Digital prospecting can be life-changing. It can elevate businesses with $5k-10k monthly revenue streams to consistently pull in six-figure numbers on a monthly basis, just by implementing foundational digital prospecting strategies. While results will vary from business to business, once you find a process that works for you, it acts as a replicable game plan—you can do it over and over again to reach the success you deserve. Here are the 5 foundational must-dos to find success in digital prospecting.
Know Your Audience
Understanding your audience means that you know your audience’s problems: you know what keeps them up at night, you understand the insider-lingo they use, and you can master the messaging needed to pull them in. If you know these elements, you will know what to input when creating filters for your target list.
Before you ever send the first message, learn to speak to people’s pain and vulnerabilities; fit the framing to how they would describe the problem relevant to them, from their own perspective. This will display that you’re not just another person spamming their inbox, because they can see you’re coming from a place of understanding.
Your messaging should be so good that if the person who receives it doesn’t respond, it feels like they’re not doing their job. Try positive affirmations before creating the copy of the messages. Keep it cool. The message can’t sound desperate for a response—nothing will deter the target from clicking out of the message faster than feeling like their response will make or break the sender. The person on the receiving end should think that it makes sense to respond and do business together, but that if they don’t respond, the sender’s business won’t be impacted.
Know How to Find Them
You need a source to find the clients you want to help, but more specifically, you need to find the right enterprise-level decision makers. This is where digital prospecting comes in to build out a high-quality target list, which serves as the basis of successful digital prospecting. It doesn’t matter if you have an engaging or memorable outreach process; if you don’t have the right data, it means that you’re not reaching out to the right people. The rest of your effort will be a waste.
Digital prospecting comes down to a simple process: ask enough people to do business with you every day, and then make that process more efficient. The fastest way to make the process efficient is to narrow down your target list. Reverse engineer how many clients or calls you need, and then how much outreach that requires. Like most other things in business, digital prospecting is a numbers game, but it’s important to make sure your targets don’t feel like a number.
When They Look You Up, They Need to Like What They See
You need to have a profile that’s attractive when people look you up. Presenting authority and authenticity on your profile are the most important qualities to capitalize on to maximize your response rate whether you’re prospecting on LinkedIn, email outreach, or even social media platforms. Optimize your profile by solidifying your bio, choosing good pictures, and leaning into an authentic about section.
People do business with people they like and trust. In the same vein of understanding your audience, people will connect with you if you have something in common with them, whether that’s working in the same field or having overlapping personal interests. It makes you seem more human and relatable. If they like what you stand for, they feel like they’re turning down themselves in order to turn you down.
Even in the case of cold email campaigns with a call to action in the email, the recipient will likely give your name a Google search, performing thorough research on their own before they choose to respond. You need to be proactive in your approach, ensuring that your profiles are ready for them to land on. Other outreach factors aside, being authentic and showing a level of authority on your profile increases the odds that someone will respond to you because they fear missing out on the opportunity to connect with you.
Stand-Outreach
Once you’ve done the work of identifying your audience and optimizing your profiles, you’re onto the next step: creating a message that stands out. Whatever you’re sending needs to look different than the other messages the target is receiving in their Gmail or LinkedIn inboxes.
Stand outreach disrupts our understanding of copywriting, because it focuses more on how the message is sent. Don’t hold back from getting creative. Use videos, audio messages, GIFs, or personalized one-liners to impact how the target will receive the message. The likelihood your target will open the message drops if they believe the message was sent to thousands of other people. Try split testing with different message elements and lean into what works, tailoring your strategy as you go.
Cold Outreach is a Spectrum—There Are Things You Can Do to Warm it Up
It’s important to keep in mind that cold outreach is a spectrum, and there are things you can do to warm up the engagement before resorting to a completely cold outreach. There’s a process of effective engagement to follow with your target before you ever send the initial message.
At one end of the spectrum, there are cold emails—a stranger’s name landing in your inbox, for example, pitching a product or service that you’ve never heard of. An example of warming it up is messaging someone with mutual connections, or reaching out to someone you’re already connected with. If they’ve seen you engage with their posts or the posts of other mutuals in their network, it signals to them that you’re human and active in the same communities.
Engaging with their content is one of the best things you can do to warm up the outreach and increase your name recognition by reacting to their posts or endorsing their skills on LinkedIn. Leave thought-provoking questions or comments on their posts that are likely to receive a response. By interacting with their profile repeatedly before you ever reach out, it makes them curious about you long before you’re pitching to them.
You can do this to scale by gathering the socials of people that you connect with and using a kanban method when reaching out to them. Move people to first, second, and third base as you interact with their profile in various ways and increase their curiosity. Once you’re rounding third base, send them a DM utilizing the messaging strategies you’ve already mastered.
Wrap-up
Digital prospecting is constantly evolving, but once you find what works for you, it will exponentially increase your qualified leads. The strategies you apply will likely expand into other ways that will help grow your business. By implementing these strategies and learning as you go, you’ll drive up your leads, engage with more of your ideal clients, and expand your business to its highest potential.
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