Ecommerce & Outreach

[BeckyKey]

Hey,

Does anyone have any advice on how to approach outreach for an ecommerce site? We're in the process of doing user guides, for niche products. I wondered if this was a good angle to approach relevant communities/sites.

Or is this too time consuming for little value at the end? Is it PR outreach we should look to focus on?

Thank you

[ClaytonJ]

Not enough info.  Can you identify and target key influencers within each niche?

[BeckyKey]

I haven't started doing this yet, is this approach worthwhile for an ecommerce site?

I know that most outreach can be ignored if it's seen to be for ecommerce or sales.

Thanks!

[BradsDeals]

I think the key with this approach is to be genuinely helpful and to avoid actually trying to sell a product. That's incredibly counterintuitive, but the product probably isn't the endgame for your consumer. What are they using it for? Be an expert resource on THAT.

The Home Depot blog is a really excellent example of this principle in action. Instead of selling their products, they're showing very creative and aspirational ways that people can use them. They did an entire DIY series on concrete. Concrete!

So they do all of these posts about concrete, but they're never pitching you a hard sell on it. The path to purchase is there if you want it, but really they're just focused on being experts on all of the wonderful, aspirational things you can do with concrete. It's very shareable and pinnable and I want every one of those projects in my home. They've planted the idea of buying concrete without selling it to me. It's very obvious they are an authority on concrete, and it doesn't matter that they're a seller. In fact, I'm more likely to buy it from them now because their expertise on it is clear.

So I started with that instead of outreach because when the content is that good, you can push it out on social and get a good response. You can share what you're doing with influencers and they won't mind because it's obvious you know what you're talking about. Next thing you know, they're coming to you for comment as an expert. The quality has to be there or you're right, you just look like you're pushing product and that does get tend to get ignored.

[BeckyKey]

Hi

Thank you for the detailed response. I have just looked at their blog and its very creative with some amazing images.

Our offering is some B2C but mostly B2B. I want to invest more into brilliant imagery to go alongside our guides but this is something we'll need to work on.

Thank you for the feedback!

[Deacyde]

As a fellow eCommerce admin, I believe that the best PR / Outreach we can do, is in terms of customer assistance means, what I mean is, customer help aides, information funnels that better explain, then further breakdowns of those explanations.

Reach out to your manufacturers, services that use your products along side their own ( information for items they may use but don't focus on, ( example would be if you sold lawnmower accessories, reaching out to lawn services and pitch your information pages, if they like it, they'll link to it to spread to their employees maybe or even send to clients to further back up their quality ))

When selling items, we can't really reach out to other sites / services about selling our items, that doesn't get much in return, however we reach out to them providing information that relates to them, they feel you're doing some work for them and then become more receptive.

Think back to web rings / circles back in the early days of the internet, if they were done right, sites with relative content linked up and provided this inner circle of related sites that would play off one another's information.

It's the digital's age of scratching their back while they scratch yours.

[Deacyde]

This is exactly what I was going on about, it's great for onsite and offsite PR.

See about turning some of your guides into infographics, summarizing the data into easier bits of digestible tidbits. In the world of scan happy folks with a perpetual 5 min attention span, longer is better for SEO but not always for the user unless it's presented in a way that keeps them engaged.

Break up text with interactive bits like links or downloadable pdfs, and even images like many others say. Video is always helpful, but balance is even more important. Like a bag of trail-mix, PR needs a proper mixture of content.

[BeckyKey]

Great thank you for the feedback.

Should we be actively outreaching to the relevant communities or simply sharing this and seeing what the response is from this?

I think what I want to identify is how much time I need to spend on outreach. I know there is no simple answer to this and it's ongoing of course.

[Paddy_Moogan]

Hi Becky,

There have been some good replies so far but to address your question here, I think it's definitely worth doing the outreach and trying to build relationships. Unless you're a massive brand, it's hard to get noticed online without some form of outreach, at least to begin with.

In terms of time, it really does depend on your other priorities. If I had to put a time on it and given that you haven't really started yet, I'd block out maybe half a day to do some research and contact a few sites and then gauge feedback. Then build up from there.

Bear in mind that some companies will hire SEO and PR agencies to just focus on promotion of their website, so it can take up a lot of time. But if you start on it yourself with a few hours, then you get a good understanding quickly of what's involved.

A quick heads up - it's not easy! But it's important so it's worth pursuing.

I hope that helps!

Paddy