Warming Up Cold Leads – B2B Edition

Ways in which you can reach out to your “cold” leads, and the processes you can go through to improve engagement.

Leveraging LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a great platform to openly communicate with a B2B target audience, as it’s easy to reach them through the niche targeting settings.

You could start with determining your target audience by asking yourself the following questions:

• Where are they located?
• What positions would they hold?
• Which industries would they work in?
• Which size of company (SMEs, large enterprises or multi nationals)?

And, if you target recruitment:

• What skills should they possess?
• Which courses have they studied?
• Which universities did they attend?

Use sponsored content that will capture their interest and could be beneficial to their career development, for example: are there frequent issues in their industries that they may be struggling to resolve? Do you have a resolution for this?

By providing your cold leads with a solution to their pain points, the chances of them engaging with your information, whether it be a free downloadable lead magnet or a gated piece of valuable content, are highly likely.

But why is sponsored content something you should implement?

Here’s why: the messaging can be tailored to your target market.

• Use sponsored updates from your LinkedIn page if your content is relevant to people employed in all industries
• Capture data on pages you are directing people to, through direct sponsored content and sponsored updates using compelling Calls to Action
• Use customised targeting through matched audiences with remarketing messaging. This can be used to engage with users who have visited the site but haven’t converted, and encourage them to return to convert
• Use sponsored InMail to engage further with people who are already aware of the brand. For instance, you could invite them to your next webinar.
  
  

Facebook Engagement

Use Facebook to engage with sole traders such as beauticians, hairdressers and plumbers, as these users may be more active on Facebook than LinkedIn.

Align your targeting efforts to interests in the industries these people work in, and potentially overlay with interests in small business to ensure they are B2B users. You can also align your messaging with how your target market’s businesses will benefit from them buying/using your services.

For example: buying a monthly box of cleaning products and pantry items could reduce expenditure on these items by 20%.

Again, seek to capture user data through encouraging users to sign up for an account, or register for a free trial. This should be pushed in both your ads and on your landing pages

As with LinkedIn, you should remarket to website visitors or users on your email address list.

Encourage people to like your page, by highlighting the benefits they will get from doing so. For example, you could potentially share industry updates with them.

Paid Search

Consider the conversion funnel.

What would your leads be looking for at the initial point of searching for your products/services? What are the longer tail keywords they would search for lower down the conversion funnel?

At this point, you should review your impression share – are you losing visibility to budget or heavily to rank? You need to be present once your target market has recognised that they need to use your product/service.

You can also use remarketing for search ads – build remarketing audiences as with Facebook and LinkedIn. Push visibility more aggressively to users searching for your target keywords, as they are already familiar with your brand.

It would be advisable to tailor your messaging to incentivise them to return, for example, if you are holding an event with limited spaces, you may wish to push attendance of the event to just these users.

Contact us today to see how our Paid Search Management experts can help to warm up your cold leads, especially throughout this Great British Winter.