You have started to plot a course towards an email outreach campaign, but you need to figure out who you’re contacting before you can start generating leads. Quality research is crucial for a successful campaign, and targeted research can give your outreach the boost in effectiveness needed to propel you towards success.
But what is targeted research? It’s simply the process of identifying which businesses would be most receptive to your outreach campaign through analysis of your product or service and the demands of the market.
Get to Know Your Product
Starting research for your campaign may seem intimidating, but it is fairly simple once you take that first step. A good jumping off point for research is to get intimate with your product–know the ins and outs of your offer and the problems your product or service will be solving. This highlights the qualities important to the customer and what types of business may be attracted.
Identify Your Target Market
Discovering industries that need your solution is crucial in lead generation. Rather than shouting into the void with an email blast, focus your efforts on targets that are likely to need your product or service; target companies that would actively use your product in their day to day business or that would be unable to operate without a product similar to yours are a good place to start.
Imagine you run a company that manufactures car parts. Businesses that work with cars will be most interested in purchasing your product, so targeting outside of the auto industry would not be the best use of resources. Identify those companies before moving forward–perhaps a car maker or mechanic would be ideal customers for you to pursue.
Once your target market has been identified, you can start researching companies within that sphere. Websites like Hoovers can help filter companies that are within your scope.
The Right People
Now that you have put together a list of companies, it is important that you are contacting the right people. Generally, you want to reach out to someone with the authority to make decisions, but a lower level manager may also recognize the need for improvement.
Think about who at the company would benefit most from your product or service. For example, if you assist with cyber security, the most receptive point of contact would likely be in the IT department. Just as you targeted companies that would be most receptive to your product or service, do the same when thinking about contacts.
If you have conducted any marketing campaigns in the past, now is a good time look back through the contacts who responded positively to you. Those responses reveal positions more receptive to your marketing and those that are not worth your time.
With the compiled list of companies within your desired target market, with titles that you think will be most receptive, the only thing left to do is find the individuals that match your criteria.
Finding Contacts
All the strategy and research you did up front has narrowed your search, so finding the points of contact will be a breeze. LinkedIn or Zoominfo are effective tools for researching potential contacts. These websites can find the right people in the desired positions at your target companies.
Conclusion
Once research starts turning into responses, you will begin to learn a lot more about your product and target market. Companies and titles that respond positively to your proposals will help focus new outreach in the most effective direction. From that point, any additional research is a walk in the park.
And if the research for your campaign is going nowhere, don’t be afraid to alter your target market–you don’t always get it right the first time. The most important thing is learning from previous research to continuously improve your outreach.
