Abraham Harrison
Last week Rodrigo Martucci addressed some questions and issue that people who read Marketing Conversation or know a little about The Abraham Harrison Way always ask, some of which was explored in How Blogger Outreach Works at Abraham Harrison. Rodrigo is one of the most innovative, creative, and passionate staffers at my agency, pretty much our go-to guy for Brazil — culture, Portuguese, social media, etc — so I asked him to expand upon my post and to address some of the comments people had in the form of Following up on Blogger Outreaches and Staying Relevant:
After Chris’ post on “How Blogger Outreach Works at Abraham Harrison“, some great comments were made and questions were raised on how the follow up process works and how to reach the highest influence from such a huge database of bloggers.
One of the most important pieces of a successful blogger outreach is staying relevant. There is huge database of bloggers today and although it might be tempting, you must limit your outreaches to your target audience. It has been a long-standing industry practice to email as many people as possible and hope that some of them will bite. This is why A&H has been so successful when it comes to blogger outreaches. Bloggers are so surprised to find a person on the other side of the conversation that they become more personal, more attentive and more responsive. This is the basic idea behind a blogger outreach follow up. A lot of bloggers don’t respond to the first email thinking that the information is not relevant to them, it is spam or it is just not worth asking questions to a robot. We find that a lot of times we receive a lot more responses from the 2nd or 3rd follow ups than we did on the 1st.
The basic guidelines for a good follow up are:
- Let them know you are following up. It’s not the first time you are reaching them, so don’t change the message completely, hoping they will think it’s something new, because it will backfire.
- Talk like a person. As it was mentioned before, this was a targeted outreach. Don’t speak in totally general terms and don’t make it clear that you used a name replacement tool, if you did. (don’t you hate it when car insurance companies call you with that recorded message and they just replace your name in a different tone)
- Focus on a short message that will tell them what you want and what they can gain from it. (special gifts or privileges to bloggers go a long way)
- Have the information ready. A lot of bloggers will just copy the information that you send to them, so make sure it is ready to go into a post.
- Do a blog search. There are many tools for this and what you might find out is that they already posted, but haven’t told you yet. If this is the case, it is still good to send a thank you email.
In conclusion, please stay relevant. I’ve said before that this is what separates us from the rest of the PR agencies out there. Once your information is relevant, you have bargaining power to follow up and let them know that this information is exactly what they need.
