click Consult, so we decided to put together a list of qualities and attributes you should look for in a campaign outreach agency…

Enthusiasm about your brand

Are they passionate about how they can bring your brand to life through campaign activity? At the same time, they need to be able to demonstrate a clear understanding of your business, its buyer personas and its organic search (SEO) objectives. All campaign activity should support your overall marketing objectives.

Creative spark

Are they brimming with ideas and creative solutions that match your brand identity and ‘voice’, but that also translates into a clear strategy geared towards your goals? Can they show you examples of previous work they’ve produced, where it was placed and how it performed?

Here at Click Consult, experts from various departments – including our copywriters, organic search (SEO) executives, account managers, designers and any other in-house experts – get to together for an idea generation session.

With a firm understanding of a client’s organic search objectives, we use a combination of marketing knowledge and creative thinking to pull together a variety of ideas for a strong, targeted outreach campaign that are in line with our clients’ business objectives.

Some examples of content we’ve produced as part of our campaign outreach activity on behalf of clients

Track record of success

Ideally, an agency would have experience in your industry or vertical and of working with a budget range similar to yours. Most reputable agencies can provide a track record of results achieve in the form of case studies and testimonials from happy clients.

As the emphasis in campaign outreach is on having the right content seen by the right people at the right time – and amplifying its reach through social sharing – an agency should be able to demonstrate a full understanding of what makes a piece of content ‘sharable’, as well as how they identify and target relevant, credible blogs.

Relationships with bloggers

Outreach is underpinned by an agency’s ability to not only create high-quality content for your brand, but also to amplify it by ensuring it’s featured by relevant bloggers – the success of a campaign depends on it. This means an agency needs to develop and maintain close relationships with a diverse database of bloggers its team can approach to feature bespoke content on behalf of your brand.

For example, at Click Consult, an essential element of our campaign outreach process is having a genuine interest in the bloggers we approach – we strive to build genuine relationships with them and offer them only content we know will appeal to them and their own audiences.

We’re committed to a content partnership on an individual basis, crafting bespoke content for each one, so checking in with each blogger at various stages of the partnership helps us to personalise our approach and reinforces the point that this process is not a sales pitch; it is a mutually beneficial relationship.

Clear content strategy

It almost goes without saying that there should be no one-size-fits all approach to campaign strategy or execution. This is definitely something that should be decided on a per-client basis. When formulating a content strategy, an agency should take a multi-stranded approach, considering past successes and where improvements can be made. They should also analyse your industry to plan the most effective content for the target audience, and how this could be leveraged through existing contacts. You agency should also regularly review your strategy and brainstorm new ideas, ensuring they consistently deliver the highest quality content, the most innovative strategy, and with sustainable results.