Building your outreach machine

BUILDING YOUR
OUTREACH
MACHINE
MICHAEL KING
MANAGING DIRECTOR, IPULLRANK
@IPULLRANK

DOWNLOAD THESE SLIDES
http://bit.ly/outreach-machine

IPULLRANK.COM @ IPULLRANKfdsjkalgdsj
Link Building Outreach is a Scale Problem

IPULLRANK.COM @ IPULLRANK
It Takes a Great Deal of Effort
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People That Are Great At it Evolve Out Quickly
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So it’s Mostly Done by Junior Staff

Google and Clients Leave You Between a Rock and Hard Place
Clients want links NOW, but don’t have anything link-worthy. Google wants great content

Naturally, I have some
thoughts on this..

You Don’t Need New Tactics…
But if youwant some here goes…

We Only Use Two Outreach Tools
Depending onthe type of outreachwe need to dowe use either Pitchbox or BuzzStream. Pitchbox for the more process driven scaledoutreach and BuzzStream for the more relationship drivenPR outreach.

The Value of Pitchbox
Pitchbox value comes in the ability to do prospecting, manage outreach and have analytics on outreach projects all in one place.

Form Letters in Pitchbox
Pitchbox also allows youto dobuild form letters that are personalized by members the teamwhose specific user role is just to personalize. These can be reviewedbefore they are sent out.

Separation of Concerns
This person runs queries
and traverses the web
identifying websites for
outreach.
ONE
Prospector
This person reviews
the sites and inputs
features for
personalization of
form letters.
TWO
Personalizer
This person writes
form letters, approves
initial outreach
personalization and
responses to
responses
THREE
Outreach Specialist
Pitchbox allows you the effectively turn yourlink building effortsinto a processor an assembly linewith veryfew people that
specialize.You can effectivelysend thousandsof firsttouch emails per week.

BuzzStream

The BuzzMarker is Fire
Using the BuzzStream’s BuzzMarker plugin is super useful for quickly capturing prospects in freeform as well.
http://www.buzzstream.com/blog/buzzmarker-for-chrome.html

Tactic – Reach Out About Most Popular Content
Use Buzzsumo to identify the most popular post on a domain and use that in your email because it’s natural that someone would reach out to talk
about something people are already sharing. http://www.buzzsumo.com

Persona-based Outreach
Persona-driven outreach can help you in prospecting and in developing form letters that will perform. Check out this post by Justin Briggs
http://outspokenmedia.com/seo/content-based-outreach-for-link -building/ and my Whiteboard Friday http://moz.com/blog/scalable-link-building-
using-social-media-whiteboard-friday

Video Outreach with BombBomb
Perform video outreach to which has inherent proof that you are an actual person rather than just a spammer. Use Bomb Bomb https://bombbomb.com/

Credit Requests
Reach out to anyone that uses your photos or excerpts of your text and request a link back as a credit. Use Copyscape, Google, Google Reverse
Image Search

Vendor Case Studies
Identify what vendors your site or client is usingwith BuiltWith andreach out to the those companies to doa case study or give a testimonial to get a link back. http://www.builtwith.com

Brand Fans
Find link building quick hits by pulling twitter followers using SimplyMeasured or FollowerWonk and comparing themto the link profile with Majestic, OpenSiteExplorer or Ahrefs.

Brand Fan Issues
One issue with using OpenSiteExplorerfor this is thatyou can’t exportALL of your links.An issue with the Twitterexportis the
shortened links.

Brand Fans Fixes
Step 2
Use my simple ExpandURL tool with the
SEOTools DownloadString function.
Step 1
Download SEOTools for Excel by Neils Bosma
http://nielsbosma.se/projects/seotools/
=DownloadString(“http://www.ipullrank.com/tools/expandurl/?u
rl=[INSERT SHORTENED URL HERE]”)

You Don‘t Need More Tactics
Jon Cooper (@PointBlankSEO) has put together the most robust resource for link buildingtactics out there. Youdon’t need any more tactics. http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

More so than tactics, you need
to establish a baseline of
requirements and figure out
how to scale.

We Say What We Don’t Do

We Specify Requirements
Varied and Integrated Tactics
Most clients want to pin you down into
one or two tactics that live completely
outside of their marketing efforts. We
demand the opposite and won’t do
outreach without strong content.
Branded Email Address
Outreach on behalf of a brand is always
more effective when coming from the a
branded email.
Visibility into analytics
I’ve found that link building only clients
generally don’t like to sharetheir analytics.
This is unacceptable as we need to
determine business impact of our efforts.

Outreach and link building
are exactly like sales
though.

John-Henry Said it Best
https://moz.com/blog/link-prospectors-into-lead-generators

We Build a Funnel

We Optimize the Funnel

We Bonus Our Outreach Team Like Salespeople

Ultimately though, outreach is
a problem of scale.

Enter Machine Learning
The Core Concepts

They Are Not the Same Thing
You often hear these terms conflated by the media

Machine learning is all
about addressing scale
problems.

AI is Comprised of Many Disciplines
Deep Learning is a subset of Machine Learning is a subset of Artificial Intelligence.
AI many branches of which machine learning is a core branch that we can execute.

Improved Google Translate from Scratch in 2 Months
A team rebuilt the broken Google Translate using Machine Learning and within 2 months it was already as good as the version that had taken years to build.

Ok. So, What Is Machine Learning?
“Machine learning is a type of artificial
intelligence that provides computers with
the ability to learn without being explicitly
programmed.”

It’s Really Just Using Math to Guess and Check

Supervised Learning
The machine looks for patterns that match the labeled data that you provide and classifies new data based on that.

Unsupervised Learning
The machine identifies patterns in the data and creates clusters based on what it finds.

Reinforcement Learning
With reinforcement learning, the model is continually trained based on new data thereby improving the classifier’s ability to perform.

The Machine Learning
Process
GET & PREPARE
YOUR DATA
You identifyand clean
your dataset in
preparationfor solving
the machine learning
problem
CHOOSE YOUR
MODEL TRAIN YOUR
CLASSIFIER
You chose the
algorithmor model
that you believe will
yield the best results
then run it in order to
trainyour classifier.
SCORE AND
EVALUATE
You score the
accuracy and
precision of the
classifier and test it
against other
algorithmsto see what
performs best.
PREDICT OR
IDENTIFY OUTCOMES
Once you are happy
withthe results, you
use the classifier
moving forwardto
make conclusions
about new data.

This is an example of how you could
predict the demand of cars for a car
rental company. It follows the same
framework.
Car Rental Example

AI Is Gonna Steal Your Job?
One of the more common fears of middle America around the idea of artificial intelligence is that robots will replace humans in their jobs.

Obama Had Some
Measured Thoughts On
His Way Out

So what part of this is
relevant to outreach?

Supervised or Unsupervised Segmentation

Predictive Modeling

Natural Language Processing

Chatbots

Training Chatbots
Training chatbots is
similar to training
ML classifiers in that
you take a
knowledge base and
run it through NLP
then tune it with
regard to
conversations.

Models
Typesof Models when you shouldUse Them

There are Tons of
Different Models
Your best bet is to test and learn.

Seriously Tonnnnnns

The Uses of Each Type
Are Difficult to
Memorize

Models & Use Cases
Random Forest
Lead Qualification
Logistic Regression
Customer Churn
Prediction
Decision Trees
Customer Churn
Prediction

Models & Use Cases
(Cont’d)
Support Vector
Machines
Text Categorization
Apriori
Market Basket Analysis
(Amazon)
Naïve Bayes
Sentiment Analysis
Recommendation Systems
Spam Classification

K-Fold Cross Validation
Try out a model and validate it using k-fold cross validation.

K-Fold Cross Validation is a Guess and Check
Try out a model and validate it using k-fold cross validation.

How to Choose a Machine
Learning Model
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/machine-learning/machine-learning-algorithm-choice

How to Use this for Outreach
Scaling the unscalable

Sales Software Has Solved Many of Outreach’s Scale Issues

Lead Qualification / Scoring

Close Prediction

Prospecting

Lead Intelligence

If outreach is like sales and many sales
tools have solved this, how can we
apply the same to outreach?

IPULLRANK.COM @ IPULLRANKMost machine learning is done inR or Python, but those are programming languages, but you’re marketers so let’s figure out some things youcan use without too muchcoding.

3 Things Machine Learning Can Help Scale in Outreach
Prospecting
Overcoming
Objections
Initial
Outreach
Research

Orange Canvas is a Visual Machine Learning Tool
https://orange.biolab.si

It Allows You to Drag & Drop and Perform Analyses

We’re going to perform supervised
machine learning to predict which sites
are worthwhile prospects based on our
previous research.

Collect, Clean and Setup Whatever Data You Have
If it’s a prospect you used, mark it as a , if it was disapproved, mark it as a 0. If there are rows that are missing data remove them.

Import Your Data
Specify the column where you have
marked a site/page as approved as
your target attribute. Skip any text-
based attributes.

Take Your Prospect Lists and Data
https://www.tools4noobs.com/summarize/

Use the Model that Performed Best to Predict

The Output is a Segmented Prospect List
Tada!

Research – CrystalKnows
This tool is an example of user segmentation based on social media data http://www.crystalknows.com

Research – PeoplePattern
People Pattern is an enterprise tool that accomplishes similar goals, but could allow you to segment outreach targets https://www.peoplepattern.com/

Research – Text Summarization Tool
https://www.tools4noobs.com/summarize/

Improve My BuzzSumo Tactic
Scale the tactic of reading the prospect’s most popular post using text summarization.

Automate Overcoming Objections with an Email Chatbot
http://blog.mila.com/en/2016/08/23/how-chatbots-and-ai-create-email-auto-replies-with-intelligent-answers/

Generate your Chatbot with API.AI
http://api.ai

Setup your Responses with Key Variables
Based on what the user mightsay in their response to you, setup your own responses and use variables so those responses are contextual and logical. The botwill continue to learn based on the emails itgets.

Connect Your Bot to Email Using Zapier
You can avoid the coding element by setting up a trigger in Gmail for newemail, connecting to the API with the POSTaction and sending an email once theresponse is returned

These are all relatively simple to do,
but if you want some help…

Codementor

Experfy

Kaggle

Final Thought
Machines are not going to replace humans at
outreach, but there are certain components of
the busywork that we can train it to do wellto
help us scale.

Wrapping Up
Who amI and where am Ifrom?

I’M #ZORASDAD
First and foremost.

MY NAME IS MIKE
KING
Razorfish, Publicis Modem alum
Full Stack Developer
Full Stack Marketer
Moz Associate

I Run a Better
Marketing Agency
Called iPullRank

We Do These Things
Machine
Learning
SEOContent
Strategy
Paid Media Measurement
&
Optimization
Marketing
Automation

IPULLRANK
http://ipullrank.com
THANK YOU
Michael King
Managing Director
mike@ipullrank.com

Building your outreach machine

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