After several years in a media agency, I believe that link outreach teams face the toughest job in the agency.
Imagine telling a programmatic trader to get impressions for a client without paying for any of them. Or imagine telling a TV buyer to secure spots based on exceptional creative, without any money exchanging hands.
The life of someone in outreach has become very challenging. The days of emailing travel, mommy, and lifestyle bloggers and offering them a small payment to publish a link within their content are long gone.
With Google Webmaster Guidelines compliance at an all-time high, outreach teams are expected to deliver the same number of links as before. They have to get influencers to talk about a brand solely based on the content the brand provides. Here are a few reasons I believe they have the most difficult job in the agency:
1. Bloggers Still Expect Payment
For many years, bloggers received payments for guest posts. This practice became normalized, and many bloggers still expect payment to feature branded content. This has “polluted” a significant part of the link graph, and the industry bears the blame.
When outreach teams cannot make payments to bloggers to ensure compliance, it limits the number of bloggers who can feature the content. This is especially prevalent in particular blogger verticals like mommy and travel bloggers. Therefore, outreach teams face restrictions on the coverage they can achieve, irrespective of the content quality.
2. The Content Doesn’t Always Sit on the Client’s Website
Outreach teams may have excellent research or content to distribute, but it may not reside on the client’s website. This presents a challenge: getting influencers to link back to the client’s site.
Even if the content is great and the influencer is willing to cover it, the outreach team still needs to provide a compelling reason to link back to the client’s site, beyond the fact that the client produced it.
Moreover, the ideal situation for the outreach team is to get a link back to a product page related to the research rather than just the home page, which creates a significant challenge.
3. The Content Given to the Outreach Team Isn’t Linkworthy
It’s common for the outreach team to receive content that’s tough to pitch to bloggers.
By the time content is signed off by various stakeholders within an organization and deemed “on brand,” it may be stripped of its linkworthiness.
There are traits of content that earn links and shares; however, some content types, like opinionated and political content, are out of reach for brands. If the content isn’t at least insightful, bloggers won’t want to share it with their readers.
In such cases, outreach teams must rely on their connections to secure links, but this approach has its limits.
4. Contact Restrictions Limit Them to Lower-Tier Influencers
The outreach team needs authoritative links but may be restricted from contacting top-tier influencers.
Medium-sized or larger organizations often have additional social or PR teams that maintain relationships with authority influencers. Building strong relationships with these teams is crucial since they can limit the number and authority of influencers the SEO team can contact.
The outreach teams are tasked with securing links from authoritative websites but are often restricted from contacting those very sites, making their job extremely challenging.
Why You Should Adopt a Positive Mindset Around Outreach
Despite these challenges, successful outreach campaigns are still feasible.
While industry veterans are aware of these challenges, focusing on them can create a negative mindset, limiting potential. It’s essential to maintain a positive mindset that continually challenges what is possible.
Here are some ways to address these challenges:
1. Improve Responsibility and Accountability of Performance
Outreach teams must be involved at all stages of content creation. In larger teams or when multiple agencies are involved, outreach teams may have limited influence on content ideation and production.
The person doing the outreach often knows what will work best. It’s critical they are involved from the ideation stage and are accountable for the entire process of content marketing.
This prevents blame games, where the outreach team blames the content for poor results, and content producers blame the outreach efforts. Having one team both responsible and accountable avoids this issue.
The same applies to a website’s overall performance in organic search. Often, a technical optimization team and a content marketing team work separately. These teams must be collectively accountable for the client’s performance, not just the team that directly reports to the client.
2. Strong Client Stewardship
Poor content and difficulties in getting content live can often be addressed through strong client stewardship. This involves meeting key stakeholders and understanding the requirements for getting content live. An obstacle report can clarify the barriers and outline actions to move forward.
This includes a clear approach to stakeholder management, ensuring that client approvals deliver against campaign objectives and maintaining good relationships with social/PR teams.
To Wrap Up
In my opinion, outreach teams have the most challenging role in the agency. While some challenges are beyond their control, many stem from organizational dysfunctions that can be addressed and improved.
A few years ago, content distribution platforms appeared and soared in popularity, promising wide-reaching content distribution. These paid media platforms offered a way to reduce pressure on earned content distribution. However, successful case studies showing SEO benefits from these platforms are rare, and they now feature lower-quality inventory filled with “clickbait” ads. Paid distribution has its place and can be effective, but it should be viewed as incremental rather than a substitute for earned distribution.
Outreach remains crucial, and agencies must strive to get it right.
