In this edition of Company Spotlight, we look into how InspireBeats used influencer outreach to achieve their target of getting podcasts, guest blogs, media features. What were the goals they’ve set and how did they work things out? Did influencer marketing work for them as a strategy in increasing the number of quality leads coming through their website? Read on to learn more!
Give us the background of your company – what is it and who is it for?
InspireBeats is an all in one lead generation and outbound email company for startups and agencies. Our ideal clients are startup founders with small to no sales teams, and we do lead generation for larger (and even a couple public) companies with millions in revenue. We send emails on their behalf to get their salespeople into more meetings.
Tell us the background of the influencer marketing campaign?
I came on as the Chief Marketing Sumo over here – joining a small team and expected to make a huge difference in terms of new leads and opening up additional marketing channels. Since the company does outbound email as its core, I figured it could work for building brand equity as well.
What were the marketing goals of the campaign?
Marketing goals at a high level were to drive more leads to InspireBeats.com that were interested in using lead generation or outbound emails to help grow influencers. In addition to that overarching goal I added a few KPI driven goals: 10 podcasts, 10 blog features and 10 guest blogs per month that I have the team aim for.
How did you target influencers aka what metrics and information did you use?
For podcasts we started by targeting shows that interviewed influencers in similar spaces, including the NinjaOutreach founder 🙂
After that we started segmenting by number of reviews, and our lead generation platform has the ability to pull number of listeners, so we try to target podcasts that have more that 3000 listeners per episode.
NinjaOutreach was helpful originally for finding blogs that accept guest posts.
Did you provide anything to the influencers in return for their help?
The best value we gave was information – the pitch I approached with was “What We Learned Sending 1,000,000 Cold Emails This Year,” and since very few people are talking about that on podcasts and guest blogs there was good fit there.
Besides that we didn’t do much else – no offers to pay them or anything like that.
How long did the campaign last?
Still ongoing but we originally tested it for one month.
What were the results of the campaign?
Ended up on 15 podcasts, 5 guest blogs published and 5 media features. Not too bad, some were on target, some were lower in terms of hitting the KPIs. It’s been great for brand building and had a substantial increase on the number and quality of leads coming through the site.
Did you use any tools to make your campaign easier?
Big fan of using mail merge to send emails in bulk – there’s a free tool called Yet Another Mail Merge. Also used NinjaOutreach to find influencers that were blogging about similar topics. Otherwise we used google searching and the iTunes store.
What was the hardest part of running the campaign?
Consistently doing outreach – in total the campaign requires sending about 300 cold emails a month, which our sales based team is used to, but is a rate that would kill most marketing people.
What was a major takeaway you learned about influencer marketing?
It works. And influencers need people to feature in their posts. If you approach people with a halfway decent pitch and a customized email, there’s a very good chance you’ll get featured.
Did you enjoy reading this? Share your thoughts in the comment section below! Or if you have an interesting influencer marketing story to share, contact us and let us know about it!
