When you’re operating a B2B startup, you want to immediately land paying clients. Initially, the revenue is primarily based more on principle rather than profit, but moreover, it’s even more important to gain clients that are going to give your serious feedback about your product immediately.
Now, let’s assume that you’ve for the most part exhausted your personal LinkedIn reservoir and you need fresh ideas and newer strategies. So, here are some of the “early days” tactics that we recommend for your new startup business.
Prospecting Email
Email may be the old school way, but this medium is free and still part of the most effective ways to reach out to your possible customers. The key to a good cold email outreach is to never come off as spam. You don’t want to push a product or send a marketing message, it’s much better to keep emails short and sweet. In addition, make sure that you’re emailing the right people.
The goal of your email is to get them to click, get them on the phone, and eventually secure an appointment with them. Incorporating the “product research” or “feedback” angles proves itself to be effective as it gets people on the phone and/or clicking the link.
Content Creation
We can’t stress enough how important content creation is as this will become the backbone of a lot of your marketing campaigns in the future and improving your website’s SEO.
A few words of wisdom for your content creation is to not just create content simply for the purpose of posting it, but be sure to create content that is relevant to what you’re selling. Make sure that your content is more customer-focused and offer them solutions. The key to this is by doing your due diligence in researching what your prospects’ possible pain points are.
Again, remember that you don’t want to be too promotional about your service or product. Construct your content in the context of Best Practices, Case studies, expert opinions, “How To” guides, or product reviews/comparisons.
Don’t shy away from using pictures and other visuals such as video for it not to look too text-heavy. On that note, keep your posts under 2000 words if you can.
Social Media
As early as your beginning stages, it’s essential that you set up your social media channels rather than later on. It will add the legitimacy that you need to your brand as well as provide your clients and prospects with additional channels to get in touch with you. The best platforms to leverage are LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.
Take advantage of your social media channels in order to engage with your clients and potential prospects, and even experts in the industry that you’re operating in. Many companies try to use “social sales development” strategies, which heavily rely on proactively following, commenting, and engaging business contacts on your various social platforms.
Partnerships and Marketplaces
Having partnerships can be great means to get early sales while your product and reputation are still growing. These partnerships can take many forms, but you can explore various opportunities and initiatives such as the following:
- Software integrations
- Cross-promotion
- Collaboration on custom projects
It also helps to research and consider B2B app marketplaces where you could make your product available where there are already existing users present. Here are a few B2B marketplaces to consider:
- Chrome Web Store
- Google Apps Marketplace
- Microsoft Office Store
- Salesforce AppExchange
The Takeaway
Of course, when it comes to user acquisition, there is no cookie-cutter strategy or formula. It’s important that you figure out where your clients are, and which platforms they frequent. There is a lot of work to be done when operating a startup business, so it’s important to explore all means that will help you kick-off your client acquisition early on. We hope that the tips we gave you above are going to be of great help as you start to venture out into reaching out to potential clients.
