What does a Head of Outreach do?

Buzz Carter is the Head of Outreach for Bulldog Digital Media! Buzz has kindly allowed us to walk in his shoes for the day so we can gain a better insight of exactly what a Head of Outreach might do.

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“I currently run a team of 6, including myself, within the outreach department. My main duties include getting in touch with Bloggers & Journalists to build relationships. We communicate with Journalists & Bloggers in order to get placements for clients, usually by providing expert written content, creative assets like infographics or exclusive data surveys we run.”

“Getting clients featured on sites helps them to gain exposure to new audiences and also benefits their SEO. In order to do this, I coordinate the outreach team as well as our content team to ensure any content we provide to Journalists & Bloggers is high quality, unique and provides value to the client as well as the site it is being posted on.”

How did you get in to marketing?

“Originally I got into marketing entirely by luck, I was in college & decided that traditional post-school education wasn’t for me, so I started to look for apprenticeships, when I found one at a Digital Marketing company. Once I started to work in marketing I fell in love with it, then after a few years I had risen from an apprentice to one of the main members of the outreach team. Then in September of 2016, I got a DM from Gareth Bull (Bulldog Founder) on LinkedIn, asking if I’d like to head up the outreach team of his agency in Southend, so I packed up and moved down to Southend and haven’t looked back since.”

What does a typical day in your role look like?

“A typical day for me involves the standard – I arrive at the office, make a coffee and have a quick catch up with the team. We’ll then kick off our morning outreach meeting, where I will delegate outreach work to my team. After this, I will contact Journalists & Bloggers to inquire about the possibility of working together. I do a lot of research via Journalist Requests, Twitter and HARO, three great ways to pick up leads for outreach. I will also liaise with clients to see what publications they would like us to try and feature them in. I’ll also make time in my day to go through the content we require with our content team to ensure everything is high quality and relevant.”

What do you enjoy most about your role?

“There are a number of areas I enjoy working on in my role. I love working with my team – we are all vibrant, smart people who bounce off each other, producing both quality banter and quality work! I also enjoy working on the Behind The Bulldog web series we have produced at Bulldog Digital Media, which talks about the everyday life in a marketing agency – it’s always great to participate in that. We have a few episodes up on our YouTube channel, covering things from the day to day work life of an agency, team bonding games (which are hilarious to be a part of), interviews with team members and lots of shots of our office dogs, one of the recent videos we have done, had interviews with a few different people (myself included) then went to cover one of the team meals we have at Bulldog. I’d say from just watching the videos you can get a great feel of what agency life is like.”

“I’d say one of the biggest things I enjoy about my role is the feeling you get when a client gets a placement off the back of my team’s work, and knowing how happy they will be about being featured on a publication.”

“For anyone interested in a role like this, I’d say that looking after a team of workers and helping them with their day to day work can be incredibly rewarding – especially with the younger team members. You get a good variety of clients to work with at an agency, and you can build up a great contact list for publications, making every day completely different. Being in an agency environment, there is always a scope to do more than just your core job, with the ability to work with and help different teams in the company.”

What would your advice be to anyone considering a role like this?

“For anyone looking to get into a role like this, if you’re still young looking to the future of your career, I’d say find an apprenticeship or junior role at a Marketing Agency and work your way up the chain. If you’re already progressing in your career and want to move into an Outreach based role, I’d recommend just teaching yourself some SEO & outreach, there are plenty of good resources to learn from all over the internet.

As for qualifications or previous experience, in my opinion, none are really needed, the majority of people I work with never went to uni and I never finished college, so it’s something you can teach yourself and progress off of your own initiative to get to where you want to be. A few good non traditional qualifications to have though would be any Google certification (GAIQ or Digital Garage) or any sort of niche certificate provided by a Marketing agency or software (Distilled U, SEMrush Academy etc.)”

Connect with Buzz on LinkedIn today!