There is no such thing as non-targeted outbound lead generations strategies.
Prospects are looking for companies that understand them, have messages that resonate with the corporate culture, and that provide a personalized experience.
This is why B2B companies are constantly on the lookout to improve their lead generation campaigns. In this guide, we take a look at targeted outbound lead generation strategies that you can try this year.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn remains to be one of the best platforms to conduct lead generation in. It’s one of the biggest platforms that exists for professional connections and it has a handy prospecting tool called LinkedIn Sales Navigator that can help with targeted outbound lead generation.
The reason a lot of marketers love LinkedIn is the fact the people on the platform are there to interact on a professional level. This means that it is seemingly easier to pitch on the platform rather than say, Facebook.
With LinkedIn Sales Navigator lead generation specialists can take their game to a whole new level using the advanced filters that they get access to.
You can narrow down your search by tenure, industry, geographical locale, etc. to find your exact customer profile.
After that you can filter those results even further with keywords that the prospect has been searching for.
It’s even powerful enough to integrate with popular CRMs such as HubSpot.
If you were to combine this with targeted messaging and the clever use of organic LinkedIn posts, it makes for a great lead generation strategy especially now that a majority of your prospects are online.
Referrals
One of the least used methods of outbound lead generation is the referral system.
It’s a pretty robust strategy because you get to use your existing base of customers to market to their own circles, freeing up valuable marketing resources and taking advantage of prospecting using an existing customer’s own filter.
Referrals have to come with a reward for your customer.
If the reward is good enough, they are most likely to pass the offer down to people who have a higher propensity to use your product.
It’s a great add on to any current marketing campaign that you may have.
Using Facebook Custom Audiences for Lead Nurturing and Pre-suasion
Facebook is the biggest social media platform in the world, and although it doesn’t hold the same professional theme as LinkedIn, you can still leverage the platform to reach your prospects.
The question is how do you do it.
Enter Facebook custom audiences.
Facebook custom audiences allow you to upload a list of email addresses and have Facebook target this list with ads of your choosing.
They’re great for organizations who want to do a little bit of lead nurturing or brand recognition campaigns since they can target very specific people with your ads.
However, you can also use them before your initial touchpoint with your prospect.
By creating a pre-suasion campaign, you can get your brand subtly recognized on Facebook before the initial pitching even starts. This makes prospects more agreeable to the products or services that you’re offering because you’re already familiar with them.
It does come at a cost compared to an organic Facebook campaign, but you get to be more efficient with your resources since it’s targeted.
Paid Advertising
Depending on your niche, paid advertising can be a viable medium to generate leads.
Let’s take Google Ad Words for instance, since a lot of DMUs that have purchase intent do research online, it makes sense to try and appear first in search engine results pages with your website.
The only downside is the price.
We often advise that you add paid advertising to your portfolio of your other lead generation strategies and use it to layer your other campaigns.
It’s often blended in with multidimensional marketing campaigns because it ensures that no potential lead slips out from the net that you’ve set up.
Appointment Setting and Cold Calling
Appointment setting is still one of the most effective strategies in the B2B space.
The problem is it is usually associated with telemarketing which isn’t the case.
There is a form of cold calling that relies on extremely targeted customer profiles and qualified data to make sure that the message that you are sending out resonates with the prospect.
In some cases, depending on the qualified data that you’re using, it could be a more effective alternative to cold emails.
In cold calls, you get to talk and interact with someone rather than emails that could go by unanswered.
Interacting with a possible prospect makes a pitch more intriguing because you can launch into a sales discovery call or even strategize your pitch to book an appointment with a DMU.
Any of these strategies can help you develop a more concentrated approach to your targeted outbound lead generation, but what can help you the most is layering them together.
You can combine some Facebook targeted advertising to your cold email campaign or even connect with people on LinkedIn after you’ve spoken to them on the phone.
The most critical aspect to targeted outbound lead generation is where your data is coming from. You need to make sure that you have data that has been cleansed and verified before you start building out your funnels.
