I get it: You’ve probably had your fair share of reading countless articles online about B2B marketing strategies, haven’t you?
And if I’m guessing right, most of the write-ups you’ve read are generic — borderline useless — that you can’t even imagine why anyone would take the time to write such a piece.
Don’t worry; this article isn’t one of those.
If you’re sick and tired of reading pointless articles about B2B marketing disguised as “must-read guides,” then you’re in the right place.
B2B Marketing professionals from Novus are going to share with you a 3-step marketing strategy that you can use to grow your customer base. If you take the time to implement/use the steps detailed in this guide, I promise you’ll get positive results out of your marketing endeavors one way or the other.
Let’s hop right in.
Step 1: Scrape data from directory sites to get leads.
The YellowPages is the next best thing since sliced bread for business owners and marketers who are looking for clients in a B2B setting.
Not only does the website have bazillions of people visiting them on a monthly basis (Similarweb says they have about 40.50 million unique monthly visitors), but the platform also houses truckloads of businesses in their database.
Don’t believe me?
Allow me to show you a glimpse of what the platform has to offer.
For the sake of example, I’ll look for a Marketing Agency to help grow your business in Los Angeles, CA.
I see 3000+ businesses listed.
While I doubt that all of the business listed are real (some of them are probably closed already), I’m sure you’ll agree that a good bit of the businesses listed here are still alive and kicking.
That being said, if you’ll go to YP to scrape the website and contact information of your target business, then you’d be able to come up with a list of people to target real fast.
Once you have the list ready, you can start sending outreach messages to the business owners. Depending on your take on what B2B selling is all about, this might or might not be a good tactic for you to try. If you’re more comfortable with pure inbound marketing, as opposed to inbound mixed with outbound, then scraping the YellowPages and then reaching out cold is probably not a good fit for you.
Just remember, there is more to scraping data from the internet than just using it to come up with a list of people to reach out to. The benefits of web scraping are far overreaching. Not only can you use web scraping to find leads, but you can also use it to study your competitors’ marketing strategies, get better insights on how your target audience are reacting to offers, or extract data from websites.
At this point, you should already have a list of businesses whom you can reach out to. However, before you do just that, I urge you to do step number two first.
Step 2: Use Twitter to establish your personal brand.
Having an established brand is important before reaching out to others — especially to business owners. With all the spammers on the internet, almost everyone tends to be wary of who’s reaching out to them. If they do their research and see that the person who reached out to them doesn’t have a strong enough clout, then it’d be easier for them to dismiss the person as a spammer, therefore, ignoring the person.
Of course, you do not want to be ignored by the business owners whom you’ll reach out to.
After all, what good will the list that you’ve put together in step number one be if none of them will reply to your outreach message, right?
Well, it’s a good thing there’s Twitter.
Establishing your brand through Twitter is fairly simple to pull off since there are Twitter automation tools that you can use to increase your Twitter following. There are a couple of nifty things that these automation tools can do for you. Narrow.io’s features allow you to follow/unfollow people automatically, and also “Likes” other people’s posts if their posts have the keywords that you added in your account settings.
With these two features alone, you’d be able to grow your Twitter followers (therefore establishing your brand, to some extent), without you having to spend countless hours on Twitter. You just need to set the Twitter automation tool one-time, and you’re pretty much ready to go.
Step 3: Start your outreach.
At this point, you should already have two very crucial ingredients to your client acquisition endeavor: 1) A list of prospects that you can reach out to, and 2) An established enough brand as evidenced by your Twitter profile having thousands of followers. Now that you have these two points readied, it’s time for you to start reaching out to your list of prospects.
There are several angles you take when reaching out to your leads. You can either offer them freebies to get them to open up to you, you can straight up pitch your services on your first email (rarely should you do this), or you can contact them offering to collaborate with them on a project of some sort (among other things).
Because there’s no way I can predict which approach you’ll take, allow me to share with you some guidelines that you need to consider when creating your outreach messages.
These are some of the crucial points that you need to consider to get better conversion rates.
- Talk about how the recipients can benefit from you, and not on how awesome you are.
- Keep your message as concise as possible.
- Make sure that your message have these elements: a) How they can benefit from you, b) A short statement telling why they can trust you, and c) A clear statement telling them what exactly it is that you want them to do. When you have these points in your message, your chances of getting a reply drastically increases.
Whether you’re pitching a guest post, straight-up selling your services, or you’re trying to build a strategic partnership with your prospects; you’ll get better results out of your outreach methods with the points above.
