Welcome back!
This week, we’re excited to share a creative strategy that our friends at Optimize Your Marketing use to book more sales calls and expand brand awareness at the same time.
If you're looking to engage with your prospects on a much deeper level and book more meetings, this week’s breakdown is for you.
The problem: Lacked a stable and consistent way to acquire more conversations and sales calls with the prospects.
The approach: Niched down and combined cold outbound efforts with content creation. Used AI to send hyper-personalized emails at scale, and used a content-driven approach to build relationships and convert prospects.
The results: Created champions within big name organizations to advocate for the agency and their services and built a system to continue to drive sales.
Key learnings: Find a way to be unique and stand out in the prospects inbox. Continuous learning and testing, paired with patience, are crucial for success.
Ian Binek, Founder of Optimize Your Marketing, faced a common challenge: finding a reliable method to consistently book sales calls with their ICP.
Without a stable acquisition strategy, it was difficult to maintain a steady flow of conversations that could lead to sales.
He needed a new approach to connect with his target audience effectively, ensuring he could generate valuable conversations and ultimately drive growth and sustainability for his agency.
He began by narrowing down his target market, focusing on specific segments within his ICP. From there, he decided to try out two different approaches. Here's what he did:
1) Niche Down and Establish Conversations: He identified key segments within his ICP and tailored his messaging to address unique needs and pain points.
2) Verified Prospect Lists: He used ListKit to find verified prospects who were actively exploring paid media to drive growth.
3) Two Different Approaches: He decided to approach the outreach in two different ways: one way was to book a call with executives about the services his agency provides, and one was to book expert guests for his podcast.
Book a call to discuss services:
Book expert podcast guests:
4) Automated Personalization: Using Clay, he was able to create hyper-personalized email content automatically, enabling him to send ultra-relevant and personal messages at scale.
5) Email Campaigns on SmartLead: Email campaigns were hosted on SmartLead to streamline the outreach process and track engagement.
The campaigns began, and thousands of personalized emails were sent to prospects following these two approaches.
After running these campaigns for two months, a clear winner emerged:
Podcast Bookings: Podcast bookings outperformed other campaigns by 3-5x, with 10-15 podcasts booked monthly with specialists from big name, enterprise companies.
The key results from these podcast bookings were two-fold:
1) Champion-Driven Sales Bookings: The agency successfully built relationships with key specialists within their ICP who worked for target companies.
These specialists often acted as champions for the agency within their organizations, advocating for the agency’s services.
This champion effect continues to drive more business, as these internal advocates help the agency become the top choice for marketing services within the target company.
2) Brand Awareness, Credibility, and Inbound Marketing: The podcast episodes themselves work as an effective brand awareness campaign, as each guest brings a great amount of value and insight to the agency’s audience.
By interviewing specialists who work for big name companies, the agency establishes a great deal of credibility with their growing audience as well by associating with these companies.
Finally, as their audience grows, these podcast episodes and distribution will continue to drive inbound leads as prospects gain value, build trust, and eventually reach out for services.
Key takeaways from this experiment:
Your target audience is getting tons of outreach every day. You have to find a way to stand out and create engagement, whether it’s your offer, the value you provide, the type of content you send, or something else.
The only way to grow and get better is to experiment. Try things out, and double down on what’s working.
The strategy we discussed here isn’t the fastest way to drive more revenue, but it’s one of the most consistent. Keep an eye on your entire funnel, and understand that it will take some time for those at the top to make a sale at the bottom.
If you’d like to follow Ian on his journey, and learn more about best practices across digital marketing, AI, No Code, and entrepreneurship, follow him on LinkedIn!
Or check out his agency, Optimize Your Marketing.
.svg)
Get everything you need to build your SaaS or services business to $5k MRR and beyond.
