Every success story of cold outreach has one thing in common: companies who manage to get their customers’ attention actually know who their customers are and what they want.
Arounda, a UI/UX design agency, wanted to find qualified clients, but they weren’t sure what their ideal buyer looked like, and how they could approach them.
So we’ve kicked off a LinkedIn lead generation campaign by testing various audiences to find the perfect match.
After one month, not only did the team refine its ICP but received 58 qualified opportunities and 15 booked calls.
Here’s our approach to this campaign in more detail.
Many customers come to us because they need lead generation, but analyzing their marketing and sales processes, we understand that they may not have all the resources to make the most effective campaign.
In this case study, we will show you what we did when the client did not have a clearly defined ICP. Spoiler alert! We haven’t just built the strategy on how to help the client to determine their ICP but also managed to bring results from the first weeks of our cooperation and generate a significant number of hot leads, who also were ICP of our client.
Bonus: Here’s the article about the importance of ICP and its precise definition for the business.
Client’s overview
Our client is a digital product design company that builds and transforms web and mobile apps, websites through Product Strategy & Design.
Their team members are grandmasters in creating and evolving web and mobile apps, marketing websites, two-sided platforms through branding, web design, UX/UI design & app development. They dive into clients’ projects completely and lead them from the start to the end to fit clients’ needs. Their website will tell you more.
Challenge
The client understood that you need to add new channels to attract customers (like lead generation) to grow the business. One of the most effective channels for that is LinkedIn. It doesn’t just allow you to establish direct contact with your target audience but also build connections and receive feedback about your service (which, for example, will not be possible via advertising).
“LinkedIn allows establishing business connections. And we understood that high-quality lead generation and establishing strong business connections on LinkedIn is a long shot as these connections require nurturing” – Oksana, Arounda
However, lead generation can only be successful when you know who your ICP is, who these people are that need your product, right? Not exactly.
If you want to grow but haven’t defined your ICP yet, as was in the case with Arounda, that might be a real challenge. And it was. But that doesn’t mean that is impossible. Just set the right goals and have the right plan. After consulting with us, Arounda decided to use lead generation to define their ICP. Reaching out to various audiences with different personalized approaches to find their perfect client was the perfect plan they agreed to bring to life. And so they’ve decided to reach this goal with our help.
It was also important for the client that the company that works with them on this task has experience working on the international market and had UX/UI agencies among the clients in the past.
“It was important for us to see your previous experience and know what you can do and who’s responsible for it. After talking to you we knew that it’s not just cold outreach but also content creation, the full package. We knew that there’re many processes and there’s specific people responsible for each process. So we knew with whom to connect to ask questions regarding a specific process and knew that we would get a quick response.
Also, we needed the expertise, expertise working with design agencies. You had that expertise. – Oksana, Arounda
Solution
As we wanted to define the most responsive TA and prospects with the greatest demand for the client’s product we decided to go with lots of testing and all of our outreach strategies were actually built on A/B testing.
Strategy components:
- TA testing
- Messaging testing
Target Audience
Initially, we divided our audience into 2 main segments based on different characteristics:
- Company’s size
- Industry
- Titles
- Geolocation
Segmenting the TA like that next step was to find out the right personalized approach to each of these segments. That’s where messaging matters.
Messaging
We’ve created different personalized scripts for each TA segment. The main differences in the approaches were in:
- Pain points we talked about to different audiences (for, let’s say enterprises they’re different than for start-ups)
- Communication styles (founders of start-ups are open to easy, informal communication, and often CEOs of the large companies prefer a formal tone when it comes to communication with strangers)
- Offer (depends on the goals our TA set up for itself and clearly start-ups have different goals from enterprises, so we wanted to match that).
Brand establishment
Effective lead generation is a full package, remember what Oksana said earlier? So we didn’t just want to reach out to the various TAs to define the perfect one for the client’s service. We wanted to build a strong client brand to attract this audience and generate leads based on reputation and trust.
We were working on filling the client’s LinkedIn profile with valuable content that would help create a leader type of persona from our client. It will help to establish authority, showcase expertise, and simply build the brand.
At the beginning of the campaign we could see a dramatic increase in profile traffic, before the campaign we had around 10 people visiting the client’s profile per week and after we started active interaction, it grew up to 65 visits (which makes it a 650% increase!)
Results
Finding the ICP
Once we launched the campaign, it took the team one month to find the most responsive industry based on reply and acceptance rate: Computer Software. The responses we got helped us dive even deeper, finding the target audience’s company size, location, and job titles.
But just knowing it wasn’t enough.
Getting to know the ICP
To find out how our client should present their service the right way and get more potential clients, we had to know what the customers wanted and what challenges they had at the time.
We optimized the script to qualify the prospects better. We’ve added the qualification question to the 2nd level of the script. As a result, we’ve got more qualified leads and more valuable conversions with people who are your potential clients.
Talking to the ICP
With an average reply rate of 34.6%, our client had the chance to use lead generation not only to introduce their agency to the TA but to actually learn what approach worked best for adding value to potential customers.
The more we knew about the prospects, the more precision we added to the conversation. Even though the reply rates dropped over time, the quality of responses we got had never been higher.
Both our client and the prospects didn’t have to waste time on unproductive conversations, focusing on building relationships with the client.
During this campaign, the Arounda team hasn’t just defined their ICP. They found 58 qualified sales opportunities and booked 15 calls with prospects.
And now that they know more about their target audience, converting these opportunities into customers is a matter of time.
“This campaign helped us learn a lot. It was interesting to have the opportunity to analyze the market, to see which TA was the most responsible, what kind of communication they prefer, what their pain points are. Knowing all of it we were able to adapt our business processes, add new services like a free audit, improve internal communication with the leads, learn the market better” – Oksana, Arounda
The moral of the story is simple: understanding your ICP is a must-have for effective lead generation. If you’re now curious about refining your ICP and launching a buyer-centric outreach campaign, Respect.Studio is here to help you out.
