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Ninja Outreach Review & Tutorial - What PR Needs to Know
Ninja Outreach grabbed my attention soon after it launched in 2015. Back then the SEO industry generally was still reeling from the crackdown in link building. Man tools were still desktop driven, and there wasn’t really a lot out there. We were hungry for a better solution at my agency, and looking into every option we could. There just weren’t many great options on the market for legitimate link builders at a reasonable price. We were mostly stuck with spreadsheets, or over priced PR tools.
Ninja Outreach has been the most agile of a new set of tools and game changer for anyone involved with link building and PR. Right off the bat Ninja Outreach is excellent for the fact that it’s so lightweight. If you need an outreach tool for tracking outgoing emails, monitoring open rates, prospecting for interested parties, and a streamlined process anyone can pick up and go to start building their business Ninja Outreach is the goto tool. I like to call Ninja Outreach the PR centric email CRM you can use (at a fair price) without having to do any extra paperwork. (no TPS reports!)
This review will be pretty thorough and as such will end up being quite lengthy. For ease of reading I’ve included a handy little index below. If you don’t feel like reading, check out our quick overview below, as well as our full breakdown of what makes Ninja Outreach so great.
Quick Ninja Outreach Review, Features, & Tutorial
Full Ninja Outreach Review, Features, & Tutorial
Review Tutorial Index:
1) What is Ninja Outreach?
Ninja Outreach reduces everything that you would do in the management of any backlink building or outreach campaign for PR, SEO, and business growth over email. At it’s core Ninja Outreach is a CRM where you can manage all of your outreach efforts from a central space. The best part about it is the included Ninja Outreach chrome extension which makes it easy to prospect and manage your outreach list on the fly as you're scouring the web for prospects and leads.
Basic overview Vid from company
Walkthrough from Owner
2) Who is it designed for?
Ninja Outreach is optimal for single PR specialists, entrepreneurs, marketing managers, or SEO’s that are trying to build out their business. The greatest asset of Ninja Outreach is that it’s lightweight, easy to start using, and reduces any headaches from running a large scale outreach effort. It can work well within teams, but I feel as though things can become a bit of headache when you’re dealing with multiple product launches or a massive team of multiple marketers. Though the system can handle that, it’s lightweight nature begins to become a liability as bookkeeping and communication itself will be a headache if not done well.
3) What can you use Ninja Outreach For?:
There are five core feature sets of Ninja Outreach. Combined they make it easy for marketers to manage outreach campaigns:
- Email outreach list management / prospect CRM - The biggest challenge of any outreach campaign is keeping track of all your emails. Seeing who is opening and remembering to follow backup with prospects afterwards is one of the biggest hassles of outreach. Ninja Outreach makes it simple to create, add, and track prospects as you interact with them.
- Prospecting – You can use NinjaOuteach to find possible outreach targets all from their central repository of content and social influencers that might be interested in your topic. While not perfect (I prefer just using Google and other methods I’ve cultivated over the years) this is a useful feature.
- Manage Templates – Create and monitor the templates you’re building out. See the success rate of certain ones, use their own templates, or build on your as you get feedback.
- NinjaOutreach Chrome Extension - This to me is the best part of the tool. Easily add people to your contact lists as you go, and outreach directly from your browser.
- Success Tracking - Nurture relationships for the long term, keep notes on your relationship with people. This makes it easy to be genuine, even when you might have hundreds of contacts.
So what does the above let you do...well there’s quite a bit:
Ninja Outreach can be used along a large set of use cases, but the majority of them are centered around email driven communication.
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- Finding and Generating Guest Posting Opportunities - Use this tool to track and scale your outreach effort. Ditch spreadsheets and instead prospect from either their search tool or search engines on the fly.
- Content Promotion - Just finished your latest brilliant blog post? As we all know, if you build it they won’t come. The key is to make sure that the right people are seeing, sharing, or interacting with your content. Ninja Outreach can make it easy to build and scale out relationships with people who might be interested in your content, or are willing to work with you on linking.
- Create and test pitches - Ninja Outreach makes it easy to generate and organize your email templates. All in all, this makes it easy to organize your outreach templates by success, and ultimately rate which pitch is most successful with prospects.
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- Lead Generation, Blogger Outreach, and/or Collecting Contact Info - There area variety of reasons from potential customer lead generation or building out a bank of your ideal customers where it would be useful as a marketer to quickly build out a bank of prospects. The applet makes it easy to get contact information. Better yet you essentially have a CRM of all these contacts.
- Content Research & Influencer Marketing - Although the influencer and content prospecting feature isn’t perfect, it does serve a great deal of valuable information about the movers and shakers in a particular industry. Use this information to both research, and develop your pitch to prospective customers. Obviously you can reach out to these people as well, with the caveat that a social influencer may not have as much value to search engines directly. Probably the biggest weakness here is that you could just do this work in Twitter and Instagram search. But again the value falls back to integration and a seamless outreach and CRM experience.
4) Design of Ninja Outreach
- Main Dashboard
When you first login you’ll see the overall view of your email outreach. This dashboard view gives you great top level details of all your campaigns with stats on reply rate and unread messages.
- Email outreach overview view
You can update the actual specifics of a relationship in this overview mode and in the Ninja Outreach chrome extension. But this view basically gives you individual details on all the users you have in a specific campaign.
The overall view makes it easy to update the contacts, in CRM style.
Track templates, and view their success, items also come pre-populated.
One of the best feature sets of Ninja Outreach is they make it easy to create and live test emails directly with your intended audience. While you can customize emails easily in with their chrome extension it’s also nice to have a fallback. Of course over time you can refine and select the best email templates for your outreach campaigns.
You can quickly add in your own or modify existing templates as you get feedback
Similar to many other CRMs and email management platforms Ninja Outreach includes handy formatting, and easy metric attachment to your emails.
Content Prospector
Part of Ninja Outreach’s value add is they help you prospect content directly from their own platform. While I’m generally most skeptical of this feature since I think Google is a better place to prospect (where do the link metrics from indexed blogs really matter at the end of the day) than social networks. It’s still always good and helpful to put your best foot forward with bloggers. You can also take these influencers and see who follows them or links to them on their blogs.
Similar to other parts of the system, the interface makes it easy to quickly add people to your outreach list.
Quickly add people to your list
Generally I find this info to be most useful for scouting and actually understanding a target audience than building a targeting and outreach campaign.
Filter content results by multiple dimensions
The best feature set add on within the system is the fact that you can filter by highly specific criteria. While this is useful for finding certain types of outreach prospects, it also starts to show the overall limits of the system since even moderately deep topic areas start to get thin results.
Prospect for social influencers using Twitter and Instagram
Similar to the content prospector the social influencer search lets you find popular influencers in the Twitter and Instagram sphere.
Again you can easily find, inspect, and add users to your outreach list. Of course the information isn’t always perfect but integrating all of this information directly into an outreach CRM is useful.
Filter searches between occupation, search by country, and quickly toggle between instagram and twitter.
In depth contact management. All of this information would be nothing without an efficient way to organize it. Similar to any other CRM Ninja Outreach lets you put in all the crucial outreach information you might need.
Ninja Outreach Chrome Extension
The Ninja Outreach Chome extension is by far the best part of the overall package. Their applet highlights a variety of information while you’re prospecting and just generally marketing on the fly. From here you can examine a variety of useful metrics on your prospects, reach out directly, and organize all of your central contact info for back at the mothership.
Quickly add people to your contact list as you search for influencers from Google or social as you go through your day or prospect.
Easily check out top level metrics on their site.
Get demographic data (of limited value in my opinion but potentially accurate for larger sites)
The interface is straightforward and makes it easy to email prospects from within the system.
View RSS of most recent posts as well as which ones have the most comments
This feature is useful for quickly understanding what a site is about, and which posts are most popular. This lets you know what info they’re most interested in, and whether they have real traction.
5) The Pros of Ninja Outreach
- Perfect for one person or one product/service teams.
- Super easy learning curve. Takes less than a minute to begin using and get started.
- Chrome extensions integrates information perfectly within the system and gives you an easy way to reach out with people as you’re prospecting or go through your day.
- Metrics on domain authority, social shares, and rss feed can be extremely helpful for organizing and prioritizing prospects.
- The Ninja Outreach Chrome extensions makes it easy to take prospect lists from Google or other places on sites and add them individually to your list.
- Great price and excellent support.
6) The Cons of Ninja Outreach
- The system doesn’t work as well for larger teams (at least it doesn’t for us) what you trade in simplicity you gain in headache with a larger team.
- The influencer search can be somewhat unreliable or slow to use. I know they will work hard to make this feature better.
- Minor point, that has gotten better, but something about the overall design still feels overall cartoony, I could imagine some bosses not thinking it’s legit enough.
7) Do I think Ninja Outreach is worth getting? (Disclaimer, I do have and use a copy)
I know I’ve stressed this point frequently but for the one-marketer band this really is the end all be all. It’s easy for any entrepreneur or business owner to get in here, start reaching out, and getting things happening.
8) Similar Programs
There are a few other systems like this out there, notably PitchBox and BuzzStream. Both of those traditionally have been a bit more expensive and/or aimed at larger teams, and thus tend to have a slightly steeper learning curve.
9) Essential Uses & Best Tutorials on the Web
While our overview should be able to get you started on your way with Ninja Outreach, I do love that this company is just so committed to helping people out, below are some of their training videos:
How To Promote Your Content With Ninja Outreach
How To Manage Any Outreach Campaign With Ninja Outreach
How to Implement The Skyscraper Technique Using Ninja Outreach
How To Get Links With Infographics And Guestographics With Ninja Outreach
How To Do Broken Link Building Using Ninja Outreach
How To Get Product Reviews, Guest Posts, And Mentions With Ninja Outreach
How To Get Links On Resource Pages With Ninja Outreach
How To Find Someone’s Email Address With Ninja Outreach
How To Promote Your Crowdfunding Campaign With Ninja Outreach
How To Get Featured On Interviews And Podcasts With NinjaOutreah
How To Generate Leads And Make Sales With Ninja Outreach
How To Find Affiliates With Ninja Outreach
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