Recently, I was asked a question on a popular platform – how do I get more clients for my business?
For such a simple (sounding) question, the answer is quite tough, especially the implementation. Every expert that you come across tells you to be more active on social media to gain exposure or blog more and thus, bring in more clients.
What most don’t tell you is how to go about it.
Keeping this in view, I’ve prepared a short, two-part primer on how you can generate leads and make sales for your B2B company.
Let’s dive in.
First Part – Social Media
For B2B businesses, I would suggest you focus on three platforms;
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- Quora
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Start by signing up for a social media management tool like Kontentino, Hootsuite or Social Sprout. These help you schedule posts in advance, shorten your links in-app, track mentions and accounts, etc.
Then you should create a DIFFERENT strategy for posting on all three platforms.
Next, create your own profile and start setting yourself up as a thought leader/expert in your niche. Add links to your site in comments (on LinkedIn), tag people – the idea is to create a community with enough engagement. This also means you will need to post regularly on Twitter and Quora, and at least thrice a week on LinkedIn.
Of course, you should also have a separate company page on Twitter and LinkedIn (not on Quora). On this account, you can share your articles, blogs, whitepapers, videos, etc. In short, whatever content you have, use your company pages to distribute it further.
Again, it’s not as simple as that and the exact strategy for each platform deserves a separate article. I would suggest that you look up content and ‘how to’ guides from social media experts like Neil Patel and create your own strategy.
Here are some links you should check out:
Second Part – How To Get More Clients ASAP
Social media, content, SEO – they’re all important tenets of digital marketing, but they typically don’t yield instant results (unless you’re talking about ads – here’s a link where I talk about ad campaigns; How do I generate leads for B2B SaaS product using Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora, Reddit or Google Ads?)
But what will really get you great results is setting up and running outbound campaigns. A combination of cold emails and calls so you can reach your prospects and convince them to buy from you.
Let’s break it down into easy steps;
Step 1 – Find Quality Data
The first point to remember is that the quality of your data is crucial to finding success with your outbound campaign – try Cloudlead for B2B list building, data cleansing and enrichment services with a risk free trial.
The benefits of having a good, targeted B2B list include:
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- Attracting more prospects towards your product/service
- Being able to target your ideal customers easily
- Knowing where in the buying cycle your target accounts stand (through intent data)
- Being able to target your audience better with sales triggers (relative to your product/service)
- Reaching prospects in any part of the world for your product through cold emails and cold calling
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Step 2 – Cold Emailing Prospects
Following is an ideal cycle for cold emailing that you can adopt:
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- First cold email
- Second cold email
- First follow up call
- Third cold email
- Second Follow up call
- Fourth cold email
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Step 3 – How To Generate Warm Leads
These are some points to follow to ensure that your cold emails actually generate warm leads:
1 – Ensure that your B2B list is TARGETED and has the relevant sales triggers (e.g. tech stack, recent funding, recent hiring, website stats, etc).
2 – Do not write misleading subject lines – be direct, don’t use over 8–9 words (personal experience) and whatever you do, don’t use spammy words like ‘discount’, ‘sales’ ‘special offer’ etc.
3 – Be concise in your email – While there’s a lot of debate about brevity emails amongst outbound marketers, there’s something to be said about to-the-point communication. Don’t you appreciate emails that get right to the point? This does not mean that you write ‘Hi’ and be done with it. The bottom line here is to define the pain point your product is solving in 2 or 3 lines.
4 – Follow up – You should set up drip campaigns and follow up with your prospects at least 5–6 times. Use an automated tool like Woodpecker, Yesware, Mailshake etc. to set up your campaign for a hassle-free experience.
5 – Lastly, DO NOT GIVE UP – Where one campaign might not have worked out for you, the other might. There are a variety of factors that account for a successful cold email campaign such as delivery time, the quality of your list, the content of your email, your subject line, domain rating etc. The key is to keep experimenting until you hit the right note for your target market.
Read: How To Write An Email Follow Up To Close The Deal
Here are some rules for ensuring that your cold emails get positive replies:
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- Carefully customize your email for decision makers, avoid generic templates. Personalize your emails with your prospects name and any other info essential to grabbing their attention.
- Too many images in your email are a big no-no.
- Don’t add attachments as nobody trusts them
- Don’t use multiple font types or font colors or font sizes. This just makes your email look spammy. Nobody like emails that are difficult to read: ‘yOu GeTTinG mE?’
- Don’t use misleading subject lines or leave the subject line blank.
- Don’t send across an entire article in your email – always aim for brevity while cold emailing. For newsletters, you should also write 3–5 sentences describing your update/blog and add a link to the blog on your site (this also has the added advantage of driving traffic to your website).
- Don’t include too many links in your email – this increases chances of your email landing in spam. Also don’t add entire URLs. Instead, hyperlink only where relevant and ensure that your email has a max of 3–4 hyperlinks (including signature).
- Don’t start your email with ‘dear sir/madam’, ‘to whom it may concern’, ‘respected CEO’ or any other variation of these. Yeah, it happens and it’s just plain wrong.
- Don’t send emails at night – sending your emails at the right time is extremely crucial – nobody likes receiving emails at 3 am at night. Segment your B2B list according to time zones and send them out accordingly.
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And that’s it – the scoop on how to get more clients and gain more exposure for your business starting today.
This post originally appeared on Quora.
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