The Project Dashboard isn’t a single feature—it’s your new command center for overseeing all your projects.

Whether you’re deep in the trenches of outreach or overseeing the strategic direction of multiple campaigns, this tool is designed to streamline your workflow and make managing your projects a breeze.

Centralized Project Visibility

The most obvious immediate benefit of the Project Dashboard is centralized visibility into activities across all your clients and campaigns. The dashboard has tremendous flexibility to display the right information for you, but let’s quickly look at how the information is organized by default.

Accessing your Project Dashboard is super straightforward—just click the icon in your left navigation bar, and you’ll be there.

When you first access the Project Dashboard, you’ll see that the information there is organized into three distinct sections:

• Projects Overview
• Folders
• Projects

Let’s discuss the information in these sections in greater detail.

Projects Overview

The projects overview section exists at the top of your Project Dashboard and fittingly provides overall insights across all projects in your current view. It will display what project phase all contacts across all projects in your view  currently exist in. We’ll discuss project phases in more detail shortly – but the general concept is that they are groupings of relationship stages that reflect what stage in your project’s lifecycle each contact exists in.

Using this information, you can get a general idea of how much activity is happening at each stage in your overall dashboard view, whether work is getting done, and where things are progressing normally or potentially getting hung up across your account.

From the overview, you can also dive into projects that have contacts in a given phase or that have completed a certain outreach goal.

For example, if I want to see and manage all of the projects where we’ve gotten replies, all I have to do is click the “Connected” phase and I’ll see the full list of relevant projects with contacts in that state.

You can change the information displayed in your dashboard view in several ways.

If you have “manage projects” privileges in your account, you’ll be able to see all of the projects in your account, whether you’re assigned to them or not, by default, to get visibility into key activities across clients and campaigns.

If you’re not a manager for your outreach team but are concerned with the projects you are working on specifically, you’ll be able to see “My Projects” from the projects view dropdown.

You could also select “Starred Projects” to see only specific projects that you have defined as being particularly important.

Another way to change the view is by diving into a specific folder – which brings us neatly to our next section.

Folders

Folders, as you might expect, are based on your folder organization in your BuzzStream account. At a top level, you can review these folders to see the number of sub-folders and projects that exist within each.

When you click into a folder or sub-folder, you’ll notice that your view changes. Now, you are seeing a dashboard view specifically tied to that folder.

From here, you can get high level visibility into each folder. Often, that means understanding what is going on at the client level or campaign type level, giving you top-level insight targeted to where it matters.

Want to know how things are progressing for that new client you onboarded? Or how are your overall campaigns performing for a given initiative?

Your folder view makes getting that insight as easy as a click.

Projects

Your projects section is where the real granular insights and actionability happen in your campaign dashboard. You’ll see in this section that each of your projects in your view is broken into a project tile.

For each of those tiles, you can get a quick visual representation of where every contact in that project currently stands.

Looking more closely at the project tile, you can see that you have visibility into what campaign phase each contact is in, as well as top-level email metrics, notifications, and error messages.

Efficient Project Actionability

Your Project Dashboard doesn’t just provide insight. You can also take critical actions on many different aspects of your projects right from the project tile.

Many of these actions are phase-dependent, and you can view those actions very easily by just clicking on the outreach phase in your project tile of choice.

These contextual actions vary by phase, but you can use them to:

• View the list of all contacts that exist in that phase
• Launch into a BuzzMarker “Review on Web” workflow
• Search for contact info using our Hunter.io integration

In addition to phase-dependent actions, you can also directly respond to project notifications or errors.

Just click into the alerts section of your project tile to see all the actions you can take to resolve errors, stay on top of follow-up reminders, and complete other critical tasks.

Consolidated Project Phases to Unify Visibility

Now, let’s turn to those project phases we’ve been discussing to explore them in a little more detail. As discussed, project phases describe where each of your contacts exists in the general project lifecycle.

Those phases are:

• Qualify – Discover and vet prospects for your project.

• Prep – Get your contacts ready for outreach. This can include finding contact information and gathering info you’ll need to personalize or populate your sequences.

• Outbound – Manage your sent and scheduled outreach to contacts.

• Connected – Review contacts that you are currently in communication with.
• Complete – View contacts that have completed their outreach cycle.

Now, if you are familiar with BuzzStream, you are likely already asking yourself: How the heck do these phases get populated? And what happened to my relationship stages!?

No need to worry dear reader, your stages are all good and well and are in fact integral to how project phases get populated!

The first time you open the Project Dashboard, whenever you click “configure phases,” you’ll be taken to the “Edit Relationship Stage” screen. Here, you’ll see a list of all of your relationship stages to the right and all of the project phases on the left.

Populating your phases is simple. Just drag your relationship stage of choice into the most applicable project phase, and it will begin populating that phase with contacts that exist in that given relationship stage.

And by the way, we’ll make a best guess on how to organize your stages, but you’ll likely want to review and adjust those to make sure they fit your expectations.

By handling phases this way, you’ve got all the flexibility to define relationship stages however you like, while still giving you unified visibility into where your projects stand. These can be modified at any time if the nature of a stage changes, or if you add a new stage that applies to a given phase.

Using the Project Dashboard

Now that we’ve given you an overview of all the different components of the Project Dashboard, let’s see a few examples of how you might use it.

Scenario 1: Overview of your team’s recent activity

Let’s say you’re managing a team and want to get an idea of what they’ve been doing recently and where things might be falling through the cracks so you can take action.

This is a snap in the Project Dashboard. Just enter the “All Projects” dashboard view, then sort projects by last opened. You’re now presented with a list of projects that your team has been working in recently.

From here, you can look on a per project basis and determine whether you need to take action. For example, you might see that a project has a lot of contacts in the Qualify phase, but very little in Prep or Outbound.

That might tell you that your teammate has hit a snag in their prospect qualification, and you can engage with them to figure out what needs to happen to move the campaign forward.

Alternatively, you can take action directly by clicking on the qualify phase, then launching into a Review on Web workflow to qualify those prospects directly from the project tile.

Scenario 2: Managing replies across all your projects

In this scenario, you have several active campaigns and are starting to see replies coming in. You can manage all of those from the projects dashboard so you can make sure nothing is getting missed.

To do that, just make sure you’re in the “My Projects” view in the dashboard, then click on the “Connected” phase. You’ll now be presented with a view of all your projects that have replies.

From here, you can take action on those replies by clicking the “Replies” icon in the project tile.

This will prevent you with the ability to launch directly into your outreach module to follow up on those replies, working through your projects and replies systematically.

Scenario 3: Get visibility into client campaigns

If you have organized client campaigns into their own folders, then the Project Dashboard can make staying on top of campaigns for key clients easier than ever.

To review and take action on client campaigns, make sure you have all of the campaigns for a given client organized into a client folder. Then, just click on the corresponding client folder from the Project Dashboard.

From here, you can see all ongoing campaigns for your client, giving you the insight to take action as necessary to make sure you’re progressing in line with your client’s needs.

Video Overview

Want a video overview of how the Projects Dashboard works? Your wish is my command!

Wrapping Up

As you can see, we’ve barely scratched the surface of the powerful capabilities of the Project Dashboard in BuzzStream. There is tremendous flexibility here, and we’re excited to see the inventive ways that our users can leverage this tool to get greater insight and actionability into their campaigns.

As always, we’d love to hear your feedback. Let us know what you think, and if you have any questions please let us know!

The post Introducing the BuzzStream Projects Dashboard appeared first on BuzzStream.

New Unsubscribe Options

Previously, unsubscribe was an all or nothing game. If someone unsubscribed from an email, they were unsubscribed from getting emails from anyone using that BuzzStream account.

This ensured that no one was sent emails they didn’t want, but there were a lot of cases where that option really didn’t make sense. For example, what if you’re working on behalf of totally different brands or product lines using the same BuzzStream account, using totally different email addresses for each? A contact who isn’t interested in hearing about one of those doesn’t necessarily want to opt out of hearing from all of them.

Given that, we’ve now added two additional options when you include your unsubscribe message in your emails. You can still opt contacts out of ever hearing from anyone in your account, but you can also modify the rule to only apply to opting out of senders using the email domain that the contact unsubscribed from, or even just from that specific email address that they unsubscribe from.

Accessibility

We also wanted to improve the ways people can access unsubscribe options when setting up their emails. You’ve already seen how unsubscribe settings work in the email composer, but you can also set your unsubscribe rules from the contact record

from bulk send

and from your unsubscribed contacts settings page

Visibility

In the unhappy case where a contact has unsubscribed from your emails, we will display that information as well as the specifics around the unsubscribe rule that has been set for the contact so you and your team are aware if there are other options available for reaching out.

Wrapping Up

We hope that these new unsubscribe features give you the flexibility to handle contacts in a way that makes sense for your business. We’d love to hear your feedback on the new features and of course if you have any questions don’t hesitate to reach out!

The post Update: More Flexibility For Your Unsubscribe Preferences in BuzzStream appeared first on BuzzStream.

As of today, BuzzStream accounts on Professional plans or higher have the ability to set backup recipients when they are sending outreach.

What are Backup Recipients?

Let’s say you want to reach out to a publisher and there’s more than one contact that might be the right person for your outreach. Until now, most people would either pick one contact and hope they responded or set up a manual system where they sent to one contact, set up reminders to to find all contacts that didn’t respond, manually pick backup recipients and then send a new round of outreach. This process is tedious, time-consuming and error prone. People often just give up on the process because it requires so much work, so they lost out on potential links.

BuzzStream can now handle that whole process for you automatically. Now you can pick a primary recipient for your outreach to a website and a set of backup recipients. If your primary recipient doesn’t respond, BuzzStream automatically moves on to the next recipient for that website. This saves you time and increases the likelihood of getting links and coverage.

How Backup Recipients Work in BuzzStream

The new Backup Recipient functionality has been engineered to be really straightforward while also being flexible enough to adapt to the wide range of workflows users have in BuzzStream.

The basics of the feature are simple.

After you add a recipient for a website, just click into the Recipient field again and select the Add Backup Recipient option.

From here, select from email addresses or people you’ve added to a website that you think would be a good backup recipient. You can also add new people or email addresses right from here.

Now, send your outreach. You can send using backup recipients from anywhere in the app, but let’s just see how it works in Send Individually for now. You’ll notice that in addition to the Sequence stages you’re used to seeing in the new composer, you can also see the additional backup recipients you added.

If you’d like, you can also personalize each stage for your backup recipients to tailor the messaging to that recipient specifically.

Once you’re ready, you can send your outreach. Now, BuzzStream will automate the process. If you don’t receive a reply from your first recipient, BuzzStream will automatically try sending to the next after a period of time you define.

If you receive a reply from a recipient, then BuzzStream will stop sending any remaining stages of the sequence to that recipient and to any other backup recipients.

Importing Backup Recipients

In addition to adding backup recipients using the Recipient field, you can also import backup recipients directly. That way, you can quickly set up a whole campaign with backup recipients based on an existing CSV that you, your team, or outsourced partners have put together for you.

To do so, just make sure that you have a spreadsheet that includes multiple email addresses per website.

That can mean either having multiple rows with one recipient email in each (note: in order to import multiple people as recipients this is the way to do it)

Or a CSV with multiple email addresses per row

Either way, once you do so just associate your fields as normal, but make sure you select the option to add backup recipients on the preview and finish step and BuzzStream will take care of the rest!

Reordering Backup Recipients

BuzzStream gives you the ability to reorder your backup recipients as well. That way, if you decide at any point in time that one of your recipients for a website should be prioritized ahead of others when you’re sending outreach, it’s easy to take care of.

To reorder recipients, just click into the Recipient field and drag and drop your recipients in your preferred order.

You can even reorder recipients after you’ve started sending your sequence in the same way, as long as they aren’t the recipient that is actively being sent to.

Backup Recipients in Action

Want to see how backup recipients work in BuzzStream? We’ve put together a quick video to show you!

Wrapping Up

We’re extremely excited to bring Backup Recipient functionality to BuzzStream. We hope you’ll find this feature a powerful addition to your workflow to secure more links and coverage. If you have any questions, please let us know!

The post Introducing Backup Recipients in BuzzStream appeared first on BuzzStream.

Introducing the Revamped BuzzStream Email Composer

At the heart of this latest update is the improved BuzzStream email composer. The first thing you’ll notice is a change to where the composer appears if you’re opening it on a contact record. Previously, the composer opened just below the contact profile summary info. That was fine, but meant that occasionally you had to do a lot of scrolling if you wanted to review items in your history or elsewhere on a contact’s profile.

Now, the composer opens in its own pop-out window at the lower left of your screen. You can navigate around the rest of the profile and even minimize this window if you need it out of the way while reviewing other information.

Now this is handy, but the biggest improvement comes with our new inline sequence editor.

Previously, sequence steps were each accessed within their own tab in the composer. This meant that occasionally you could lose context when navigating between steps. Well, not anymore. Now, you can edit your sequence in one inline scrollable interface that means you’ll never lose that context.

We’ve also included the new composer experience in other key areas of the app, including our Send Individually workflows, so you can enjoy the new experience throughout BuzzStream.

Sequence Summary Information

With an improved sequence composing experience, we also wanted to add improved sequence insights. Now, when you review the History tab for a contact record, you’ll see a sequence summary section for any active sequences associated with your contact.

This summary section will make it much easier to understand what exactly is going on with your sequence so you can review and take action where needed.

Video Summary

To show you these updates live in action, we’ve also put together a quick video walkthrough.

Wrapping Up

I hope these updates provide a smoother and more efficient experience as you’re emailing your contacts. I’d love to hear from you what you think – please let me know any questions or feedback you have about these changes!

The post Introducing the Updated BuzzStream Email Composer appeared first on BuzzStream.

We’ve just added several new automated stages so BuzzStream can do even more work for you to enable you to easily get insight into relationships without any additional work on your part.

Those new stages are:

• Scheduled: when you schedule an email to send in the future, the contact will be moved to this stage so you know they’ve got emails coming up.
• Paused: when an email is paused, either by a user or by BuzzStream’s system, the contact will move to this stage 
• Bounce: if an email is sent but can’t be delivered to a recipients email address, the contact will move to this stage so you can modify or remove the email address
• Send Failure: if a known problem causes an email to fail to send, the contact will move to this stage so you can take corrective action
• Unsuccessful – No Reply: if a contact has been sent the last stage of their sequence and don’t reply within a certain period of time that you define, they will be moved to this stage

We’ve put together a quick video talking you through these stages as well:

We hope these new stages provide more actionable information you can use to manage and interact with your contacts. Please let us know any questions or feedback you’ve got!

The post Relationship Tracking Automation Improvements appeared first on BuzzStream.

Now you’ll have the flexibility to get greater insight into the contacts you’re emailing, have more actionable controls for interacting with them, and greater filtering capabilities to get right to the information you need.

Let’s dive in and take a look at all the features in this new update.

Opportunities

In BuzzStream, you’ve always been able to see the emails tied to contacts you’re interacting with in your campaigns right in your mailboxes. However, it was previously tricky to get at a glance insight into all of the campaign data tied to those emails, including which specific projects they were tied to, the contacts associated with them, and the relationship stage they were in.

Now, you’ve got all of that information included right in your mailboxes (and elsewhere) with Opportunities.

In BuzzStream, an opportunity represents all of the project-specific information about a contact. With opportunities in your mailboxes, you can quickly see this critical information for all of the emails you’re interacting with.

These opportunity details are also included on the contact profiles in your projects, so you can organize and get insight into this information there as well.

Opportunity Tags

Along with opportunities, we’ve included a brand new tag type in BuzzStream: Opportunity Tags.

Using opportunity tags, you can tag contacts with project-specific information to help you keep track of key details throughout your outreach workflow. These will differ from the Website and People Tags that you are currently familiar with because these are only tied to the opportunity. This means that these tags will not be reflected across all of your projects, only the project associated with a given opportunity.

In essence, you won’t have to clutter up your account with tags that are irrelevant outside of a given project.

For example, let’s say that you are reaching out to a contact on behalf of a specific client, and they request payment for a link. Whether you actually want to pay or not, you can tag that opportunity so you know that for this campaign they are making a paid link request. This tag will only apply in this project, so if you outreach in another project and they don’t make a paid request you will not get confused by this previous (not relevant) tag.

Applying an opportunity tag is simple. Just select one or more contacts you’d like to apply the tag to, then click the tag icon

now, just apply or create the tags you want

To filter on opportunity tags, just select the Tag filters at the top of the Mailbox section. From here, you can filter on any of the tags you’ve added to only see emails tied to those tags.

Resume Sequences

If you use sequences in BuzzStream, then you know how frustrating it can be when you receive a reply that isn’t really a reply, such as an out of office message, that breaks your sequence. Now, with our resume sequence functionality, you can pick right back up where it left off when a sequence is broken prematurely.

To resume a broken sequence, just select the email that broke the sequence in your campaign and click the three dots menu. Then, click “Archive and resume”

This will archive the message that shouldn’t have broken the sequence, and resume the sequence at the next stage in the chain.

Bulk Operations on Relationship Stages

Sometimes, you want to change the relationship stages across a number of opportunities at once in your mailboxes and don’t need the full context of the email to do so. With our bulk relationship stage operations, we’ve made that a simple process.

Just select the emails you’d like to change the relationship stages for and select the relationship stage change icon

Finally, select the stage you’d like those contacts set to and they will be changed.

Wrapping up

We hope that you enjoy all of these updates to functionality in the BuzzStream mailboxes. If you have any questions or feedback please let us know! We’re always happy to hear it.

The post New Ways to Take Action in BuzzStream Mailboxes appeared first on BuzzStream.

The problem is, dealing with contact forms as part of your overall outreach workflow can be very clunky. You’ve got to manually find the right page, navigate to the site and away from your streamlined BuzzStream interface, copy your message into the field and then remember to actually update your contact once you’ve sent the dang thing.

Well, all that’s in the past, because I’m extremely pleased to announce that we’ve added a streamlined contact form workflow!

Adding Contact Forms as Recipients

The first part of this update includes the ability to add contact forms as recipients to your contacts. Previously, you could only add email addresses, but now you can define a contact form when that makes more sense to use for outreach. Doing so is easy.

First, just click into the recipient field. You’ll notice that there is now a “Contact Forms” section, making it easy to see when you’ve got a contact form available to use.

In this new section, you’ll see any forms that BuzzStream has discovered or that you or your team have added. You can also add a new contact form to a contact right from here.

Once you select a contact form, it will be added as the recipient for your contact.

Contact Form Outreach Workflow

Once you’ve added a contact form as a recipient, you can utilize that contact as part of your “Send Individually” workflow.

The great thing here is that you can select a mix of contacts that use outreach forms and email addresses as recipients. No need to conduct two different rounds of outreach! Just select the contacts you’d like to send to and choose the “Send Individually” option.

Now, you can see that you’ve got the workflow view you know and love, with all the contact details on the left and your email on the right. You can customize the messaging here just as you would normally. Once you do so, you can click the “Copy to Clipboard and Open Contact Form” option on the bottom. This will copy your message and take you right to the contact form so you can enter the details without manually copying and pasting.

Once that’s done, just navigate back to BuzzStream and click “Update History and Stage” to mark the contact with the “Attempting to Reach” stage and move to the next contact in your outreach list.

Now, when you view the history for your contact, you’ll see that the message you sent through the form has been captured automatically and the relationship stage has been set!

Wrap-up

We hope that this new way of managing and sending to contact forms speeds up your workflow and makes the whole process more efficient! If you’ve got any questions about using contact forms in your outreach, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

The post Improved Workflow for Sending to Contact Forms appeared first on BuzzStream.

Please (PLEASE) integrate Hunter.io into BuzzStream!

Well, today I am extremely excited to announce that, yes, if you’ve got a BuzzStream group plan or above and a Hunter.io account you will now be able to use all of their contact info data in BuzzStream to help you find emails and people even faster.

Oh, and by the way, we’ve also added contact information filters and updated our “Add Contact” functionality. More on those below!

Hunter.io Integration

To get started all you need to do is add your Hunter API key to BuzzStream through our third party integrations page. 

Now, you can add Hunter’s discovered contact information to your contacts while maintaining full control of your Hunter account so you don’t accidentally go over any limits. 

To enrich contacts with Hunter.io data, simply navigate to the project you’d like to add those contact details for. From that project, go to either your Research List or Outreach List, highlight the contacts you’d like to enrich, then click Research, then Search Hunter.io for contact info.

Now you’ll be able to choose whether you’d like to use any of Hunter’s deliverability filters to help narrow down the contact info they discover. For full information on these filters, I recommend you check out the documentation available on Hunter’s site.

Once you’ve done that, just click continue and Hunter will begin adding their contact details to your contacts! Now you can access that information in a variety of different ways.

First, you can use Hunter contact information and bylines to populate recipients for your campaign so you know you’re sending emails to the right people. Just click in the recipient field and you’ll see all of the discovered information there, including general website emails as well as a list of the specific people Hunter has discovered belonging to a site, including their roles and email addresses.

You can also access Hunter information when adding contacts individually. Just enter the domain information and in seconds you can access any people and contact info that Hunter discovers and add it to the BuzzStream contact record.

Finally, BuzzStream will send you a CSV download of any contact information found for records in your account. You can then open and review that information in the program of your choice.

New Contact Info Filters

Given all the new ways to gather contact information with the Hunter.io integration, we wanted to give you the flexibility to find and review that as well as other campaign details such as associated people and campaign recipients. That way, you’ll be able to see at a glance where you’ve already got details and assigned recipients and where you need to spend more time researching.

Enter our new contact info filters.

At a high level, these filters will let you filter contacts, discovered contact info, or recipients on email address, name, or role fields. If that sounds a bit dry, let me make it real for you.

For one example, what if you want to just quickly see which of the contacts in your account has a discovered email address so you can quickly approve and assign those? Just set the filter criteria to “Discovered contacts”, the field to “Email address” and the filter to “has any value”. Now, you’ve just got a list of contacts with emails you can send to right away!

What if instead you wanted to send to a list of people working at the websites in your list, but aren’t sure where you still need to find the right info? Just set the criteria to “Project recipient”, the field to “Name” and the filter to “is empty”. Now, you know exactly where you or your team need to spend some time researching and adding the right person to be the recipient for your outreach emails.

Ok, one more that’s just a little more out there! Let’s say you’ve got a huge list of website contacts and you remember you wanted to send a tailored message to one of the people associated with them, but can’t remember the full name. Was it…Kelly something? We’ve got your back. Set the criteria to “Contacts” the field to “Name” and the filter criteria to “contains: Kelly”. Now you’ll see the list of contacts in your account with and associated person named Kelly! 

There’s a ton more flexibility here and we’re just scratching the surface, but suffice to say there’s a lot you can do with these new filters.

Updated “Add/Edit Contact” Functionality

We’ve also updated our “Add/Edit contact” forms to better support the Hunter.io data integration, and in the process made some significant updates that offer much more functionality that will save you time and give more granular control over your contact database.

First, we know that sometimes when adding people to reach out to across a variety of projects, sometimes duplicates and creep in. To support managing those better, you now have the ability to merge People contacts. To do that, just click on a Person record that you know has a duplicate, then click the Edit button in the top right corner.

Now, look at the bottom of the field list and you’ll see a yellow button stating how many duplicate contacts exist.

Click that button, and you’ll see the specific duplicate records. From there, just select the duplicates you’d like to merge into the same record, then click Merge and the duplicates will merge into one record.

Related to our quest to eliminate duplicate contacts from the world, we’ve now included much better auto-suggest functionality when adding people to your account. Previously, we only showed the names of people when you entered a contact with the same name. Now, we will show you their name, email address, and any role info you’ve added so you can make a much better decision on the fly.

Previously, it was impossible to associate people to a website directly from the “Add Website” form. This was frustrating and could lead to multiple steps to accommodate that goal. Now, you can add associated people directly from the form (and, as mentioned above, you can populate the People section using discovered Hunter.io data).

Finally, we’ve made it possible to add and edit any data from the edit section of person or website records. Previously the list of fields you could access there was constrained, resulting in extra steps and wasted time. Now you can enter all of the details so there’s no extra clicks or searching for the right place to add info.

Wrap-up

We hope that all of these new improvements give you even more tools to find contact info, manage contacts, and send effective outreach! We covered a lot here, but it’s only touching on the power of these new tools and our Hunter.io integration. As you try them out we’d love to hear from you! Please get in touch with any questions or feedback you have.

The post Hunter.io Integration and Updated Contact Management appeared first on BuzzStream.

Do you know what link building is? If you’re a small business owner, the answer should probably be yes – especially today, when the pandemic has forced much of the world’s business to be conducted online. 

In short, link building refers to the process of acquiring links from other websites to your own. These links can provide a variety of advantages beyond simply directing traffic from another website. For instance, a link on another website could improve your SEO, or where you pop up on a search engine. While it does get even more complicated (most SEO specialists agree that link building is one of the hardest parts of their job), the difficulty can be a major advantage: If you can master it, you’ll be way ahead of the competition.

So how are small businesses approaching link building today? Are they mastering it and beating the competition? We recently spoke to 612 small business owners across the country, 133 of who had some type of link building strategy in place. They shared these strategies, their successes, and their knowledge gaps as well. Regardless of where you fall on the novice-to-master spectrum for link building, this study will have something to teach you and maybe even something to help your own small business. 

Most Common Marketing Strategies in Small Businesses

Our study begins with a look into the most common marketing strategies overall – not just those directly related to link building. We asked the business owners to select all the digital marketing strategies they’re currently employing and then tested some specific knowledge with regard to link building.

Social media was the top marketing strategy among small business owners. Considering it’s often free to access and easy to get started, this makes sense, although we were surprised to see 45.6% of small businesses forwent taking advantage of this tool. Many premier marketing firms would consider a total lack of social media to be “not an option.” Not only can social media increase brand awareness, but it can humanize the brand – something for which a small business is already poised for success.

Even though social media strategies could stand to be a little more ubiquitous among small businesses, link building was rarer still: Just 11.2% had link building as part of their digital strategies. That said, 52.5% of small businesses didn’t even know what link building meant. This becomes even more ironic when you consider that 62.7% understood just how important link building was. If you’re part of this crowd that understands the importance but needs to learn more, keep scrolling as we dissect the various link building strategies small businesses employ. 

Link Building Methods Among Small Businesses

Focusing specifically on link building as a part of digital marketing, we asked those business owners who were employing some type of link building what specific strategies they used. 

On-site content creation was the number one way small businesses built links. This refers to the process of creating content for their own site that has the potential to be shared and linked back to from other sites. This type of content doesn’t necessarily explicitly promote the brand, but contains shareable information, perhaps related to the brand. When it’s not exclusively about the brand or product, that content strategy is what’s referred to as “tangential content.” Sixty-eight percent of small business owners built tangential content, and 33.3% of owners did all of the content marketing themselves. 

More than a third also tried blog commenting to build links. Blog comments – particularly long-form and early comments – can greatly help with SEO, if you stay consistent. It’s also something small businesses can get started on right away, without any prior training or ad expenditure. This can also help with community site link building, where you ask others to link back to your site. Commenting regularly on blogs and showing support is a great way to get your foot in the door. 

How Well Link Building Works

Among those (few) small business owners who did employ some type of link building effort, would they agree these efforts were successful? And how would they define that success? The next part of our study digs into these questions. 

Link building had incredibly high success rates among businesses owners, especially considering that even those with a strategy weren’t necessarily knowledgeable in the field. Eighty-eight percent of small business owners considered their link building efforts a success. On average, they felt this success was evident after 4.9 months of link building efforts. 

But what did success mean exactly? For 60%, link building success was determined by the relevancy of links. This means that the hyperlinks they received to their website were hosted by a relevant website – perhaps one in the same or similar industry. For instance, a link to a painting blog would be considered highly relevant if it came from a home decor website, but perhaps irrelevant if linked to by a pet adoption site. Forty-six percent also considered the volume of links received to be an indicator of success. While the number of links does matter, business owners were right to value relevance more. As with many things in life – including link building – it’s quality over quantity that counts. 

2021 Link Building Plans

This study may have gotten small business owners thinking about what they could do to improve their current link building situation. We ended the questionnaire by asking these business owners what their plans were for link building come 2021. 

Many small business owners appeared eager to learn more about the complex but exciting world of link building. Forty-two percent said they would be interested in attending a virtual conference on the subject, which can not only increase knowledge of the topic but can also build a network that can later assist in building links as well. 

More than a quarter of small businesses also expressed a willingness to spend more money on link building in 2021. Nearly 30% said their budget for this area would increase next year, while 28% reported the same for their overall SEO budget. 

Link Building Well

Considering how much there is to know about link building (and how little the businesses we surveyed actually knew), small businesses need to be wary of exactly how they’re spending money to build links. The idea of putting emphasis on this is well-founded, it’s simply a matter of knowing how to do it correctly. 

If link building sounds overwhelming, that’s because it certainly can be. Especially if your strengths as a small business owner lie elsewhere, it’s advisable to call in the experts to do the link building for you. The team at BuzzStream does exactly that – we specialize in getting your business more links, more traffic, and more coverage. This way, you can specialize in what you do best simultaneously. If you’d like to get help with using link building to grow your business, head to BuzzStream today. 

Methodology and Limitations

We surveyed 612 small business owners in the U.S., including 133 with a link building strategy, about their digital marketing strategies. To help ensure respondents were paying attention and taking our survey seriously, an attention-check question was employed to identify and disqualify those who failed to fully read questions. The main limitation of this survey is these data rely on self-reporting. Potential issues with self-reported data include, but are not limited to, exaggeration, selective memory, and attribution errors on the part of respondents.

Fair Use Statement

Link building is no easy feat, but it’s certainly worth the effort. If you think the information in this article could help someone with their link building efforts, you are welcome to share it. Just be sure your purposes are noncommercial and that you link back to this page.

The post Small Businesses and Link Building appeared first on BuzzStream.

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more commonplace at the office and in everyday life, questions continue to arise: Will AI ever understand causation, or will AI take over the world and leave humanity in damnation? For media professionals, whose inboxes are flooded with a daily dose of hundreds of subject lines, the musings are less existential. Can AI write a subject line – a good one at that – and follow with a solid pitch? 

To determine the quality of writing produced by AI, BuzzStream and Fractl asked 500 public relations specialists, journalists, and other media professionals to rate a series of subject lines and pitches generated using OpenAI’s GPT-3 text generator. Participants did not know any of the text was AI-generated. Read on to uncover why the question we should be asking is, can AI do it better than humans? 

AI-Produced Subject Lines Are Valuable 

Finessing a subject line may be the No. 1 priority for media professionals because, without the perfect one, emails face the same destiny – the trash pile. Using our AI technology, we generated three subject lines and tested each with our respondents. 

The majority (79%) of professionals said they would open the email based on the subject lines, and 62% revealed they were better than subject lines they wrote themselves or recently received. So, what made our AI-produced subject lines valuable? 

According to 88% of survey participants, the length of the subject lines were good to excellent. Although 71% also reported the quality being high or very high, the length is an important factor because achieving the point in “six to eight words” makes it more probable that your email will get read. 

Although a short, well-written subject line may get a media professional far, it will not do any good if it is one in a million of the same. As it turns out, 69% of respondents reported that the subject lines AI produced for our study were novel, and 76% said they were valuable. 

AI Writes Surprisingly Good Pitches

To discover if AI could maintain its positive track record with media professionals, we generated six emails using the GPT-3 text generator. Once again, 62% of our survey respondents shared that the AI-produced text – this time, email pitches – were better than the last they received or wrote themselves. 

Three-fourths considered the AI pitches valuable, and 72% deemed them novel. Also interesting is that 79% of respondents said the AI-produced pitches were convincing. Writing an email pitch worth reading is one thing, but crafting one that persuades a journalist or media professional to buy into your campaign is what success in marketing looks like – and AI passes the test.

For Media Professionals, AI Creates New Beginning 

It’s unclear exactly how these AI developments will impact the digital PR realm, but one thing’s for sure: Authenticity and authority are going to matter more than ever. Keep prioritizing your brand building (including your personal brand) and establishing trust now.

If AI pitches do become the norm, perhaps it’ll be a matter of spending more time on the creation of high-quality content to pitch and identifying the best journalists to reach out to. We’re in an extremely versatile industry, so as long as we continue to focus on what’s best for our audience, we should still be poised for success.

Methodology and Limitations 

We collected results from 500 Media professionals working in digital PR, journalism, digital marketing, and promotions. The survey was designed with the intent of testing human perceptions of AI-generated subject lines and email pitches presented to them. Respondents were not informed that subject lines and emails were AI-generated. Limitations due to self-reporting apply, including exaggeration, telescoping, and selective memory. Subject lines and emails were generated using GPT-3, a text-generating program from OpenAI. GPT-3 was given a set of prompts in order to generate email pitches, but for efficiency, not every variation of each prompt was used. GPT-3 output could vary based on word count and word variation of prompts. 

Fair Use Statement 

If media professionals trust AI to complete the tedious day-to-day work, what doors open for the marketing industry? Join in on the conversation by reading our research on AI-produced subject lines and email pitches. When you find something good enough to share for noncommercial reuse, please link back here so readers may view the project in full and review the methodology and limitations.

The post AI Writes a Pitch appeared first on BuzzStream.