Influencer outreach is tough, but the benefits are mouth-watering. So with appropriate blogger outreach tools, you can get the benefit of the practice.
According to Tomoson — featured below — brands generate more than $6 for every dollar they spend on influencer marketing. So what blogger outreach tools and platforms deliver these types of results?
Let’s find out.
Skip to the blogger outreach tool that appeals to you the most. This is a list of the best of them.
- NinjaOutreach
- Buzzsumo
- BuzzStream
- Pitchbox
- Klear
- Mailshake
- Traackr
- Upfluence
- Muck Rack
- Tomoson
Let’s explore what’s in these tools for you.
Best Blogger Outreach Tools
1. NinjaOutreach
NinjaOutreach is one of the best outreach tools that help you get your target audiences’ attention by filtering through millions of influencers’ insights.
You can find emails, social media influencers, and business profiles from any location and niche by searching keywords.
Features of NinjaOutreach
NinjaOutreach is feature-rich and attracts bloggers from any niche. Here are some of its features.
Lead Generation
NinjaOutreach helps you find business leads with the largest audience. Your part is to choose your niche of interest and location keywords. The tool allows you to find bloggers for specific business opportunities such as sponsored posts, guest blogs, etc.
The tool also syncs with a free Chrome Extension that allows you to get leads even when you’re doing other things on the web.
Built-In Email Finder
This feature lets you find the emails of your leads faster. Plus, NinjaOutreach would crawl up emails and other contact information from a list of URLs.
Email Scheduling
Once you sync your NinjaOutreach account with your inbox, you can send email outreaches without switching apps.
Create New Outreach Templates, Modify, and Reuse
Here you get pre-written email outreach templates that you can modify and reuse. So, you always send the right business emails. You can also create and add new emails to your template library.
Create Email List for Your Desired Bloggers
NinjaOutreach automatically fills the contact data and profile of the bloggers you add to your lead list. You can track your interactions with your leads and get notifications round the clock.
Link Building Software
This tool helps you build quality backlinks beyond guest posting.
Effective Collaboration
You can create a team by giving access permission to whatever number of people you need to get the work done. You can leave instructions in the form of custom notes for your team to know what to do per time.
Pricing of NinjaOutreach
The Flex plan is $389 per month, while the Pro plan is $589 per month and the Silver Plus plan is $849 per month. Albeit, you can get 60 percent off by subscribing to the annual payment method.
Both plans give you access to the same number of
- Bloggers
- Business emails
- Influencers, and more
However, the Pro plan gives you more contacts, connected emails, seats, and monthly email limits. You have seven days to try it for free and cancel whenever you want.
Advantages of NinjaOutreach
NinjaOutreach’s benefits include:
- Large-scale influencer marketing
- The CRM is easy to use
- Quick Search
- Get More Data
Some customers are happy about this tool.
Limitations of NinjaOutreach
The monthly payment plan is three times more than the annual payment. And based on complaints from users, some find the auto subscription inconvenient.
Others complain that they didn’t get warned after the trial period, and didn’t get refunds.
2. Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo helps businesses and marketers discover bloggers who will drive their marketing goals. Henley Wing and James Blackwell founded this platform in 2012.
This platform provides its users with in-depth metrics on influencers, some of which are bloggers. Buzzsumo keeps a database of bloggers who have genuinely engaged, human audiences only.
How can you benefit from Buzzsumo?
Let’s find out.
Features of Buzzsumo
Image Credit: Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo’s features cut across multiple marketing spaces, including content research, link building, and web monitoring. But for this article, we’ll focus on its blogger features.
Engagement
This feature lets you discover writers who get a lot of shares, likes, and links. It aims to filter for blogger engagement. So you’d find bloggers who have followers, and you’d know where these followers hang out.
Take Dara Fontein’s content, for example. Her top articles have engagements of 3,400 and 5,600, including three and eight backlinks, respectively.
Image Credit: Buzzsumo
Search by Size
You can also find bloggers from big publishers or niche websites. So you could find authors from Forbes or some local Moroccan food blogger. For example, Dara Fontein is a writer from Hootsuite.com.
Domain Analysis
If a platform has many bloggers, you can enter its domain to find its top-performing authors. For example, you’d enter HuffPost’s domain to find their top bloggers.
Language Filter
You can find bloggers in different languages too. This feature is vital if you have a global audience. So you can discover influential bloggers who write in any language you use in your business.
Pricing of Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo has four pricing plans. However, you can only access their full blogger outreach tools if you subscribe to their Plus plan or higher. For example, you can’t access the top author search tool in the Pro plan.
For all plans, you’ll get 20 percent off if you paid for a full year
- Pro is $99 per month
- Plus is $179 per month
- Large is $299 per month
- Enterprise is based on custom requirements
Charities and NGOs get 40 percent off all plans. Meanwhile, educational institutions get a 30 percent discount.
Advantages of Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo benefits and advantages include that it’s
- Easy to use
- Has a large database of bloggers
- Deep insight into each blogger’s influence and strengths
- Extra helpful features for other marketing commitments
- Highly responsive support
Limitations of Buzzsumo
Here’s where Buzzsumo can improve
- Marketers with lower budgets struggle to justify the price of this tool
- The toolset can be overwhelming
- Search results can give broad results at times
3. BuzzStream
BuzzStream helps marketers and brands connect with bloggers. The software provides bloggers’ contact information, social media profiles, and their websites’ metrics.
So brands can find and prioritize bloggers that match brand messaging and outreach goals.
Features of BuzzStream
BuzzStream has four core features to help you find, contact, organize, and improve your relationship with bloggers.
Research
The research feature helps you
- Browse to find prospects for your list
- Add new contacts to your list
- Automatically discover blogger contact details and performance metrics
This feature eliminates the need for spreadsheets, so you can use the data right in front of you to build the blogger profiles that fit your business.
BuzzStream helps you send highly personalized messages without losing efficiency. So you can leave spreadsheets behind for good. With this feature, you can do these:
- Segment your lists
- Create campaign templates
- Personalize your messages
- Decide when to send your message
- Automate follow up
- Set reminders to follow up
This feature has a full suite of functions you can perform with it. From tacking your email to sending your outreach on the go, getting detailed profiles to managing bulk emails — BuzzStream simplifies your email outreach.
Manage
You can view each team members’ outreach progress, share notes with them, and manage your relationships in one place. This tool makes it easy for you to manage your projects in one place.
Report
Analytics is critical for business success. That’s why buzzStream provides users with a robust analytics tool that covers team, campaign, project, and email reporting.
This tool’s analytics feature includes, at least, 15 types of analytics. Each analytics type comes with in-depth data and reporting.
Pricing of BuzzStream
BuzzStream comes with four pricing plans.
- Starter for $24 per month – ideal for 1,000 contacts
- Growth for $124 per month – ideal if you have 25,000 or fewer contacts
- Professional for $299 per month – ideal for up to 100,000 contacts
- Custom for $999 or more – ideal for 300,000 contacts or more
Except you plan to do some advanced marketing, the Growth Plan should cover your blogger outreach needs.
Advantages of BuzzStream
Users loved BuzzStream for many reasons. The most recurring reasons why users love BuzzStream include
- Customer service is helpful
- Easy to learn and use
- The email templates work well
- Highly customizable email composition and sending feature
- Saves time with its follow up feature
Limitations of BuzzStream
Here are user complaints about BuzzStream.
- It collects contact email addresses on websites, not individual email
- Email-based customer support is too slow
- Might show glitches at times. For example, BuzzStream may record an email as never opened; meanwhile, prospects’ replies suggest they opened the message.
4. Pitchbox
Pitchbox is a leading blogger outreach tool that’s received a ton of endorsement and praise from top marketers and industry leaders. Brian Dean, Neil Patel, Ryan Stewart, and others have said pleasant things about Pitchbox.
But what’s in it for you? Does Pitchbox live up to its praises? What features can you find in it, and what do these features do? Let’s answer these questions now.
Features of Pitchbox
Pitchbox packs a lot of punch in its blogger outreach offer. Here are the features you’ll find in it.
Blogger directory and contact database: Pitchbox keeps a database of bloggers and their contact details. It also updates that database often. It adds new, influential bloggers, and updates old data to new ones.
Campaign management: The platform comes with a rich reporting and management feature. So you can get the full insight on your campaign efforts and know where yo improve.
Relationship management: Pitchbox lets you manage your contacts and prioritize your list based on the most valuable contacts you have on it.
Filtering: You can filter for the bloggers that you want for your blogger outreach.
Pricing of Pitchbox
Pitchbox invites interested prospects to book a private demo session with them. They don’t have a pricing plan displayed on their website.
Advantages of Pitchbox
Users love these about Pitchbox:
- Intelligently removes a prospect’s contact from a pitching list to prevent duplicate pitching
- Automatically finds contacts
- Suggests relevant bloggers
- Provides API integration with other tools to supply relevant marketing data
- Customized reporting
- Responsive customer service
Limitations of Pitchbox
Here’s what users say of Pitchbox’s limitations,
- Pulls out irrelevant contacts at times, based on the keyword entered
- Pricey for small businesses
5. Klear
Klear helps brands discover influencers that match their marketing goals and budget. It claims to be the smartest influencer search engine available.
You can find bloggers by their location and category. Klear avails information on a blogger’s audience demographics, social media metrics, topic, their level of influence, and more.
Features of Klear
On Klear, you can spot and connect with bloggers as quickly. The platform uses four features to make this connection successful. Let’s explore them.
Find Influencers
Image Credit: Klear
The platform lets you use filters to find the bloggers you seek to engage with. So you can filter your results based on your brand’s marketing goals.
Influencer Analysis
Image Credit: Klear
Once you’ve found the bloggers who match your goals, you want to analyze them to ensure they are an excellent investment for your brand. So, you’d get into the nitty-gritty of what each influencer does and how they do it.
Manage Relationships
Image Credit: Klear
With this tool, you can manage your customer communications in one place. Klear comes with a CRM system, whether you use the platform for communication or not.
Measure Campaigns
Image Credit: Klear
Klear provides the analytics to ensure that marketers are getting their desired ROI and justifying their effort.
Pricing of Klear
Klear provides a pricing plan for startups or small businesses that have less than 20 employees. But it targets enterprise users more. You’ll have to request a demo if you’re interested in the pricing details.
Advantages of Klear
Here are recurring reasons why users love Klear.
- Klear’s True Reach metric separates high quality, influential bloggers from nonperformers
- Customer service runs through a dedicated customer success manager
- Makes finding influential bloggers easy
- Dashboard functions are minimalistic and intuitive
- Find bloggers by keyword
Limitations of Klear
Drawbacks that users noted.
- Klear shows inaccurate influencer locations at times
- Price is steep
- Choosing Skills from a predetermined set of categories
6. Mailshake
Mailshake is the tool for cold email outreach. It features email templates, lets users send customized bulk email messages, follow-ups, replies, and conversion data.
The platform has more than 49,000 users. So what does Mailshake have for you? Let’s find out.
Features of Mailshake
Mailshake features include
- Mailshake for Sales
- Mailshake for PR
- Mailshake for Link Building
- Mail Merge
- Follow-Ups
- Lead Catcher
- Integrations
- Phone Dialer
However, not all these features are relevant for blogger outreach. So what would you need for blogger outreach? Let’s explore them.
Mailshake for PR
This feature helps you secure blogger mentions. It supports blogger outreach that is personalized and scalable. It also supports automatic follow-ups and provides in-depth analytics.
Mail Merge
The Mail Merge feature lets you send out personalized emails to a group of contacts at once. You can upload the contacts in seconds and automate follow-ups.
Phone Dialer
Image Credit: Mailshake
Mailshake helps you integrate cold calling into your blogger outreach. You can all bloggers straight from your web browser, record the call, and export the calls to a CRM.
Lead Catcher
This lightweight CRM helps you manage your leads. So you can
- Reply to your messages, regardless of channel, straight from your Mailshake
- Track your email opens, clicks, and responses
- Automate prospect update
Other Handy Features for Blogger Outreach
Since your main goal for considering Mailshake is for blogger outreach, other features you’ll find useful include
Integrations: Connects your data with other apps, like your CRM and external analytics.
Follow-ups: Lets you automate follow up.
Pricing of Mailshake
Mailshake has three pricing plans to match its audience’s needs.
- Email Outreach is $58 per month per user
- Sales Engagement is $88 per month per user
- Agency is custom plan
Advantages of Mailshake
Why users love Mailshake.
- Simple to use
- Clear and intuitive interface
- Email cleaning function helps reduce email bounce rate
- Useful sample email templates
- Very responsive customer service
- Saves a lot of time
Limitations of Mailshake
Almost all Mailshake users say that they have nothing negative to say about the tool. However, one did say that the software counts out-of-office responses as a valid reply.
7. Traackr
Traackr boasts of being the standard for influencer marketing. With its Influencer Relationship Management (IRM), you’ll have the structure and insights you need for your marketing efforts. You’ll know:
- Which blogger is the best match for your brand
- The value of the collaboration, and
- How to extend the relationship to your existing team.
For more access to a massive and growing database of influencers, you can use Traackr’s IRM for agencies. Plus, you get reports on campaigns and influencer performance.
Traackr’s Influencer Market Benchmark (IBM) lets you measure the attention that your brand gets from influencers.
Features of Traackr
Traackr’s features help to build the right relationships with influencers and measure the impact of the collaboration. Here are some of these features.
Influencer Discovery
This feature lets you find bloggers based on the performance of their posts and get their audience demographics. You can also use engagement rate or follower count across platforms. Albeit, you can use the recommended influencers to make your search faster.
Influencer Vetting
Traackr helps you find brand-safe top performers in your desired niche that match your audience. You’ll also see what percentage of their followers are real or not.
Relationship Management
For visibility and collaboration, you can keep track of your interaction with the blogger while you coordinate your team.
Brand Safety and Values Match
You can protect your brand from fraudulent influencers and those who don’t align with your values.
Campaign and Program Reporting
You can track and analyze all your results at the same time. And since the data points are transparent and clickable, you can see what’s driving your results.
Influencer Marketing Benchmarking
You can compare the performance of your organic and paid influencer marketing to your competitors.
Pricing of Traackr
Traackr doesn’t list its price, but a third-party website says it costs $499 a month and charges another $2,500 for training, lifetime support, and software setup.
Advantages of Traackr
What users love about Traackr.
- Maintains an extensive blogger database
- Intuitive platform with a minimal learning curve
- Has a very responsive and helpful customer service team
- Insightful analytics
Limitations of Traackr
What users don’t like.
- Data isn’t as customizable as possible
- Analytics and other advanced capabilities demand technical expertise from the user
8. Upfluence
Upfluence is popular as an easy to use blogger outreach tool. In particular, the tool works for influencer marketing and is recommended for eCommerce and consumer brands.
More than 1,600 brands use Upfluence, including big brands like Amazon, Verizon, Universal, and Asus.
Features of Upfluence
Management
Upfluence provides a central location from where you can manage your different outreach campaigns.
Automation
The platform has automation tools to facilitate any blogger outreach campaign. You’ll reach a larger audience and get more leads with minimal effort.
Analytics
With in-depth reporting and analytics, you’ll have the metrics and insights you need to make campaign decisions.
Influencer Community
Nowadays, outreach campaigns rely heavily on influencing. As a result, Upfluence lets you connect to multiple social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter.
Pricing of Upfluence
Upfluence has three pricing plans, and they include:
- Growth Plan
- Scale Plan
- Enterprise Plan
However, unlike most other blogger outreach tools on this list, all Upfluence plans are private. You’ll need to contact the sales team to discuss the price, depending on your needs.
Upfluence doesn’t have any free account, but you can download and use the Chrome extension for free.
Advantages of Upfluence
Some of the best things about Upfluence include:
- Easy management of multiple campaigns from one location
- Quick access to influencers on social media platforms
- Dependable analytics and reporting
- Good customer support and resources
Limitations of Upfluence
Some of the limitations of Upfluence include:
- Pricing isn’t transparent
- More options for brand and business than individual marketers.
9. Muck Rack
Muck Rack is a PR software specifically for finding journalists. It aims to make your outreach to journalists measurable, scalable, results-oriented, and time-saving.
Apart from reaching out to journalists, you can also follow any news of interest and build necessary reports.
Features of Muck Rack
Here are Muck Rack features you’ll find useful.
Media Database
Image Credit: Muck Rack
This platform hosts a robust database of bloggers. So you can discover and build relationships with key media contacts.
Monitoring and Alerts
Image Credit: Muck Rack
Media monitoring helps you spot media opportunities, track brand mentions, and leverage any relevant news that can boost your blogger outreach strategy.
Pitching
Image Credit: Muck Rack
Since lack of personalization is the chief reason journalists turn down pitches that might have been a good fit. Hence, pitching personalized messages is critical to outreach success.
Collaboration
Image Credit: Muck Rack
Muck Rack comes with a workflow management feature that lets you delegate your tasks to the software. It also features a CRM to help you build better relationships with your prospects.
Reporting and Measurement
Image Credit: Muck Rack
The software lets you track your outreach performance and create reports. This tool promises to aggregate and structure your reporting automatically.
Pricing of Muck Rack
Muck Rack doesn’t provide any pricing information on its website. So you’ll reach out to them for a demo to get their pricing.
Advantages of Muck Rack
Here’s what users say they found advantageous about Muck Rack.
- Find bloggers you can’t find in traditional databases
- Access to each blogger’s bios and interests
- Getting media alerts
- Modern user interface and intuitive design
- Conversation logging feature
Limitations of Muck Rack
What users would want to see but don’t have yet.
- Access to local media outlets and bloggers
- They exclude people from lesser-known publications
10. Tomoson
Tomoson lets you connect with bloggers who will review or unbox your products, broadcast your content, make product videos, take photos, or write articles for you.
What features should you expect? Read on.
Features of Tomoson
Here are Tomoson’s features you’ll use.
Escrow: Lets you hold payments with Tomoson so that you can pay a blogger after they complete a task.
Bulk Invite: Invite bloggers and then approve the ones you want to work with and send them your products to review.
Rating: When bloggers submit their work, you can verify them and then rate them.
Pricing of Tomoson
Tomoson offers five pricing plans.
- Basic – $49 per month
- Starter – $99 per month
- Business – $199 per month
- Agency – $ 399 per month
- Scale – $599 per month
You can start a 21-day trial; no credit card asked. They also offer enterprise plans for businesses that have larger needs than covered in the fixed pricing plans.
Advantages of Tomoson
Features users love about Tomoson.
- Escrow eliminates the fear of one party defaulting on the terms work
- Bloggers are pretty cooperative and do a neat job with product reviews
- The platform is best for using micro-influencers
- Offers free trial
Limitations of Tomoson
Tomoson’s user complaints and platform limitations are as follows,
- It doesn’t provide detailed influencer or blogger data so you must do your research
- Sometimes bloggers may apply for an old campaign
Bottom Line: Putting these Best Blogger Outreach Tools to Work
Influencer outreach can be very lucrative, but you want to define your goals, build your target blogger list intelligently.
Hence, the need for these platforms. As you can see, some software solutions are better than others. So you want to try those that match your business objectives.
Scott L. Macarthur is a marketing consultant and an online author. He is mostly engaged in providing his expertise to startups and SMBs. He is also an author on TheNextWeb.