Every week it feels as if we get into a new era of changing how we sell and market to our buyers. From AI to scaled outreach to Google changing how it surfaces websites, we have our work cut out for us, which is why modernizing your strategies isn’t just essential, it’s critical to guarantee your future success.
The companies and firms wanting to unseat you are young, hungry, modern, and nimble, many of which are armed with funding and an eye for testing vs. doing what’s always been done.
To that effect, that’s exactly what #samsales, this young, hungry, and nimble company did a few weeks ago, with outstanding results. Here was our play:
Ungated Lead Magnet
One of the primary ways we can keep a lean sales team is by creating a tremendous amount of inbound.
We generate this demand via teaching our audiences across LinkedIn, dark social on LinkedIn, our site, and our weekly newsletter as much as we can for free. By letting readers learn alongside us, we’re educating them en masse and converting them into inbounds when they’re ready to engage us.
With this in mind, we created a Top Ten LinkedIn Algorithm Hacks resource that gave away a small fraction of the tactics we teach, and made it an ungated resource on our site.
Towards the bottom of the resource, we linked a variety of assets that individuals could read, purchase, or sign up for, thereby hoping to further our tether and revenue with them.
Modern play vs. dated play: Ungating the content to allow for better learning and to reach as many people as we could. The more people we could reach the more people would know this is an expertise we possess.
Thought Leader Ad
In the fall of ‘23, LinkedIn released Thought Leader Ads, an offering that allowed companies to put dollars behind the posts of individuals, but also allows for them to promote the posts of influencers and individuals outside of their company.
Where companies often miss the mark here is they either use an auto-sharing platform to get content out en mass from their employees (not knowing that the algorithm kills that content) or they share content from their company page (which gets almost no engagement short of employees). Instead, we did as we direct our LinkedIn Executive Branding clients to do, we created a compelling post using the voice of our CEO, Sam McKenna. Sam created the post, we set up the Thought Leader ad, set our target audience parameters and budget, and set it free on a Friday.
Modern play vs. dated play: Leverage the voices of your executives and put dollars behind them. LinkedIn ads can be powerful, but your executives already get 600% more reach and become nearly 90% more trustworthy when they post from their personal accounts so why not fuel this success with a few hundred dollars/post?
RB2B!
We set up an account with this arm of Retention.com, connecting it both to our Hubspot and Slack instances, allowing us to get visibility on website visitors. This piece was a game changer for us in being able to connect the dots on a massive pool of individuals that other lead forensics sites simply don’t offer us.
This service delivers a variety of data directly into Slack, including company size, LinkedIn profiles, revenue, and often stating precisely what page was visited.
Modern play vs. dated play: Instant insights into a large pool of our website visitors, allowing for outreach and retargeting.
Segmented and Proactive Outreach
We segmented our leads into different buckets of action items:
- First degree connections to our CEO, Sam McKenna:
- One type of message to our senior buyer personas
- A link to our playbooks and discounts to IC personas
- Second degree connections:
- Connection requests with a specific message to our senior buyer personas
- Emails sent with a link to our playbooks and discounts sent to IC personas
The Results
Total Spend: $200
LinkedIn Impressions: 78,751, almost triple our normal views
Website Traffic:
- Daily Visitor Increase – 1194% increase over daily avg.
- Monthly Visitor Increase – 36% increase over monthly avg.
- Net New Unique Visitors – 1478% increase in one day alone
What’s Next
The domino effect from this will be long-lasting, but the brand awareness stemming from this has not only driven immediate revenue to our site via purchases of our subscriptions, but immediately booked our team a series of meetings.
Further, it has allowed us to capture new contacts, create dialogue with countless new prospective buyers, give us data for retargeting, and capture that audience on our site but also as new connections on LinkedIn. All this aggregated allows us to continue to share content, educate, and move buyers through the funnel, for one heck of a low cost-per-lead.
Want to learn more more? Chat with one of our team members!