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
After we had everything in place we started our lead generation testing different audiences firstly. Within the first month of the campaign, we’ve seen that it received the largest number of replies from companies in Computer Software. The highest number of interested and hot leads was from these companies. After analyzing the responses we were able to say not only the industry of our client’s ICP but also titles, geolocation, company’s size.
But knowing ICP was not enough. We also wanted to know what they want, what their challenges are. Being aware of that client would be able to present their service the right way and get more potential clients.
To find out the pain points of our ICP we worked with the message script.
After we’ve defined our ICP 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.
During our lead generation campaign, we’ve received more replies than average per industry, and the audience was pretty active all the time. Thanks to the well-built messaging approach, we discovered challenges our prospects had and offered the solution. Our testing approach significantly added to the great results we’ve got. Each of our tests increased the number of accepted requests to connect and replies. That means we came up with suitable hypotheses that brought immediate results for the client.
On the chart above, we can see one more result of our messaging testing. The decline of the replay rate happened due to the changes in the pre-qualification message. We made the leads pre-qualification as precise as possible, so the client gets fewer responses in the end but more qualified leads. So, in the end, the client’s sales team doesn’t have to spend a lot of extra time talking to someone who isn’t their potential client. Therefore, it is better to have less, but better.
As the result of the five-month campaign, the client hasn’t just defined their ICP but also got 29 hot leads and 29 interested leads who can become clients in the future.
“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
Feel free to contact us to find out if our services can help you meet your goals as well.
