Today, the online influencer industry is as large as ever. More and more people are using the internet so there’s always a new audience to reach.
As a business user, you need an outreach campaign tool to maximize your efforts. Such tools help in automation which will make the influencer outreach process a lot easier.
There are so many outreach campaign tools in the market and sometimes it is difficult to choose the best one that suits your needs.
In this article, we will be reviewing two of the best ones – NinjaOutreach and BuzzStream.
Let’s jump right in.
What Is NinjaOutreach?
Image source: NinjaOutreach
NinjaOutreach is a software that connects businesses with the right bloggers and social media influencers that they need to promote their brands and grow their followership in a more organic way than with conventional advertising.
It saves bloggers and digital marketers hours of trying to find influencers and guest posting opportunities.
Before apps like NinjaOutreach, a lot of businesses shied away from influencer marketing as much as possible because it was always a tough task to find and connect with influencers using a single software, but NinjaOutreach has all of the things you need to stay in touch with influencers in one place.
NinjaOutreach is perfect for hundreds of reasons, but the most popular ones that it is known for are link building, guest posting, podcasts and interviews, content promotion, social media marketing, business branding, etc.
It doesn’t end there. As much as the primary function of NinjaOutreach is to find influencers, businesses can also use it to spot new leads.
NinjaOutreach is easy to use and does not require any technical knowledge. As long as you can perform a simple search on Google, then you use this software.
The software has a search bar that you can use to find your influencers by industry and location.
When you have applied your search, NinjaOutreach will show you a few information, starting with the name of the prospective clients.
You will also find other results on the influencer such as SEO metric, contact information, analytics on engagement. With this data, you will be able to compare the influencers that are faring well with the ones that are not.
The software lets you save the names and details on your client inside of a file. You can send this file to members of your team and or another client.
NinjaOutreach has an array of features that makes it useful across many niches to discover new influencers and gather leads. Here are some of its key features:
NinjaOutreach Lead Generation
Image source: NinjaOutreach
NinjaOutreach has been in the market for a while and over the years it has amassed millions of business profiles on its database.
This can come in handy for businesses that are in the market for lead generation that will enable them to get more sales.
Users can access the NinjaOutreach lead database to search for prospects by typing in their business niche and target area.
The software has an advanced filter option that lets you identify the most promising leads.
You can find this out by specifying the amount of audience and engagement the prospect has on their different social media accounts.
You can even go further to search for specific words and phrases within their content or specify for the URL to show results that have the word or phrase that you have specified.
NinjaOutreach also makes it easy for you to find contact persons within the organizations that you are targeting. It helps you to find their email addresses by crawling through the URLs.
All you have to do is import the list of URLs that you want to check and NinjaOutreach will check them for you.
Other things that you can do with the lead generation feature include checking for giveaways, guest posting opportunities, interviews, product reviews, sponsored posts, and resource pages.
The leads you gather do not have to be disposed of after you have used it once. You can save these leads on the page to be used for future campaigns.
Alternatively, NinjaOutreach has a chrome extension that you can also use to save your leads on the go. This extension is free and is usually synchronized with the user’s account.
While there are a couple of other apps that have similar features as NinjaOutreach, it is its time-saving factor that is its major selling point.
NinjaOutreach can pull out thousands of leads for your specific need, including names, emails, and URLs in a jiffy.
Once you have gathered all the leads that you need, you can get started with your campaign right from your account and schedule for mail to be sent to your leads at different times.
NinjaOutreach allows you the option of classifying your leads with different tags. This is especially useful when you want to filter your leads based on previous campaigns that they may have been involved in.
There’s also a custom field that lets you personalize your lead name and any other customer information as needed.
You can easily rinse and repeat campaigns, especially the successful ones by saving their email templates to a library and pulling them up anytime you need them.
Instagram Influencers Finder
Image source: NinjaOutreach
You can use NinjaOutreach to find Instagram influencers to work with. You can do this by searching for the ones that are within your business niche.
NinjaOutreach has over 80 categories that you can choose from, so it is unlikely that you won’t find the industry that you are looking for.
Once you have selected your industry, you can narrow down your search even further by selecting a country, region, and city. This option makes it easy for businesses that want to target local customers to track down influencers that have huge followings in smaller circles.
Apart from the time-saving factor that using software has over manually scouring Instagram for the right influencers, another advantage of finding influencers via NinjaOutreach is that it gives you access to analytics so that you can know how engaged the influencer’s audience is.
This data is presented as a percentage and color-coded to indicate good or bad.
You will also be able to see how much each influencer charge per post so that you can know which of them is within your budget.
After you have found the influencers that you want to work with, the next thing to do is to add them to the list of leads that you have earlier created. Once you have done that, all the appropriate details will be filled in automatically.
While your list of leads is usually saved to your account, you can still download the CSV version of it to be used as backup whenever you need it.
NinjaOutreach Link Builder
Image source: NinjaOutreach
For serious SEOs, link building is an important part of their campaign.
Digital marketers are now aware of the fact that a big chunk of search engines is driven by links, plus it is a cost-effective method of marketing which allows them to advertise their brands on the websites of other non-competing brands for free.
It is literally impossible to increase your brand’s online presence without having a good number of inbound links, especially from high domain authority websites pointing to your own site.
The idea is to easily get found out by Google, and as you build your domain reputation with high-quality backlinks from credible websites, so will your website’s search engine visibility increase.
While there are many ways to go about a link building campaign, the right link building software can make you achieve your goals a lot faster, which is what NinjaOutreach does.
It saves you a ton of hours by helping you automate your link building process using several strategies, including competitor link building, broken link building, expert roundups, infographics link building, resource pages link building, among others.
Finding leads for link building is simple. All you have to do is search the software’s database by industry and location and you will be shown thousands of high-quality leads to contact.
Of course, links from higher domain authority websites will fair better for your brand, so you can sort your leads to display high DA sites first.
With NinjaOutreach, you do not have to send emails one by one to your leads. You can send automated messages and follow-up emails to thousands of prospects at once and track your interactions with them.
NinjaOutreach Contact Relationship Management
Image source: NinjaOutreach
NinjaOutreach is also a fantastic contact relationship management software that helps you keep tabs on all of your campaign interactions.
This makes it easier for you to track your relationships with hundreds and even thousands of clients without having to jump from one software to another.
One of the major advantages of an inbuilt CRM is that it enables you to know everyone that you are working with and contact different prospects at the appropriate time.
It is easy to use and it works effortlessly with all the other features that the software has. If you are working with many different prospects you can set up tags to make it easier for you to sort and find them anytime you want.
NinjaOutreach Customer Support
NinjaOutreach features three main support channels – direct contact, a knowledge base, and an ultimate guide.
To reach the support team directly, you have to fill and submit a contact form. You’ll get a reply by email.
The knowledge base features help articles and questions and answers from the NinjaOutreach team. It goes a long way to help, especially if you’re new to using the outreach campaign tool.
Finally, the ultimate guide features more in-depth articles on using NinjaOutreach. It covers building links, collecting contact details, finding affiliates, using connecting with third-party tools, and many more.
NinjaOutreach Pros & Cons
While NinjaOutreach has a lot of amazing features, it also has a couple of drawbacks.
Pros
- It saves you time by automating your influencer Outreach process.
- NinjaOutreach has a large knowledge base that speed track the learning process and makes it easy to get the hang of the software.
- You can test out the software for free for 7 days before you commit to a periodic subscription.
- It is not expensive.
- It gives you the most useful results.
- It’s an all-in-one tool.
Cons
- A lot of social media platforms are unavailable.
- It does not have its own email marketing software, so you will have to pay extra to integrate your own email account.
NinjaOutreach Pricing
NinjaOutreach has four pricing tiers depending on how many emails you will like to send each month and the volume of users you aim to have.
It has the Flex, Silver, Silver Plus, and Gold plans.
- Flex – $389 per month when billed every month, or $155 per month for annual billing
- Silver – $589 per month when billed every month, or $255 per month for annual billing
- Silver Plus – $849 per month when billed every month, or $459 per month for annual billing
- Gold – Custom quote
The Flex plan is apt for marketers that do not handle more than 1000 emails per month. It grants you access to up to 120,000,000 influencers.
The Silver plan is apt for marketers that do not handle more than 10,000 emails per month.
The Silver Plus plan is ideal for marketers that send up to 15,000 emails per month.
The Gold plan is suitable for large businesses and agencies that handle influencer campaigns on behalf of their clients.
What Is BuzzStream?
Image source: BuzzStream
BuzzStream is not only an outreach management software; it is also used for link building.
In fact, when it comes to doing link building and outreach management side-by-side, BuzzStream is one of the best in the market, but it is a real Hydra, being that you will find it difficult to use if you do not put in the work to structure your account.
Unlike a lot of the link building apps in the market that are only good for getting your links on low domain authority sites, BuzzStream is an outreach and CRM tool that allows businesses to manage large volumes of outreach campaigns.
One of the scariest parts of link building is that it takes a long time to reach a major achievement, but BuzzStream expedites the whole process.
Another problem of some of the poor outreach tools that are in the market is that they end up making you use services that will get you banned by Google, but with BuzzStream there’s literally zero chance of getting penalized by Google.
Apart from the extra bit of expertise that you need to structure your account, you will hardly find any outreach tool in the market that is better than BuzzStream.
You can have an unlimited amount of projects with the software, so it makes sense to break them down into smaller bits.
While you should be careful so as not to have duplicated projects, BuzzStream will alert you if any of your targets already exist on another campaign to save you the stress.
BuzzStream Process
Here’s how to execute a BuzzStream outreach campaign:
Choose your outreach tactic
Image source: Hubspot
We have talked about link building umpteen times now and we already know that link building involves reaching out to people to have them place a link on their website that redirects back to your site, but how do you begin that kind of conversation?
Well, there are a couple of ways to go about it and here are our top 3 picks:
Guest posts
Guest posting is perhaps the most popular way to warm up to a bigger brand and get your link featured in one of their contents since you will be the one producing the content.
Remember that a lot of websites have their specific guidelines, so be sure to understand them before you submit your unique content for consideration.
Aside from the opportunity to add backlinks, guest posting also gives you a platform to indirectly advertise your site and tell prospects what you are about.
Skyscraper technique
The Skyscraper technique is a term coined by Brian Dean of Backlinko to describe a method of building backlinks that involve redoing older pieces of content in a better way and reaching out to those that are linked to the older content to consider linking to your own.
Broken links
This technique involves crawling through the content of high domain authority websites to find broken links and offering your own link that has similar content as a replacement.
These three methods of link building are as effective as they are tedious to do, but BuzzStream does all the work for you.
Find Targets
Image source: BuzzStream
Different link building techniques require different tactics that will ensure their success. For example, if you choose to opt for guest posting, you will need to find blogs that accept guest posts.
Skyscraper technique requires websites that have previously accepted similar density of links, but for contents that are not as developed as your own, while the broken link method simply needs sites that contain broken links.
If you are not using BuzzStream or similar software, you will have to use Google advanced queries or reverse engineer the process as used by any of your competitors.
If that sounds like a lot of work, it is because it is.
Using BuzzStream ensures that you do not have to spend hours logging in your entries on an old spreadsheet one by one.
BuzzStream has an inbuilt Google scraper that helps you quickly find thousands of prospects by typing in your advanced queries.
Scraping Google works just fine, but if you want to leave no stone unturned, you can combine it with Buzzsumo.
BuzzStream has a chrome extension that lets you scrap Buzzsumo results. This means that you can quickly find the best target for guest posts that are trending and popular on social media.
For the Skyscraper technique, you can use BuzzStream to scrap the do-follow links from your Ahrefs search.
Collect & Filter Details
Image source: BuzzStream
Once you have identified the link targets, the next thing to do will be to filter and sort out your collection.
This stage is usually the most time-consuming stage of an outreach campaign since it involves classifying the sites according to how much juice they have and ensuring that you can map out the apt way to reach out to the different sites considering that they require a different approach.
BuzzStream makes this stage as easy as it can be. For the first step, BuzzStream has an inbuilt system that helps you to sort the prospects on an Iframe.
You can also attempt to use BuzzStream to scrap the contact details of some of the decision-makers of the websites, but it is not always the best option.
It may pay you better to use control + F on your keyboard to find the contact page or other contact information like an email address.
You may also have some luck on the about page of the websites. These pages usually contain pictures, names and contact information of the handlers of the website so your chances of finding some email addresses there are high.
On some occasions, you may only find the page’s contact form. In that case, go ahead and add it to your BuzzStream and proceed anyway.
BuzzStream Reach Out
Image source: BuzzStream
At this stage, everything must have been ready and so the next thing to do is to send your first contact email.
If everything is as they suppose to be, the contact person should have a rough idea of who you are and your intentions by the time they finish reading your email.
BuzzStream has an outreach and template manager that lets you store your templates to pull up whenever you need to.
From the manager, you can also track the performance of all your templates to know which ones work for specific campaigns.
Once you have created your emails and selected the prospects that you want to indulge, BuzzStream will piece everything together and give you a chance to review and personalize your email further if you need to before it is sent out.
BuzzStream Follow-up
When you are planning your email outreach campaign, it is always your wish that all your recipients open your messages and respond to them, but that doesn’t happen in real life.
At least not after your first message.
In fact, unless in special circumstances, you may not receive a fourth of the responses that you are expecting unless you send follow-up messages to increase your chances.
BuzzStream reminds you to send follow up messages and allows you to use a second email template.
You can send as many follow-up messages as you want, but after some time it becomes spam.
BuzzStream Customer Support
BuzzStream offers direct support to users via email. There are different email addresses to send your queries to, depending on which category they fall in.
BuzzStream is also rich in customer support resources. The platform features video tutorials that illustrate different aspects of using the outreach tool.
You can access these videos for free on the support page. Furthermore, you join the BuzzStream webinar training to learn how to set up your account, add contact, prospect, and more.
Interestingly, BuzzStream features an online university – The BuzzStream University. The university issues you a form of bachelor’s degree in influencer outreach upon completion.
BuzzStream Pros & Cons
As with any software, BuzzStream has its advantages and disadvantages. Here are the most notable ones:
Pros
- It has reasonable pricing.
- It is a fast and effective way to build links.
- You will find useful answers from customer support.
Cons
- It may take some time to get used to.
- There may be a delayed response from their customer service
BuzzStream Pricing
BuzzStream has four pricing tiers that are mainly separated by the number of contacts that they can carry. They include:
- Starter – $24 per month
- Growth – $124 per month
- Professional – $299 per month
- Custom – Starting at $999 per month
The cheapest plan costs $24 per month and can handle up to 1000 contacts while the most expensive one costs $999 per month and can handle over 300,000 contacts.
NinjaOutreach vs BuzzStream: Similarities and Differences
The most obvious similarity between NinjaOutreach and BuzzStream is that they are both platforms for social influencers.
As a result, they share many features like researching, finding emails, and sending follow-ups.
Going further, they both support API and integrations to connect with third-party platforms. BuzzStream and NinjaOutreach are also premium platforms.
However, while BuzzStream features a relatively affordable beginner plan, NinjaOutreach’s starter plans are high-cost. In particular, many users switch from using NinjaOutreach due to its expensive pricing.
Verdict – NinjaOutreach vs Buzzstream
Both NinjaOutreach and BuzzStream have many similar strengths, but at the same time, they are different. Sometimes, our choice of one over the other may be as a result of getting used to one first.
That being said, I will opt for BuzzStream because it can handle any type of outreach campaign and track social media conversations faster.
