I’ve been there many times. But through trial and error, the Venngage infographics marketing team (including me) has developed an outreach strategy that works.

Listen to this: my team increased our outreach email open rate from 10% for a regular campaign to between 70% and 80%. And we increased our email response rate to 25% – 35% for an average campaign.

There are two major components to our strategy: first, we use infographics and second, we use a tiered email outreach process. Let’s break it down.

Write an Article and Make an Accompanying Infographic

This first step actually includes multiple steps involved in writing an article and creating an infographic. This article isn’t about that, though, so I’m not going to go into those details (here’s a great guide on how to create infographics). But I wanted to make this a point on its own to emphasize that having a visual element that can be extracted from an article and re-purposed on its own is incredibly useful for outreach and can almost guarantee more interest and more backlinks.

I’ve found that placing visual content front and center in email outreach has yielded great response rates. Infographics are a hot content form right now. Including an infographic in your article ensures that even if someone doesn’t read your article, they can still take a moment to look over the infographic.

Plus, infographics are easy to repurpose and super shareable. They perform great on social media sites. And writers can build their own articles around them.

Compile a List of Related Sites

For one article, I typically reach out to anywhere between 100 and 200 contacts. But these aren’t just any old sites I’m reaching out to–it’s a culled list of relevant sites.

How do you compile a list like this without it taking all day? I won’t lie: the process still takes some time, but we’re talking hours as opposed to days. The payoff is worth it, and the more you do it, the faster you’ll get.

Use a combination of tools like Moz, Buzzsumo, and good ole Google to search keywords related to the article to be promoted. These tools generate lists of articles related to your keywords–these are sites and writers who will potentially be interested in linking to your article. The sites that have published infographics in the past will be particularly likely to show interest.

Copy the resulting list into a spreadsheet and then go through it and remove the useless links. Useless links are for sites like Pinterest, Blogspot, Reddit, Growthhackers, LinkedIn, and other sites that you can’t really outreach to.

That’s the easy part. The hard part is finding specific contacts for each site. Depending on how many people you want to outreach to, you can either find your contacts manually by searching the writers and editors of the articles (yes, this involves some light internet creeping…) or you can hire a virtual assistant from a site like Upwork to do it.

You can also do this: Swap the first and second step of this process. This is known as the skyscraper technique, coined by Brian Dean. Basically, you send your first wave of outreach emails before you even publish your article, building excitement and gauging interest. The result is that when you do publish your article, you will have already generated interest in your content, resulting in faster shares and backlinks.

Craft an Enticing Outreach Email

As crucial as actually creating content is, crafting an outreach email that people will actually read. When it comes to a cold email, short and to the point is best. One of the most common mistakes marketers make when first learning to email outreach is to write emails that are way too long.

Craft a concise, friendly email template that you can send out to a big batch of contacts using a mail merge tool like ContentMarketer.io. I like that particular tool because it allows you to schedule automatic follow up emails (more on that in the next step).

Here is an example of an outreach email I sent out to promote an article + infographic about the hero’s journey in popular movies:

Here’s the no-frills list of things you should put in your infographic outreach email:

1. The first name of the contact (make it personal).
2. A friendly introduction.
3. A link to a specific article by the contact.
4. A brief introduction to the article you’re promoting and the link.
5. A mention of the infographic.
6. A no-pressure request for a read and a share.
7. One last salutation.

That’s really all you need!

Pro tip: if they respond and express interest in your infographic, offer the embed code, not just the image. They may choose to just use the image anyway but at least this way they’ll have the option. Be sure to include a link to your site in the embed code.

Follow Up Your Emails Not Once, But Twice

Here’s a little secret my team learned through trial and error: following up with contacts not once, but twice increased our open rates to between 70% – 80% for an average campaign. That’s way better than the 10% open rate we averaged before we started sending follow-ups. It’s a learning process. Persistence works.

The fact is that many of the sites you reach out to receive tons of emails in a week, and it’s easy for your email to get lost in the fray. A couple of follow-up emails will bring your pitch back up to the surface.

I typically send the first follow up email three to four days after the first email, then the second follow-up email another three to four days after that.

What should you put in a follow-up email? Next to nothing. Follow up emails should be short–no longer than two sentences–and not too pushy,  serving as gentle reminders that your first email exists.

From my experience, people aren’t usually bothered by follow up emails (and if they are, they’ll probably just continue to ignore you). Usually, people will respond with something along the lines of, “Sorry, I meant to respond to your email but have been busy.” No harm done.

Here’s an example of a follow-up email I typically send:

The third email that you send will be a similar variation of the second one. If they don’t respond after a third email, drop it.

To make this process less time consuming, I recommend using a mail merge tool.

Don’t be Discouraged – Regroup

Email outreach can be frustrating when it yields poor results. You will probably have to try a couple of different templates to see what sticks. Even then, a fair number of people will still ignore you. But if you keep it concise, friendly, and offer the infographic as something a little extra special, the number of people who do read your email and–miracle of miracles–respond, should increase significantly.

So don’t be discouraged by the email outreach process. Regroup, revise, and try again until finding what works best for you.

The post How to Use Infographics in Your Content Outreach Strategy appeared first on Relevance.

I’m going to start off with the bad news so that we can quickly move on to the good news. The bad news is that, according to a recent study by Moz and Buzzsumo analyzing one million posts, only top 10% of most-shared posts will receive backlinks. That means that the remaining 90% of blog posts that are published receive zero backlinks and fewer than 39 shares.

Yeah, those are scary numbers. But that’s the bad news. Now on to the good! You can benchmark your content to get some concrete numbers to strive for. For example, if you are able to get even one backlink for your blog post, that post is already in the top 10%. Once you’ve breached the top 10%, you have a greater shot at achieving higher share counts and even more backlinks.

How does your content stack up?

A couple of months ago, the other members of the Marketing team and I at Venngage decided to set the bar higher for our content. We knew that if we wanted our content to compete with the top sites, we needed to gain a decent understanding of what a well-performing blog post looks like. Should we aim for 50 total shares per post? 200 shares? 1000 shares? We decided to benchmark our content based on the number of shares our blog posts get, to see whether our blog content was performing as well as the big sites.

To do this, we analyzed every article from the last six months published on the top 115 marketing tech companies on Inbound.org to see how many total shares each post received. Then we dug deeper to see how many shares each post received per social media site (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus).

We used a simple grading scale to measure the performance of each site based on the number of shares per individual blog posts:

We also calculated the average total monthly shares for each site over the same six month period:

So to be in the A grade range, your blog needs to gain a total of almost 15k shares per month, with the majority of your shares coming from Facebook. Now the fun part (hint of sarcasm)–see how your own contact stacks up.

We followed the same framework of analyzing all of your blog posts over the same six month period and assigned a grade to our posts.

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Normalizing Your Shares

As expected, there was a big difference between our absolute number of shares for each blog post and the absolute number of shares for articles on sites with bigger followings like HubSpot and StumbleUpon. Unless you happen to be at one of those top 115 companies, odds are your blog posts generally don’t come close to the same number of shares. But don’t panic! It’s important not to panic.

Look, it’s really hard to reach the same number of shares as companies with a much bigger follower base. It’s worth it to identify what your ultimate goal will be, but that’s why, in order to create a benchmark that is realistic and actionable, you should normalize your shares to level the playing field.

Normalize your shares by dividing the number of shares on a particular article by the number of followers on each social media site. For example, to get the normalized number of Facebook shares for a blog post, you would divide the number of Facebook shares you got for a post by the number of followers your site has on Facebook. This will give you a better idea of how engaged your audience is.

We were able to identify areas where we needed to increase our follower engagement–Twitter and LinkedIn were the main area for us.

Key Takeaways

Here’s a summary of our findings:

There were some findings that surprised us and changed our perspective of what top performing content looks like.

Top content has significantly more shares than the rest.

As you can see in the infographic, in pretty much every area, the blogs that received an A grade had an exponentially higher share count than the rest. In fact, the top 20 MarTech companies account for 80% of shares. This can be discouraging but keep in mind that in order to get into the top 10% range, all you have to do is get at least 39 shares and one backlink. This is very achievable with some basic blog traffic outreach.

Infographic posts perform very well.

We were surprised (but delighted) to find that posts with infographics had a significantly higher share count than other general posts, video posts, and interviews. It’s nothing new that MarTech companies like infographics, but the numbers still surprised us!

LinkedIn is the top site for normalized shares.

That’s right–at least, where B2B sites are concerned. LinkedIn shares are substantially higher than other platforms. Basically, if you’re not putting energy into LinkedIn activity, you should start. We’ve certainly upped our LinkedIn game.

Keep track of your month over month blog traffic.

Even if certain blog posts perform to an A grade standard, your overall share count month over month can still be low. That’s why it’s a good idea to track your monthly metrics to see how your blog is performing overall, so you can recalibrate your content strategy accordingly.

You can read the full content marketing benchmark study on our blog.

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The post Why You Should Benchmark Your Blog Post Performance [Infographic] appeared first on Relevance.