Alex Turnbull started the journey of growing his startup (Groove) with no readers and an unshakable determination to build an audience fast.
He got 1,000+ subscribers from a single blog post in 24 Hours.
Wow!
I was blown away when I read his story. It’s so inspirational!
Let’s see how we can take this growth hack and turn it into action, using just one tool.
So what’s the Big Idea?
Before getting into the details, let’s see what is the high level strategy behind…
Alex told a friend about his approach: publish the content and email the link to influential people in his space
Right…
He got a “Dude. Are you kidding me right now?”
It’s true that this was happening in 2013 and since then influencer marketing became all the rage.
Right now, you face yet another challenge.
Influencers got bombarded with hundreds of templated messages, asking them for a share or a link. And just going for the “ask” will get you few positive answers, if any.
So the question is: does this strategy work right now? Are we too late at the party to capitalize on influencer marketing?
The good news is that this still works! There’s no question about it.
However, you need to do it right.
Influencer marketing relies on an evergreen principle.
There are people in your market that have access to huge audiences, relevant for your business.
As you’ll need a long time to build a big, targeted audience on your own, you can significantly speed up the process if you manage to get endorsed exposure to established, relevant audiences.
So let’s see how Alex did it.
STEP 1: Build an Influencers List
The 2 criteria Alex followed are pretty common sense, but both are crucial in order for this approach to work well:
- The influencer needs to have a similar audience with the one you’re trying to reach
- They should personally be able to get value out of your content
Aim to be as targeted as possible at this step. This will ensure that you gain a targeted audience and also that you get a much higher positive response rate from influencers.
I just need to add another prerequisite element here: your content should be top notch, otherwise don’t even bother with influencer marketing.
Related to the second point, it helps if you bring a fresh perspective on the topic you cover.
If the influencers you target have shared already a lot of similar content, they bring no value added to their audience. There’s no reason for them to share yet another article on a topic beaten to death.
Being distinctive is a must to catch their attention.
How to Perform This Step with Ninja Outreach
- Log into the tool, or if you’re not a user yet, sign-up for a 14-day trial here.
- In the header menu, go to Search, and select Find Leads.
- Type your relevant keywords into the search bar to find thousands of influencers in your niche. NinjaOutreach has over 25 million websites in its database and growing.
- You can also switch your search to social so you can find influencers on Twitter and Instagram.
- Apply appropriate filters and perform other searches using several related keywords and you’re all set.
- Add the relevant influencers to your “List of leads”, so that you can use this list for the next steps.
STEP 2: Engage Before Reaching Out
Even if you have the greatest content ever, you should not just go and ask the other person to share it.
As Alex puts it: “Nobody cares about you until you give them a reason.”
Always lead with value. Be the first to offer something valuable, not the first to ask.
This is exactly what Alex did.
He started to engage with the influencers quite a while before needing a share.
This warmed up the relationships and got him poised for success.
His exact engagement checklist is:
- Follow on Twitter
- Two tweets
- Two blog comments
- Two blog shares
- Personal email
You can adjust this list, but the principle is the same: engage with the influencers first.
Also, he did this on a quite large scale, starting to build relationships with more than 80 influencers.
If you want to get big results, you do need to take massive action.
How to Perform This Step with Ninja Outreach
- Ninja Outreach automatically finds the social profiles and in most cases, also the email addresses of your leads. Then it makes them available to you, grouped together. Huge time saver!
- So just head over to the “List of leads” you built at STEP 1 for this project and you can start to perform all the steps Alex went through, from within the Ninja Outreach interface.
STEP 3: Validating the Idea
Even if Alex established contact and engaged with the influencers in the previous step, he still did not proceed with the “ask”.
He didn’t just send them the link.
Before publishing the post, he sent a message asking for the permission to share an exclusive link to the post with them.
This is actually a technique he borrowed from Derek Halpern and it was really effective: 83% of the people said yes.
Most people rush things and skip this step. And this is an opportunity for you to stand out via taking the time to build the relationship.
Asking for permission to share shows respect for the influencer and if you’ve done a good job in the previous steps, many will say yes.
How to Perform This Step with Ninja Outreach
- The biggest challenge of this step is finding the influencers’ email address. NinjaOutreach automatically finds the email address of most prospects.
- For the cases in which you don’t have the email address of the influencers, you have two options: (i) send a DM via Twitter or (ii) Ninja Outreach provides links to the ‘Contact’ pages of the blogs – just fill in the contact forms with your message. NinjaOutreach also has a contact form autofiller that lets you fill up contact forms in a click – so you don’t have to fill up contact forms manually, one by one.
STEP 4: The Ask (With an Easy Twitter Link Included)
An hour before publishing the post, Alex sent the link to all the influencers who confirmed interest.
And he did another great thing – he made it very easy for them to share the post, via including an easy to share tweet link (created with ClicktoTweet).
In 24 hours, the post generated 1,000+ subscribers.
As you can see, the “ask” itself is just a small part of the outreach process. A positive answer is mainly driven by all the steps taken before the “ask”.
How to Perform This Step with Ninja Outreach
- For this step, you can follow the exact approach described at STEP 3.
STEP 5: Responding to Every Comment
All the previous steps described above paid off, as some really big names in the industry commented on the post.
This got the interest of other people who read the article and some of them commented, as well.
Alex responded to every comment, generating engagement, subscribers and gathering great feedback and ideas to use for developing additional content in the future.
STEP 6: Capitalizing on the Momentum
After publishing the first post, Alex continued to add value to its growing audience via posting new weekly content.
And all the hard work described in the previous steps paid off. After four weeks, he generated 5,000 email subscribers and 535 trial signups to the Groove SAAS.
These numbers are mind blowing, as many businesses don’t manage to build a list of 5,000 subscribers in a year.
Conclusion
Influencer marketing works and the above is just one case study. If you want to get inspired even more, check out these 32 more influencer marketing and blogger outreach case studies.
Here’s a watch out, though.
If done manually, the whole process can be incredibly time-consuming.
That’s where an outreach tool that can assist you throughout the process can help a lot.
There’s a ton of outreach tools out there, and the purpose of the post was not to review them.
However, there is something I’d like to stress.
- There are several phases of the outreach process when you do influencer marketing.
- I believe the best way to go is to find a tool that you can use for each and every phase.
I like Ninja Outreach, but you shouldn’t necessarily just take my word for it.
I suggest to create an awesome piece of content and sgo for an influencer campaign this week.
Then sign up for a 14-day Ninja Outreach trial and kick off the outreach process, go through the whole experience yourself and see how you like the tool.
Try Alex’s approach and then come back and share with us your results in the comments.
Or if you’re already experienced, we’d love to hear from you what is your perspective on influencer marketing.
What are the tips and tricks you find most valuable?
Eugene Mota helps entrepreneurs build profitable blogs and businesses they love. Check out his highly actionable guide How to Start a Business in 8 Easy Steps and visit his blog for tips on how to get more leads and clients at EugeneMota.com.