When it comes to promoting new businesses, a lot of entrepreneurs don’t always get their strategies right. Indeed, ineffective promotion, and consequently low sales, is considered to be one of the major reasons most new business owners end up abandoning their startups within a few years – sometimes even months – of setting them up.
Are you looking to increase your business leads but can’t decide on the most suitable strategy to use? How about using outreach strategies using ways such as email, influencers, and social media?
If this sounds interesting to you, this post is for you. Here, we share three customer outreach tips you can implement immediately to grow your new LLC in California.
Create an ideal customer profile (ICP)
When starting a new business, it can be tempting to cast your net too wide when trying to define and target your ideal audience or potential customers. A common but mistaken belief among most new business owners is that the more the prospects, the higher the chances you’ll get many customers. Nothing could be further from the truth.
When looking to close leads and more so when using ‘cold’ methods like outreach, quality matters more than quantity. What we mean by this is that it’s incredibly important that you focus on quality prospects and let go of anyone that doesn’t suit your business to avoid wasting time and sales resources.
So, how do you determine who you should invest in for your outreach campaigns and who to ignore? A good place is to create an ideal customer profile (ICP) based on several parameters which we’ll explain in a moment.
For starters, an ICP should comprise several the bare-minimums that a prospect must meet before you can even consider to contact them. A few key characteristics you can look for here include the location of the prospect, gender, buying power, revenue size, employee count, industry, etc. You don’t have to have so many factors that it becomes difficult to zero in on appropriate candidates.
By narrowing down your list based on your set ICP, you significantly increase your chances of finding people and companies that might be genuinely interested in what you’re selling.
That leads us to the next step.
Contacting and following up on interested prospects
So you now have a highly targeted list of contacts that you feel are a good fit for your new business, what next? For starters, you need to decide on the most feasible method of communication to use – this can be email, phone calls, or social media.
If you choose to go with email, the first step you need to take is to look for email addresses of those you’d like to reach out to. A few tools like hunter.io or Voila Nobert will come in handy here. You might also want to learn the basics of email outreach to increase your open rate, clickthrough rate, and most importantly get people to respond to you.
To better track your emails and productivity, consider using an email marketing tool like ConvertKit, Aweber, or MailChimp. These tools help you track everything from whether the email reached your targeted recipient or not as well as reporting their actions – opening, clicking through to the links you probably shared in your mails, etc.
With this information, it becomes easier knowing who to follow up on based on the interest they showed on your products. You might even consider calling some of the promising prospects if that proves to be a more effective method.
Use retargeting ads to close lukewarm leads
Selling a brand and its products to someone who hasn’t heard about it before is often hard. Multiple studies show that the average consumer has to encounter your business 6-8 times before they can finally feel comfortable buying from you.
Assume you’ve already contacted a prospect using email and even gone ahead to call them to try and talk them into buying your products. But they still don’t look convinced, it’s time to move to the next step – remarketing to them.
Remarketing ads, just as the name suggests, enable you to target custom audiences that have taken certain actions on your business like opening emails, visiting your website, and picking your calls. When used well, they can turn those lukewarm, undecided leads into loyal customers for your business.
Have you used any form of outreach campaigns to promote your brand and products? How are the results and is it a method you’d recommend to budding businesses? We’d love to hear your feedback.
