Thursday, 21 March 2019

How to conduct smarter social listening for consumer brands

6 Twitter analytics tools to amplify your Twitter strategy

Drama Mayhem - Product Launch Campaign Case Study

Drama Mayhem

Don Wilder

Interview with Ninja Outreach user, Don Wilder, Founder of Drama Mayhem

Drama Mayhem is a new improv comedy card game that is being unveiled early this year. Founder Don Wilder discusses how he was able to save over 30 hours in his campaign and reach top influencers to help promote his product with the help of NinjaOutreach.

“I'd also really want to express one area that you guys outshine the competition, and that's the speed and quality of the customer service on troubleshooting any and every question I shoot at them. The guys are great, friendly, and helpful. That's one of the strong reasons I will plan to continue using your software as well.” - Don Wilder of Drama Mayhem

Results:

  • Established contact with a comedian and actor influencer with over 165k Instagram followers that will help promote his business
  • Over 200+ positive leads and counting

1. What specific goal have you achieved with NinjaOutreach?

I wanted to find influencers for the new card game I created and will soon launch to market.

I've reached a few notable influencers that will help me promote the game.. recently I reached one celebrity that is a comedian and actor with over 165K Instagram followers that is excited to help me spread the word about my game.

2. How many campaigns did you launch to achieve this goal? What was your reply rate? How many emails did you send and how many positive responses did you get?

Well, I've launched about 15 and I'm still going. There's no set number of responses I'm after. The more the better. The reply rate ranges from around 1-1.5% to 17%.

Reply Rate

3. What other tools (if any) did you use for this campaign and why?

Dropbox > For the PDF download of the sample game to show leads to generate interest.

4. How did you use NinjaOutreach?

I looked for target keywords that would be a good fit for my campaign and did the general search, and I used the google chrome extension.

5. What outreach strategies did you find worked best? (best template, best approach, best schedule to send outreach, etc)

So far, it's been a revised template with a custom pitch for leads to check out our new game, along with the offer to try out a free sample deck.

I normally put in the contact person’s first name or company name, and if no name then I'll put "there" as in "hey there" to keep it more friendly in tone.

So far, our templates have pretty good open rates, some even get higher than 40% open rates and over 5% replies.

Open and Reply Rate

6. What problem did NinjaOutreach solve for you, or how was NinjaOutreach specifically able to help with your campaign?

The simple organization of lead generation, and automation on the email outreach.

NinjaOutreach also saved me a huge amount of time.

Granted the amount of time I need to search, hire, train and manage virtual assistants, I'd say for every 100-200 emails that go out would be around 1-2 hours of work to do above and review VA's results.

The challenge is also for work quality (minimizing error) and speed. So, I think I've sent out 3-4K+ emails so far.

So NinjaOutreach saved me LOTS of hours, in short, at least 20-30 hours of work to this point or more.

7. Before NinjaOutreach, what was your process for prospecting and launching your outreach campaigns?

Excel and manual email outreach. I hired a couple of VAs online but it was more work to train them than what it was worth, as it was a labor-intensive process and very little results in return.

8. What process would you say was more cost-effective? Why?

Time is money, right? I don't need to manage VAs anymore so closely. Being able to do all of this on my own using automation has been really helpful.

The post Drama Mayhem - Product Launch Campaign Case Study appeared first on NinjaOutreach.



source https://ninjaoutreach.com/drama-mayhem-product-launch-campaign-case-study/

Tuesday, 5 March 2019

Utama Spice - Link Building & Guest Post Outreach Case Study

Utama Spice

Interview with NinjaOutreach clients, Ria Templer and Jon Jones of Utama Spice

Utama Spice is an all-natural beauty, skincare, and aromatherapy products company based in Bali, Indonesia.

“I personally love NO and don't know what I’d do without it!” - Ria Templer of Utama Spice

Results:

Implemented a faster, automated system for getting a constant trickle of guest posting and link building leads.

1. What specific goal have you achieved with NinjaOutreach?

We were able to set up and maintain a highly effective, results-oriented and long-term guest posting, sponsored post and link building campaign using the Ninja Outreach platform.

2. How many campaigns did you launch to achieve this goal? What was your reply rate? How many emails did you send and how many positive responses did you get?

We currently have seven automatic outreach campaigns running.

We have completed many dozens of these automatic outreach campaigns over the past year.

We achieved our goal of finding quality link building opportunities very rapidly. Within a day of the campaigns beginning, we were getting feedback from bloggers and site owners about collaborations for product reviews, giveaways and sponsored posts.

Reply rate

Our reply rate was as low as 2% but as high as 30% and had a rough average of 11% reply rate.

But with the enormous capabilities of the Ninja Outreach service, you can get huge results in a short time.

Virtually, every reply we received was ready and willing to move forward with a link arrangement, whether for free, in return for quality content, or for payment in cash or kind (products).

You only need to use a tool like Ahrefs to evaluate whether a specific website’s SEO and traffic metrics are qualified or worth your while.

3. What other tools (if any) did you use for this campaign and why?

I use no other tools. Just my Gmail Suite for business and Ninja Outreach. I suppose Ahrefs is a nice tool to have in this process as it can help you weed out the chaff (underqualified websites).

4. How did you use NinjaOutreach?

I used both the Chrome Extension and the native search function within the Ninja Outreach SaaS to find leads quickly using manual methods.

It was not until later I negotiated a small, special additional monthly rate for the nice people at Ninja Outreach to help me compile leads lists rapidly and without my spending a lot of time and effort.

I now get these leads lists imported into my account monthly. All I do is set up automatic email campaigns, set the system to send a trickle of emails daily and that leads to daily responses for link building!

5. What outreach strategies did you find worked best? (best template, best approach, best schedule to send outreach, etc)

I wrote specific templates for my ecomm companies, such as “Looking to do sponsored post, guest post or giveaway” in the subject of the email.

Then, basically praising the site owner for having a wonderful site and saying how I felt their readership may likely enjoy my company’s’ products.

Inevitably, this leads to the site owner coming back with their interests and terms.

NinjaOutreach List of Leads Page

I would only send a maximum of 7 emails a day for any one campaign. I had also simplified my emails to write “Dear Sir/Madame,” to overcome not knowing who, or what sex, would be answering/replying to my outreach. This simplifies and streamlines.

At first, I wasn’t sure it would work well, but it did work pretty good in the end. And it’s an ongoing process now.

6. What problem did NinjaOutreach solve for you, or how was NinjaOutreach specifically able to help with your campaign?

In the past, I could only do outreach at a snail’s pace.

Think about it, how much time you need to compile a list of prospects manually. It might take 2 to 4 hours to get 20 or 30 leads! Who has this time?

With the ability to rapidly compile lead lists based on specific parameters, such as shares, audience, keywords and so on, you can scale up rapidly. If I did not have Ninja Outreach, I’d still be in the dark ages with respect to my outreach and link building.

7. Before NinjaOutreach, what was your process for prospecting and launching your campaigns?

Before Ninja Outreach, I would just blindly google my keywords and sift through various sites (news, ecomm, and blogs) to find a possible lead I could email.

It was painstakingly slow and inefficient. I can honestly say it was almost a joke.

It worked, but at a pace that is not realistic.

8. What process would you say was more cost-effective? Why?

In my opinion, you cannot get a higher rank for more keywords quickly without building backlinks. And Ninja Outreach allows it to happen quickly and efficiently.

I could not recommend Ninja Outreach more highly.

The post Utama Spice - Link Building & Guest Post Outreach Case Study appeared first on NinjaOutreach.



source https://ninjaoutreach.com/utama-spice-link-building-outreach-case-study/

Monday, 4 March 2019

Software engineering personalities: the Teslas and the Edisons

In the history of inventions, the rivalry between Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison is one of the most famous. Their competition in the field of electricity is sometimes referred to as the “war of currents.” Live Science describes Tesla as having the ability to “accurately visualize intricate 3D objects” and “really work out his inventions in his imagination.” In contrast, Edison was a “tinkerer,” who arrived at many of his inventions via trial and error. Most accounts, however, conclude that “you can’t really say one is greater, because American society needs some Edisons and it needs some Teslas.”

While reading up on these two individuals, it struck us at Sprout Social that these two working styles can teach us how to build a healthy engineering culture consisting of Edisons and Teslas.

We’ve found many software engineers, regardless of background, fall into one of the two personality profiles. While both have their merits, they also carry differences that, when Edisons and Teslas work together, can lead to conflict in the workplace.

Let’s compare their individual beliefs here:

“Tesla” programmer beliefs “Edison” programmer beliefs
Up front design is valuable. Speed to market is valuable.
Meetings to achieve consensus and brainstorm problems are valuable. Meetings to knowledge-share after arriving at a solution are valuable.
You should “measure twice, cut once.” You should get something out and iterate.
It’s inefficient to write code without full clarity on the problem you’re solving. We won’t identify many issues up front, so it’s important to get started to find them

The differences in personality type come to light especially during times of crisis, such as a difficult project, a buggy release or when technical debt starts to add up. Edisons and Teslas can experience the following frustrations during those situations:

“Tesla” programmer frustrations “Edison” programmer frustrations
We don’t have adequate up-front design. A lot of issues can be identified early. We should be required to do up front design. We move too slow and have too much corporate minutiae because we spend our time talking and writing documents instead of actually delivering code.
My code should be easy to review because the design for it was already reviewed. I don’t like when people are resistant to rewrite code, or even discard it entirely.
I don’t like reviewing code for which I have not reviewed a design. If the code is already done, it’s too late to adjust and I feel awkward reviewing it. My code should receive a lot of feedback, and I welcome it. Code for review is simply a suggested change, and it can and should be rewritten multiple times if necessary.

When nurturing team culture, engineering leaders will need to identify ways to balance and accommodate these two perspectives. Teslas become frustrated when forced into an Edison way of operating, and Edisons become frustrated when forced into a Tesla way of thinking. Even engineering leaders can succumb to their own personal biases, preferring one over the other. This makes it even more challenging to create an environment where Teslas and Edisons can thrive.

At Sprout Social, we’ve identified several ways we try to accommodate both Edisons and Teslas:

  1. Make design documents optional: Teslas may prefer to create design documents more frequently than Edisons, so consider making design documents optional except in the case of major features that could affect other teams.
  2. Don’t mandate deliverables: Agile Spikes (investigation stories) do not have mandated deliverables. A Tesla may prefer to deliver a diagram or design document, while an Edison may deliver a prototype or code samples.
  3. Allow for focus time: Have prescribed time blocks for team syncs and otherwise allow for heads down working time. This creates an opportunity for Teslas to share designs while Edisons can knowledge-share. It also protects Edisons from too many ad-hoc collaboration meetings.
  4. Encourage radical candor: This applies to both design documents (at Sprout, they live on collaborative Wikis) and code reviews. Teslas may prefer thorough feedback on design docs, while Edisons may prefer thorough feedback in PRs. Regardless, both Edisons and Teslas should be encouraged to practice giving and receiving radically candid feedback.

If you are a software engineer or an engineering manager, we encourage you to develop an awareness of how your team members operate and ensure your processes and culture cater to both for a highest-possible level of productivity. If you over cater to one camp or the other, you’re disadvantaging half of the team.

Are you a Tesla or an Edison?

This post Software engineering personalities: the Teslas and the Edisons originally appeared on Sprout Social.



source https://sproutsocial.com/insights/software-engineering-personalities/

Monday, 25 February 2019

The complete guide to Facebook listening

The complete guide to Instagram listening

The complete guide to Twitter listening

Global Child TV – Travel Blog PR Outreach Case Study

Augusto Valverde

Augusto Valverde, Producer and Founder of GlobalChildTV

Global Child TV is a world travel show that uses social media to collaborate with locals who share their stories and experiences from around the globe.

“Ninja Outreach has been a fantastic tool for our production company and travel show called Global Child where we explore the world through top experiences. You can see the show on Amazon Prime video!” – Augusto Valverde

Results

  • Scored a show collaboration with top Luxury Hotels around the world such as the five star Raiwasa in Fiji.
  • Got between 4% to 11% reply rates between 8 campaigns
  • Secured relationships with top influencers, PR, and travel media companies

How many campaigns did you launch to achieve this goal? What was your reply rate? How many emails did you send and how many positive responses did you get?

I have 8 ongoing campaigns and I contact over 3k leads for each campaign. My reply rate ranges from 4% to 11%, which are excellent reply rates especially considering the messaging volume that I’m working with.

NinjaOutreach List of Leads

What other tools (if any) did you use for this campaign and why?

I used to check plenty of other tools manually.

For example, I research influencers and bloggers on Instagram and Facebook and make contact with them there. You can imagine how tedious that was. Since I got NinjaOutreach, I started doing everything from that one platform.

How did you use NinjaOutreach?

Ninja Outreach has been a fantastic tool for our production company and travel show called Global Child where we explore the world through top experiences. You can see the show on Amazon Prime video!

First, I use it for prospecting leads. I use the Instagram search and Blogs & Websites search a lot. The filters were a godsend. I could group my campaigns by type of influencer, number of followers, etc.

Next, I use it to schedule my emails. I have over 3k to almost 4k leads before I start a campaign. I just schedule my emails to go out to everyone that matches my criteria, and I wait until responses start coming in.

I’ve had great response rates so far, so I’ve never had a problem with Ninja Outreach and believe it’s been really worth it.

NinjaOutreach Track Rate

What outreach strategies did you find worked best? (best template, best approach, best schedule to send outreach, etc)

I believe two things made my outreach formula work: authority and value.

First, I let the receiver know who I was, what my program was about, all the shows and collaborations we’ve done, the countries we’ve visited, the media coverage we’ve received… this lets the receiver know we’re not some fly-by-night “influencer” looking for a free pass. We are a legitimate company that wants to do business with them.

Second, value. We offer them value not through lip service but through a real product. These luxury destinations have staff to pay to make sure our stay is top-notch. What we offer is not just exposure to our millions of viewers, but a tangible service. We can create trailers and visual reels according to their specifications, at no cost, and they can use these for their own ads and promotions.

We use top equipment and professionals for our shoots, and those are the same resources we’ll tap in our offer to create for them. So our offer of “value” is not just some exposure, but also has real money value.

It’s hard to get people to respond to you if all you do is just ask for their time.

NinjaOutreach Create Template

What problem did NinjaOutreach solve for you, or how was NinjaOutreach specifically able to help with your campaign?

In the beginning I was having to host, produce, write, edit, direct and conduct business affairs, so I simply did not have time to explore potential collaborations with destinations nor the PR firms that represent them.

Thanks to Ninja Outreach, I was able to create specific campaigns that reached out to Luxury Hotels and because of that I now have several of the top hotels in the world participating with Global Child for our upcoming season such as the five star Raiwasa in Fiji and many more.

Ninja Outreach is like having an entire team of people working on your behalf and it’s the ideal tool to multiply business and maximize my time in an intelligent way.

Before NinjaOutreach, what was your process for prospecting and launching your campaigns?

Everything was manually done by a VA. But now I do all my outreach myself because NinjaOutreach already has a database with over millions of profiles, bloggers, social media influencers, and emails. I’ve got what I need. I just pick the leads I’m interested in, save them into a list, and schedule my emails and follow-ups.

Alone, emailing over 3k people is a demanding job, but Ninja Outreach has freed me a ton of time by allowing me to automate.

What process would you say was more cost-effective? Why?

Ninja Outreach, hands down.

I highly recommend Ninja Outreach. Their customer service walked me through the process of setting everything up and they’ve gone above and beyond to teach me how to use this simple tool that is extraordinarily powerful!

I can’t wait to try out the Influencer tool and see what results that brings me!

The post Global Child TV – Travel Blog PR Outreach Case Study appeared first on NinjaOutreach.



source https://ninjaoutreach.com/global-child-tv-travel-blog-pr-outreach-case-study/

Tuesday, 12 February 2019

Interview with NinjaOutreach clients, Asher Laub and Sam Dvorin of Fiddler’s Dream Music

 

Fiddler’s Dream Music

Interview with NinjaOutreach clients, Asher Laub and Sam Dvorin of Fiddler’s Dream Music

Fiddler’s Dream Music is a music, theater, and dance entertainment company. They used NinjaOutreach for business leads generation, traffic building, and influencer marketing outreach.

We interviewed owner Asher Laub and PR manager Sam Dvorin where they shared how they were able to immediately get high-value leads for their business even with a few campaigns by using highly targeted, personalized outreach and templates.

Results:

  • Acquired valuable leads from as little as 10 ongoing campaigns divided amongst a team of 4 outreach specialists

1. What specific goal have you achieved with NinjaOutreach?

Our team has managed to use NinjaOutreach for a variety of purposes. We have directed targeted traffic to our websites and social media by strategically reaching out to social media influencers, bloggers and other artists in the music entertainment industry.

List of Leads

2. How many campaigns did you launch to achieve this goal? What was your reply rate? How many emails did you send and how many positive responses did you get?

We have about 10 different campaigns in the works divided amongst our team of 4 outreach specialists. We are comparing various outreach templates between each campaign to hone in on the most effective approach. We’re still new to this so it’s a work in progress. So far we’ve gotten some great leads.

Corporate Entertainment List

We have found that manual outreach is important to do as well. We’re able to speed up the process with the search tool within NinjaOutreach.

3. What other tools (if any) did you use for this campaign and why?

We created some branded email accounts with bluehost and gmail so as not to affect our money site urls.

4. How did you use NinjaOutreach?

We send out a regular dose of emails customized to each blogger, or influencer. We show the recipient that we have read/seen a specific work of theirs so it doesn’t come off as spam.

List of Music Concerts Influencers

5. What outreach strategies did you find worked best? (best template, best approach, best schedule to send outreach, etc)

Follow-up on the initial email is really important for a response form the higher level influencers. Also, templates only work for a couple of stages in the outreach process. The rest needs to be very personalized.

6. What problem did NinjaOutreach solve for you, or how was NinjaOutreach specifically able to help with your campaign?

It improved traffic for our client and allowed us to circumvent ads in targeting large influencers and bloggers.

7. Before NinjaOutreach, what was your process for prospecting and launching your campaigns?

We used ads, social media and SEO methods to reach clients to promote our main sites https://www.fiddlersdreammusic.com and https://www.asherlaub.com. This method is much preferred than the daily grind of social media.

8. What process would you say was more cost-effective? Why?

It’s most cost effective to create a number of outreach templates for your employees to use. This reduces room for error. There needs to be a highly competent outreach specialist who oversees the other workers to insure quality.

The post Interview with NinjaOutreach clients, Asher Laub and Sam Dvorin of Fiddler’s Dream Music appeared first on NinjaOutreach.



source https://ninjaoutreach.com/fiddlers-dream-music-case-study/

Friday, 8 February 2019

Outreach Worthy Marketing Case Study

Yeshua Quijano

Interview with NinjaOutreach Client Yeshua Quijano of Outreach Worthy

Outreach Worthy is a done-for-you blogger outreach services company. We interviewed Outreach Worthy’s owner Yesh Quijano, and he shared how he was able to “overdeliver” for his company’s clients. Read further to see how he got faster results from the multiple blogger outreach campaigns that he launched using NinjaOutreach.

Results

  • Achieved an average 11% reply rate with a guest posting campaign in the pets niche.
  • Secured 7 guest posts in 13 days and established a working relationship with a few of these bloggers.
  • Secured a FREE link from a DR 73, 135K organic traffic/month authority domain.

How many campaigns did you launch to achieve this goal? What was your reply rate? How many emails did you send and how many positive responses did you get?

I’m pretty new to blogger outreach on this scale (I’ve done ultra-custom outreach campaigns for about a year prio) so I’m not sure if I did this campaign in the most efficient way. Nevertheless, I think I over delivered thanks to NinjaOutreach and a well-drafted email script and follow up sequence.

What I did was run small daily campaigns, sending about 10-20 emails/day. All in all I sent 140 emails in a span of 13 days with a reply rate of about 11%. If I look at the daily reply rates I got anywhere between 6% to 28%. That’s about 16 responses, a few of which are sponsored post opportunities which I passed up for now.

List of Leads

So I’m pretty excited to utilize all of NinjaOutreach’s features – if my success rate is already this good while just using maybe 50-60% of the tool’s features, what more if I can use it all?

What other tools (if any) did you use for this campaign and why?

I use Hunter.io to supplement my search for email addresses (the free version works fine!). NinjaOutreach’s chrome extension is actually pretty good already for finding email addresses, but combining it with Hunter.io makes prospecting so much easier.

Additionally, I use Ahrefs to check if the site has at least 1,000 organic traffic per month. My reasoning for this is if a site is getting some Google love (in the form of organic traffic), then it must be doing something good. Therefore, earning a link from that site must be beneficial to my campaign.

Lastly, I’m using Link Research Tools’ Power*Trust chrome extension. Basically it’s a tool that aggregates metrics from Moz, Majestic, and Ahrefs, among other tools, so I believe it’s one of the more accurate tools out there. You can learn more about the tool here.

How did you use NinjaOutreach?

I use NinjaOutreach mainly as an email broadcast tool. I haven’t gotten around to using its prospecting feature but I plan to play with it in the future.

Currently we do all prospecting using Google’s search function then record all relevant data on a Google Sheet.

After that I add all qualified prospects on NinjaOutreach via the Chrome Extension.

NinjaOutreach Chrome Extension

Once I added about 10-20 contacts, I kick start the campaign on the Ninja Outreach dashboard.

The tool also lets you send two follow up emails which makes the campaign truly set-and-forget. I usually set my follow up emails 3 and 6 days after getting no replies.

NinjaOutreach Campaign Set up

I spend a good amount of time making sure the contact names and email addresses are correct. I’m a bit paranoid so I check each email if the placeholders have been properly replaced with the correct names.

In terms of customizing and automating my workflow, I found a good compromise. While I use a general email template, NinjaOutreach allows for some customization. For example, changing Page URLs or First Names per email.

What outreach strategies did you find worked best? (best template, best approach, best schedule to send outreach, etc)

There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy in outreach. Everything depends on your target website and industry.

Are you looking to land guest posts on law-related websites? Your email should probably sound professional.

In my case, I’m targeting pet blogs, so I tried to be as casual, as friendly, and as pun-ny as I could. Yes – the best template I had for this particular niche is littered (no pun intended), with puns.

NinjaOutreach Custom Template

As I’ve already mentioned, this helped me land 7 guest post opportunities in 13 days, one of which is a DR 78 blog that gets around 135,000 monthly organic traffic. If you’re like me who keeps his ears to the ground regarding link prices, links like these sell for $280-$300 a pop:

Analytics Data

From here, all I really need to do was add more prospects and let NinjaOutreach do the rest. I won’t be able to do this if it wasn’t for the tool saving me a lot of time.

What problem did NinjaOutreach solve for you, or how was NinjaOutreach specifically able to help with your campaign?

I’m the owner of Outreach Worthy, a marketing agency with a big focus on blogger outreach. While we’re growing at an incredible rate, we’re still a small team so I’m always multitasking.

NinjaOutreach really helped me save a lot of time by automating 80% of the outreach process.

I really love the template builder and campaign set up function – it doesn’t even take 10 clicks (I’ve counted!) to get the ball rolling on one campaign. Before, I used Gmail’s canned template feature to send emails and if you’ve done manual outreach before, you know how tedious and time-consuming replacing names and websites URLs, and copy-pasting subject lines every single time is.

With your tool, I get to send 15-20 emails in about an hour and a half. This time already includes prospecting, so the actual time it takes to send emails might just be 10-15 minutes. This would have taken twice or thrice the time if I did it manually.

Before NinjaOutreach, what was your process for prospecting and launching your campaigns?

Prospecting has been pretty much the same for us – we’re still using advanced search operators and checking metrics via Ahrefs and LRT. The biggest change is in the efficiency of how we send emails and follow ups.
NinjaOutreach made these two tasks automated (I absolutely love having two automated follow ups), so we now have more time qualifying leads and making sure they’re a right fit for our campaigns.

What process would you say was more cost-effective? Why?

NinjaOutreach’s template builder and automated campaign feature already reduced the time spent on one campaign by 50%. As the saying goes, time is money, and I’m saving a heck of a lot of cash by using your tool.

I’ve used BuzzStream in the past for a short while, but it felt more like a glorified canned email. Suffice to say that NinjaOutreach has surpassed my expectations. While the tool may have a few bugs here and there, their tech support is really helpful. One of them is a fellow Filipino, so he’s been extra helpful to me. Shoutout to Harold for being the best CSR for NinjaOutreach!

The post Outreach Worthy Marketing Case Study appeared first on NinjaOutreach.



source https://ninjaoutreach.com/outreach-worthy-case-study/