We are with you; the sound of cold outreach may make you shudder as well. But cold outreach can see success if you build the right marketing strategy.
Cold outreach is not a subject that any marketer or salesperson enthusiastically jumps into. And who can blame them? Unfortunately, cold outreach has a reputation for being the bane of many sales and marketing efforts, filled with mountains of rejections with seemingly minor or few leads in the funnel.
However, cold outreach doesn't have to be a painful process, and once you build an outreach strategy fit for your goals, you will find your efforts are well worth it. This article will look at how you can use cold outreach to develop positive lead generation.
Lead Generation the Key To Growth
The biggest reason companies have marketing teams and budgets are because companies have to find a way to bring the business to their door. If you sit around just hoping that word would get around about your product or service, you will quickly find yourself with no business at all.
This is where your sales team will come in. They help managers to figure out how to capture those leads and turn them into a sale. Believe it or not, lead generation works best when the marketing and sales teams work together. When companies want to gather more traffic to their funnel, they may use various strategies and set benchmarks to see how their efforts are shaping up.
Know Your Target
We have spoken about knowing your target market and audience a great deal, and that's because it is essential to know where to place your marketing and research efforts. Before you know where you are going, you have to start at the beginning.
It wouldn't make sense to spend hours creating an outreach strategy just to realize that you aren't aiming for the right audience. So to save time and ensure your cold outreach strategy is fruitful, look into what value you offer and which types of buyer personas will likely become leads later on.
Build A Strategy
With technology, information and data can be easily accessible, and any company can make a more pointed cold outreach strategy suited to their goals built from the findings of their research data.
The reason to build an outreach strategy is the same as any other strategy you would create for sales, or HR, to bring more leads into the funnel. But more than that, the hope is to gather quality leads. A quality lead has a higher potential to convert into a sale, which means the efforts put into lead generation increase your sales and ROI.
Consider Different Methods
No, we aren't suggesting you call random people and ask if they want to buy your product. That, of course, would not be the best way to go about this. Instead, to help increase your lead generation, you can use several outreach methods that have seen success with other businesses.
Cold calling, while still used, is not as effective when you are considering that most of those you hope to reach are more accessible online, whether by email or through social media.
LinkedIn cold outreach can be beneficial as you can connect with your target through a connection request or by interacting with posts or discussions they may be part of. LinkedIn is an excellent spot for lead generation strategies that target businesses over an individual and can have a more casual yet professional approach to communication.
Email Campaigns
Connecting with your leads through an email campaign may be less intrusive than a LinkedIn connection request. A strategy that includes emailing should consider those who sign-up for your mailing list or who have interacted with your newsletters, content, or requested additional information.
In this way, the person you are emailing has already shown some type of interest in what you are offering and can be considered a more qualified lead. This is more of a more inbound strategy while sending LinkedIn connections is more of an outbound strategy. A combination of both is needed to maximize your lead generation strategy.
Getting the Results
There are more strategists that can aid businesses in their cold outreach efforts, and there are more effective methods for some than others. But how do you know if your cold outreach strategy is working? By measuring, tracking, and reviewing the information you collect along the way.
Measuring your efforts is a big help in knowing how to move and in which directions to move. You can become more agile in your lead strategies in this way.
For example, let's say your team created and completed two email campaigns over a month, but you do not see any engagement. Because of this, your team decides to review the data to see where improvements or changes can be made for the next email campaign.
Becoming agile in your outreach strategy gives you a competitive advantage by allowing you to respond to the changing environments and solve problems at the moment. It saves time and moves your company closer toward a strategy that can generate a positive result.
What's Your Cold Outreach Strategy?
Cold outreach is still a strategy used today by many marketing teams and is still an effective way to fill your pipeline with qualified leads. However, there is no one size fits all approach, and it takes effort to know the purpose behind your strategy.
Suppose you are considering a new cold outreach strategy. In that case, our marketing agency has experience using agile methodologies and outreach best practices to generate quality leads for our clients. Let's work together!