The Ultimate Digital Outreach Tracking Template

TL;DR: Download this free digital outreach tracking template to improve your future content marketing outreach efforts.

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You’ve built out a robust content strategy plan with your SEO team. Your strategy includes digital outreach tactics. You’ve performed influencer research using BuzzSumo, Google Search, or some other media list building platform. You’re ready to kick off your digital outreach communication efforts and make connections with relevant journalists.

Now is the time to send those emails.

It’s easy to get a few days—or weeks—deep into outreach without keeping track of everyone with whom you’ve communicated. Even though you already built out a robust research list to begin, new opportunities always arise. Maybe an influencer or journalist caught your eye on Twitter. Maybe you found a website that hosts a blog reel of related content. Maybe you spotted a random opportunity on HARO.

If you are not keeping track of these efforts (or using a paid service to track for you), how can you effectively follow up, remember if they responded and how they responded, or ultimately show results surrounding your long hours of outreach efforts?

Outreach Can Get Complicated Without Keeping Track

This is where our outreach template comes handy. Originally created by one of our SEO Analysts, (who is really good at building graphs), and later modified to be more PR conducive, this template will help keep you organized on communication efforts as well as provide you with a snapshot of the websites you are targeting.

What the Outreach Template Includes:

• Four tiers of outreach opportunities
• Outreach tracking and progress
• Social and industry influencers
• Competitor tracking
• Email template tracking

Begin Tracking Outreach

This outreach template is to be used for a specific client or project and is broken out into different tiers, which are labeled on the tabs as Local, Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3. There is also a section where you can drop in an email template you may be using, so you have it saved in one place for future reference or modification.

Anyone who works in PR knows that it is very unlikely to be doing this directly as you go, but if you can set aside just one to two hours/week to track your communications, it will make follow-ups, new projects, and ultimately reporting your efforts much more manageable and hopefully, more successful!

Getting Started

To begin, click here to download the template, then go to File>Make a Copy. This will create a personal version for you to use and develop to best fit your outreach recording needs.

1. Since you already did the bulk of media research prior to actually pitching (right?), you can easily drop all of your research into those first four tiers as seen fit to keep everything in one place. If you are launching a new outreach strategy, you can use these tiers to input all of your research and list building off the bat.
2. Use the Outreach Progress tab to document and make notes of dates sent, follow up, and responses.
3. This outreach tracking template includes a lot of variables that you may not need. So remember to tailor this to best fit your outreach tracking needs and goals.

Have any other suggestions for the Ultimate Outreach Tracking Template? Have an idea on how we can make it better or other suggestions for tracking your outreach? Tweet to @katiewol and let me know!