How to Use HARO Outreach in Your Digital Marketing Strategy

HARO or help a reporter out helps journalists and bloggers in searching in finding sources to contribute to their writing. Let’s find out how to incorporate HARO outreach into your digital marketing strategy.

What is HARO outreach?

HARO outreach is known majorly as simply HARO or help a reporter out. HARO is a tool which can connect journalists and bloggers with expert sources. These sources can contribute to their articles whilst meeting journalists demanding deadlines. It also presents brands with a platform for exposure and a place to tell their brand stories. 

HARO distributes a mass amount of around 75,000 journalists and 1 million sources from a range of well-respected media outlets and industries. 

The process is very straightforward, a journalist or blogger will post their request on HARO. You then search via a range of different keywords to find these queries. From there it’s easy to reach out with your response and details to offer your expertise. 

How to use HARO outreach in your digital marketing strategy

Help a reporter out offers a great opportunity for you to identify valuable PR opportunities. Taking advantage of these can put your brand in front of others and potential leads and customers. 

HARO offers paid plans but is mostly free which means it is effective cost-wise for your digital marketing strategy. By providing your expertise to other platforms and online locations, you can gain some pretty valuable quality backlinks. 

Backlinks help you establish online authority and contribute to your SEO efforts and how high you rank on search engines.

For more information on backlinks take a look at our post on the quickstart backlink SEO guide. 

HARO opportunities can increase the level of thought leadership you have amongst others in your industry. This is by offering your expertise wider than just your community. 

The results from using HARO are certainly worth investing your time in. Or, in some cases part of your digital marketing budget if you do this right. 

Here are some steps on how to use HARO outreach effectively in order to benefit your digital marketing strategy.

After signing up for HARO the first thing you need to establish is where your area of expertise lies. Taking a leap head first with your own personal opinion or fact from your school days won’t fly on HARO. You need to offer something more, a level of expertise.

For ROAR we specialise in digital marketing areas such as SEO, PPC, HubSpot services, Blog Writing and more. So, we would look for reporters or bloggers looking for specialists in these areas and offer our knowledge to support them. You wouldn’t catch ROAR offering opinions on something like working in the farming industry. This is because we have no level of expertise in this area.

The journalists who welcome your input won’t hesitate to bin a general, lacklustre response.  Ensure that you are offering something worthwhile and worth both parties’ time.

Once you have established what area you are expertly knowledgeable in you can find related topics and outreach requests. Simply search a keyword and see what requests you can offer knowledge on.

For example: as ROAR specialises in SEO, we would search ‘SEO agency’ to find pieces we can contribute to.

Make sure you include your details in the HARO requests response, including things like;

• Name
• Title
• Organisation
• Link to your website

This will help when the journalist is backlinking or referencing your contribution to their website. Some reporters may ask for a headshot so make sure you have previously uploaded one to your website or via Imgur. This is so you can link this in the HARO response as you can’t send attachments. 

Have a short bio written typically one less than 100 words. Save it somewhere that is easily accessible – stick to work-related achievements for this one.

Stay focused and check the feed regularly then begin sending out your responses. Journalists are subjected to dozens of queries and emails each day. This makes it vital to get in early whilst providing what they need. 

Journalists won’t chase you for extra info or additional expertise so make sure that you answer the whole request. It needs to be accessible immediately or they will move on to the next person.

The more often you are able to respond, the better. You will then have a catalogue of responses you can structure your future ones around. 

The more point focused and specific you can be, the better chance you have of the journalist using your response. But, don’t expect a response whether your information is used or not. A surefire way to keep track of your contributions is by setting up a Google alert for your name and business!

If your response is posted, make sure to interact with it on social media and share it with your wider community. This could build an ongoing relationship with the journalist and allow you to build connections with their community also. 

Journalists’ careers are incredibly fast-paced. So the sources who are fast, reliable and polite stand a chance of being reached out to for future projects. 

HARO with ROAR 

At ROAR we value the opportunities that HARO presents to not only us but our clients. 

Within our DIY SEO Platform, you will find a HARO outreach plugin built in. This means you can take complete control over your SEO and HARO outreach all in one palace.

Amongst the HARO outreach plug-in, the DIY SEO Platform puts the power back in a business’s hands. With the platform, you can use HARO, and also view the actions that are needed on your site to improve SEO. Including beginning high-quality backlink strategy, tracking metrics, boosting local SEO and learning via the SEO academy training courses. 

Speak to one of our specialists today to take your marketing strategy to new heights.