How to contact influencers and save time doing it

Not sure how to reach out to high profile influencers? Eric Siu shares his top strategies to connect with busy influential people the right way, without wasting anyone's time. Subscribe to...

Full Transcript of The Video

Eric Siu: Hey, everyone. Eric Siu here, the co-founder of The Marketing School Podcast and the founder of the entrepreneurial podcast Growth Everywhere. In today's video, I'm going to tell you about how you can connect with influencers to bring them on your podcast or whatever you're trying to do, actually. A couple of tools I'm going to go through right now. First tool right here is called TextExpander. What TextExpander does is, instead of you having the same templates over and over, "Hey, I'm looking to bring you on my podcast. Here's how many downloads we have," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like you have so many paragraphs you need to say, right, or a couple sentences. You don't have to say the same thing over and over, so let's take a look at it.
I'm going to just email right here with the CEO, Charity: Water. Right? You can see that I just used two keystrokes. I used a G and an uppercase E, and this whole, I think we got like four paragraphs of text right here. In general, when you're reaching out to people, you want to keep it brief, so I should probably edit this, but this is the old podcast template that we used to use. It says, "Hi, name. Love everything that you do! Wanted to see if you're up for a podcast interview on Growth Everywhere. It goes from 20 to 35 minutes. You know we have people like Jason Lemkin from Echosign, Mark Organ from Eloqua. If you're interested, just please pick a time here," so I give them my calendar, and I'll talk about that tool. Then I show them a workflow in terms of the questions that I'm asking. Right?
Everything's in there. Right? If they want to book it, they can just click on that link, and then they'll go into my calendar, and they'll book something, and then I set my podcast interviews for Thursdays only, so Thursday I batch them. That's another tactic you want to use if you're doing podcasts or whatever you're doing. Then you want to give them like a preview of what's coming. Right? You check out the interview flow like, "Here's the questions I'm going to ask you," so they're not going to be blindsided. Right? You want to make sure that you make things as easy as possible for people. When you're connecting with the influencer, they're going to appreciate you for that, because they're really busy people. Right? You want to make it really easy, like if you're going to tell them to do work, "Hey, can you do all this for me? Can you sign all this for me?" They're going to be like, "No. Go away."
Right here, I mean, this is what we use. Right here I just put Scott, for example, and you can see it pops out there. Right? TextExpander makes my life really, really easy. Okay? It's the same thing for sales or if I want to send people some documentation to sign, whatever it is, I'm going to have that all in there. Now, the other thing is, you can see like the scheduling link right here is, it's meetme.so. ScheduleOnce is my calendar tool of choice. You can use a tool like Calendly, so that's C-A-L-E-N-D dot L-Y, and then ScheduleOnce is really good too. I mean, it syncs with my calendar, and then they can go in and book a time. It's really easy. There's a lot of these tools. I've just been using ScheduleOnce for years. They have an API as well that hooks in with different tools where you can sync in with their CRM and things like that. Again, makes your life easy. It seems that there's a lot of tools, but the tools are there to help make your life simpler. Okay?
Now, the cool thing is, you can see there's my title. I keep it very to the point. Right? It says "Podcast interview" right here, so, "Hey, Scott. Thanks for being a part of our community. Would you be interested in a podcast interview on Growth Everywhere?" Now, the question is, how do you get these CEOs' email addresses? How do you reach out to these people? Right? Here's how you do it. There is a tool right here called Hunter.io, and you can also use ... I mean, there's tools like findthat.email, so a lot of different tools out there. I just like using Hunter.io, so same thing. Like if we go to, let's see the domain, charitywater.org. Okay? We just type in charitywater.org, and then it can find the email addresses from that very specific domain. Okay? Now, we can see we have his email address over here, and let's take a look. Okay?
It's going to show you the different patterns, like in this case maybe I'm looking for Scott. Guess what? Scott is right here. We have his Twitter as well, and we have his email address right here. The green means it's confirmed, and this is where they pulled it from. They scrape the web, and they get the emails for you. Now, there's a lot of different things you can do with Hunter.io. You can get bulk emails from different companies. If I just have your name and the company name, I'm going to find your email using this tool, right, so that you can verify leads, things like that. There's the API as well. I don't want to go too much into it, but that's how you find the email address, is you can use different tools as well. By the way, if you have Scott's email, please don't bombard him. Be nice to him.
You have Hunter.io. You have TextExpander. You have ScheduleOnce. That's all you need to find these influencers. If you're trying to get influencers, talk to them on Instagram, for example. That is a hack that you can do right now where you find them and you just DM them. Right? That is a way of doing business development or trying to connect with these people as well. That's it for today, and we'll see you in the next video.

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