B2B Marketing Strategies: How to Find Your Perfect Customers

I wish I had read this 2 years ago.

Finding the perfect customers for your new B2B product or service can seem overwhelming - it certainly did for us. In this article, we’ll explore four key B2B marketing strategies to attract and convert your ideal customers: cold outreach, SEO, paid ad retargeting, and product-led growth. These strategies should kick into action sequentially, each building on the previous, allowing you to effectively find and convert your target audience into loyal customers.

Table of Contents

1. Cold Outreach
2. SEO
3. Paid Ad Retargeting
4. Product-led Growth & Referrals

Cold Outreach

Cold outreach, the act of approaching prospective clients who haven’t previously interacted with your business, should be the initial focus of your B2B marketing strategy. This approach offers three main advantages:

1. Quick Start: Cold outreach allows you to begin immediately and see results fast.
2. Precision: It enables you to target the exact prospects you want to reach - your ideal customers.
3. Cost-effectiveness: It’s relatively inexpensive compared to other methods.

When implementing cold outreach, I'd recommend following these steps:

1. Build a high-quality prospect list and reach out via email, LinkedIn, and phone. Continually refine your cold email copy through A/B testing.
2. When a prospect replies with interest (i.e., becomes a warm lead):
   (a): If your service costs over $100/month, immediately send a Calendly link to schedule a demo call. At this price point and with little social proof, sales demos are crucial.
   (b): If your product is self-service and the prospect seems ready to go, send them a promo code to encourage immediate sign up.
3. Implement a robust CRM (like Hubspot or Pipedrive) and feed all these leads into it. Follow up at regular intervals until they subscribe or definitively decide not to.

This is a surefire way to bring in your first customers - it worked very well for us. However, you absolutely should not neglect SEO, paid ads, and product-led growth. The following sections will enable you to maintain growth, and not stagnate. This is something that we learned the hard way, and I don't want you to make the same mistake!

Heads up! At Coldlytics we build targeted lead lists on-demand. There are many providers out there, but most are B2B databases containing stale & over-saturated data. We put a dedicated data researcher on the back of each list so you get the highest possible quality, and pinpoint accuracy. Give it a go via our $7 trial today.

SEO

SEO takes time - at least 6 months of consistent work to build your domain authority and content library to a level able to bring in significant numbers of new visitors per day. It can be a grind; it’s pretty tough working hard on something for a long time and not seeing any results (you won’t see anything for a few months).  But when you do start seeing those organic clicks roll in, my god is it worth it!

The goal here really is to have SEO and organic inbound leads eclipse your cold outreach leads. No one wants to spend their life on demos. Ideally, the number of discovery calls you do should decrease, and the potential lifetime value of those prospects should increase (raise the bar for demos to $500/mo customers, for example).

Your SEO efforts should begin at the same time you start cold outreach, or even before you build your product or service! I won’t dive too deep into SEO methodologies but certainly make sure to:

1. Use a keyword research tool to identify low difficulty, high volume keywords. As you are starting with a low domain authority these will most likely be long tail keywords.
2. Build backlinks from the get-go. The more high-quality backlinks you have, the more important you are in the eyes of Google.
3. Explore programmatic SEO as a way to target many keywords at once. If done well this can give you a great initial boost.

Paid Ad Retargeting

So you’re bringing people in organically - great! But the likelihood is they got to your site via a search term that carried little commercial intent.

What this means is that they’re probably not interested in purchasing right now. But if you’ve crafted your content strategy well, they should be within your target audience. Don’t let your service disappear from their radar!

Install the Facebook pixel on your site (this goes for any other ad service), and set up a custom audience for retargeting via the Facebook Ad Manager. Create a campaign to retarget these people. Try many different ad sets & approaches, and set a daily budget that you can afford to maintain for the months ahead.

Avoid the very real temptation to ramp up the budget just to get more clicks fast. Yes, you’ll see traffic, but the quality will be low. Let Facebook do its thing - It’ll gradually learn which ads and placements work best to bring potential customers back to your site.

Product-led Growth & Referrals

Ok, so we’ve moved from a mostly cold outreach, to a mostly inbound marketing approach.

There’s one more thing we should not overlook. This applies to software and self-serve platforms primarily, but can also be implemented in an agency environment. This is my final point because it becomes very important at this stage, but make no mistake - it should be implemented from the get-go.

Implement a referral program. Incentivize customers to refer new customers, who will in turn be incentivized to do the same. At this point you’ve moved from an active growth strategy to a largely passive one - it’s the holy grail!

In addition, if you run a software platform, think about how to leverage product-led growth. This is when your product becomes the driver of customer acquisition.

An example of this is to enable users to invite others within their organization to collaborate. This can also apply to people outside their organization. Slack does this really well - you can use Slack Connect to collaborate with people externally. They can get started for free, but need to upgrade to their own paid plan after a month or so.