B2B Marketing: Generate Dozens of Leads Every Week With 3 Strategies

B2B Marketing: Generate Dozens of Leads Every Week With 3 Strategies

written by Houston Golden
Founder & CEO, BAMF Media
May 6th, 2019
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screenshot of linkedin sales navigator API which says "LinkedIn Sales Navigator Search Export"

I know.

Lead generation is a pain in the ass.

And if you’re a startup, it’s the #1 factor that’ll affect your growth. B2B Marketing is easy, but not that much!

The problem isn’t lack of channels. There are tons of ways you can generate leads for your business.

The problem is ROI. And achieving traction fast.

This is why LinkedIn is the #1 channel you need to focus on if you’re in the B2B space.

LinkedIn is a beast when it comes to organic lead B2B generation.

Even with twice or thrice as many users, Twitter and Facebook don’t even come close to it.

Sit tight, buckle up and enjoy the ride as I show you how you can position yourself for massive success on LinkedIn.

Here is one thing all B2B companies can agree with- leads generation is the ultimate approach to breathing life into businesses.

Leads can help you to scout for new prospects, increase your bottom line and meet most of your business goals. Therefore, if you aim to remain on top of the game or chill with the best in the nosebleeds, you have to improve your lead generation tactics.

B2B marketing strategies including lead generation can be quite slippery for both green and accomplished marketers. With search engines, social media platforms, and marketing tools upgrading their servers frequently, it’s so easy to be left behind.

Are you having a tough time harvesting adequate leads for your business? Worry not. I’m going to show you three scalable strategies that you can use to generate dozens of leads every week using targeted B2B outreach.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Three Extremely Scalable B2B Lead Generation Strategies
How to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator for lead prospecting
How to build your Facebook community
Building a relationship via Phantombuster
Why is Facebook ideal for B2B marketing?

Three Extremely Scalable B2B Lead Generation Strategies

Here are practical strategies you can use to take your B2B lead generation process to a whole new level:

  1. LinkedIn automated messaging sequences

Most of us marketers, growth hackers, and sales gurus know that cold emails are not as effective as they used to be a few years back. You can rewrite your subject line, pour your spirit in the email and add in a few free lead magnets but you’ll end up with measly open rates and replies.

If your email marketing charm is not working anymore, it’s time you tap into social media.

LinkedIn is a good source of B2B marketing leads and is a go-to resource for many marketers. Through profile visits, invites and messaging, you can engage a ton of prospects and win customers.

Marketing through LinkedIn can be tedious and costly if you choose to work with interns and sales reps. With automation tools cropping up every day, you can take your efforts to the next level by leveraging them.

  1. Cold emailing outreach

We are back to cold emailing again. I did tell you this is a tactic that is slowly losing its efficacy and that’s a fact. But that does not mean it’s entirely useless.

If you do t right, you can still get substantial open rates and replies.

I’m going to show you how you can use LinkedIn sales navigator to do advanced lead prospecting. And then I’ll take you a mile further by showing you how to email those prospects using Mailshake.

Ready to for a spin?

How to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator for Lead Prospecting

LinkedIn membership is free, but sales navigator access is not. This is a premium feature with plenty of tools and filters to narrow your searches.

You also get premium profile options that include larger headshots for background and cover images and recommendations on how to improve your profile.

Given all those premium features, you’ll be expected to part with a few dozen dollars a month. Billing is done on either an individual or team basis.

Now, let’s get started with the prospecting process.

Sales preferences

This is the first place to start. This section can be found in the settings section right in the middle of the page. Here, you need to narrow down your prospects based on factors like geographical location, company, role, and company size.

The selected preferences will always pop up whenever you inspect a client’s profile, and LinkedIn will provide recommendations based on the set conditions.

Screenshot of LinkedIn Sales Preferences

Every preferential section is editable. You can add or remove a region easily and click “done” to save your new data.

Screenshot of LinkedIn Sales Preferences "Geographies" section

Advanced Search

Sales Navigator’s Advanced Search is the most used tool for lead building. Simply open the Lead builder and scout for potential leads by typing their title (say growth hacker) or company (Apple). There are over ten filters that you can use to refine your results. Here are a couple of those filters:

  • keywords
  • company
  • industry
  • function
  • title
  • relationship
  • seniority level
  • company size
  • geography

The lead builder makes finding relevant clients easy peasy through Boolean functions.

It doesn’t generalize; rather it helps you narrow down your results to whatever it is you need.

For instance, if you are targeting senior management and decision makers, the Seniority Level filter can help you reach out to VPs, managers, partners, etc.

Screenshot of LinkedIn Sales Navigator's Advance Search "Seniority Level" filter

If there is any filter you want to do away with, just hover your mouse and click the “X’ symbol next to it and it will be cleared.

Is everything looking good?

Are you happy with all the filters in place?

Hit “search”, and the tool will look through LinkedIn and pull up relevant profiles from their entire user base.

Out of your results, this tool adds extra details like the users who switched jobs in the past 30 days, got news coverage and those who posted on LinkedIn in the past 30 days.

Screenshot of linkedIn sales navigator's advance search with green circles around "Leads" and "Accounts" tabs

Your outcome is not permanent.

You can still refine your search by adjusting the filters once again until you get satisfactory results. So what’s next once the results are in place? You can do the following:

  • save the lead within an account or save the entire search
  • connect
  • view profile
  • Send InMail
  • View similar results

If you choose to save someone as a lead, utilize the “Notes” and “Tags” section on the right to supplement more info about your lead. This helps to define more about your lead.

Screenshot of LinkedIn Sales Navigator with red box around "Tags" section

From here, you can decide what to do with your leads-either send them a connection request or a message.

Suppose you loved the way you configured your Sales Navigator search, you can save it and request for email notifications so you get informed when another matching lead pops up.

Screenshot of LinkedIn Sales Navigator Leads section, showing "Save search" feature

Scraping and Cold Emailing Leads

Now that we’ve collected enough leads, it’s time to scrape them out, find out their emails, and set up a cold emailing campaign.

We’ll be using Phantombuster for the scraping.

This is the process that we’re following for the scraping:

1. We first filter city by city in our Geographical area, as LinkedIn limits the results the display per Sales Navigator search to 1000, and then copy-paste the search URLs (browser search URLs) in a google sheet.

2. We then change the permissions of the Google sheet to ‘Anyone with the link can view’.

3. We then use the ‘Sales Navigator Search Export API’ in the Phantombuster API store.

Head over to the Phantombuster API store (please create an account if you don’t have one yet- they offer a free trial), and find the LinkedIn Sales Navigator Search Export API.

Screenshot of linkedin sales navigator which says "LinkedIn Sales Navigator Search Export"

And start filling out the API configuration form:

Screenshot of LinkedIn Sales Navigator Search Export API Configuration

First, copy the browser session cookie for your LinkedIn account.

This is how you can get your browser session cookie:

-Open LinkedIn in your browser and right-click > Inspect Element.

-Click on the arrow dropdown icon next to ‘Network’ and select ‘Application’ from the drop-down menu.

-When that’s done, select https://www.linkedin.com below Cookies and copy the ‘Value’ of the ‘li_at’ element in the table.

-This is your LinkedIn session cookie. Paste this the Phantombuster Sales Navigator Search Export API form.

4. In the ‘LinkedIn search terms’ field, paste the google sheet link (the one above where we listed the sales navigator search URLs) and in ‘Number of profiles to scrape’ enter 1000.

5. Enter the column name of the column in the Google sheet where we pasted the sales navigator search URLs.

6. For ‘Number of lines of your spreadsheet to process per launch’, set it to a safe range of 100 per launch, and check the ‘Remove duplicate profiles’ box at the bottom.

Now click on ‘Save’ and ‘Launch’.

Depending upon the number of sales navigator search URLs that you’d like to scrape, you can launch the API multiple times to scrape user lists and details.

You’ll be able to download the results CSV file from the Files section in the Console of the API:

Screenshot of LinkedIn Sales Navigator Search console results with red box around CSV file download button

This CSV file will include, among other details, the LinkedIn profile URLs, first and last names and company names of all the users that you scraped.

For finding the emails what we need are the first & last names and the company names /websites URLs, and we get all three from the Results CSV file above.

You can use any email prospecting tool like Hunter.io or Anyleads.com to find the emails in this manner.

The next step is. setup the cold emailing automation using Mailshake.

In this section, I will recommend you stick to Mailshake as it can help you market at scale.

You need to stick to the good old rules of emailing. Before sending one, think about how your client stands to benefit. I wouldn’t take kindly to an email that intends to seal the deal during the first contact. Capitalize on building a relationship first.

Drafting your email

It’s time to send an email to prospectives. You know what you want to tell them so put that down. If you don’t have time or are still green at sending cold mails, use Mailshake’s cold email templates. Warning- do not send a template as it is. Personalize it a bit so it suits your lead’s tone and style. So here are the steps to personalize it :

(1): click on the “+New campaign” to launch a new email campaign

Screenshot of Milkshake's UI with the mouse cursor on "+ New Campaign" button

(2) : Drop, upload or type in the email addresses. Obviously, you can’t type in manually so we will go with dropping or uploading. The maximum number of addresses permitted is 5000.

Screenshot of Milkshare's UI showing Email CSV file upload page in "Recipients" tab

(3): paste your email in the draft section or write one if you have not done that.

Screenshot of Milkshake's UI showing Email Compose tab

(4) : Edit your email’s subject by inserting relevant details that Mailshake is supposed to autofill from your CSV file.

Screenshot of Milkshake's UI showing the Auto text replacement feature from the CSV File, such as Names of the recipients

(5) : draft a follow-up message and indicate when Mailshake bot should send it.

Screenshot of Milkshake's UI showing the Follow-up email options.

Once you have everything in the campaign, launch it right away or schedule it at a later time.

Note: Do not send a lot of follow up messages. If someone did not reply to the first email, you could do a follow up two more times. If there is no reply, send a new email with a different subject line (that perhaps proposes a new offer) and see what happens.

Let’s move on to another scalable B2B marketing tactic.

Community Building

Picture of grass with people's hands and feet making a circle, indicating community building

Virtually every company has a Facebook page for their customers-where their customer base includes other B2B companies that have something valuable to offer.

Apparently, so many company owners dismiss Facebook as an inviable sauce for B2B establishments. Well, if you belong to that bracket, it’s time to drop that mentality.

Graph showing top 6 social media platforms used by B2B Marketers for content marketing.

According to a report by CMI, Facebook is the third most favored platform for B2B marketing after LinkedIn and Twitter. But we both know you can’t go selling to every user on Facebook as that would be both ludicrous and insanely expensive. You need to find customers who are interested in your products or services and then invite them to like your company page.

How to build your Facebook community

Every brand needs a dedicated number of followers behind it. The more the number of social media followers, the more credible the company is perceived to be. Additionally, such a huge audience of fans means more sales.

However, owning a quality group isn’t a walk in the park- for real. It can take a very long time to get even a meager 500 followers. So what’s the best way forward?

Cold emailing.

Unless your company is new, you must be having a list of email subscribers lying somewhere. If you don’t have, then perhaps you need to embark on a lead hunting spree. There are many tools for scraping data from Facebook. If you get hold of a good one, harvest as many relevant emails (those within your niche) as possible and store them in CSV formats.

I’m supposing you know about Mailshake now and how to use it. Just like we did before, you will start a new campaign targeting a defined group of Facebook users with a message to invite them to like your group. Do follow-ups to ensure your audience gets a chance to see your mail.

This is merely your first stages of building something big so there is no point in selling. If anything, you just need to tell your prospects how they stand to benefit by following your brand on social media (for instance quick resolving of issues, insider tips, etc.).

Also, when you send your day to day emails, add your Facebook page link to your email signature. This way anyone who wants to know more about your company can visit the link.

Building a relationship via Phantombuster

You’ve managed to invite people to like your brand’s page. It’s time to interact with them via their inboxes. Since you cannot do that manually, you need a tool like Phantombuster that can send out messages in bulk.

For this tool to work well, you need (to provide) the following:

  • your Facebook session cookies(xs and c-user)
  • the message you wish to send
  • a spreadsheet link with Facebook profiles (this can be extracted from Facebook groups using Mailbiz)
  • specification on the number of messages to be sent per launch

Step one: Open account– If you don’t have an account with Phantombuster then perhaps you need to open one first.

Step two: Install to Chrome/Firefox: make your work easier by integrating the Phantombuster extension  to your browser. It’s a two-click installation process.

Step three: Launch the API: it’s time to configure the tool by providing all the necessary details just like we did for the API setup earlier, i.e. your Facebook cookies, message, profile URL spreadsheet and sending conditions. The spreadsheet must be open (allow edit access).

Screenshot of phantombuster with an arrow pointing at the 3-dots next to the "Launch" button

Step four: Repetition setup- Everything should be looking good at this step, and the API can go live. However, before the launch, you need to customize it so it works repetitively. For instance, you can condition it to send out three messages every ten minutes.

Screenshot of Phantombuster UI with a red box around the "Repetitively" option

Step five: Launch and enjoy!

Precautions

Phantombuster is an automation tool, and thus it works aggressively. If you set it to send many messages in short durations, Facebook will restrict your account  for spamming users. Your messages will not be sent and in worst case scenarios your account could get blocked.

Since Phantombuster’s servers are propped in the West Coast of the US, Facebook might consider its logins as “unusual activity” if you don’t come from that location. So they might temporarily block your account.

You will be required to confirm that you made the login attempts before the suspension is lifted. To be on the safe side, trying using proxies that are near you.

Once this Facebook message sender starts working, some people will respond.

You need to be available to guide and interact with them. Drop valuable insights, share freebies and any other offers that will make a top choice in your niche. You need to do this with your growing group as well.

Once you have done all that, it’s time to start reaching out for leads and sales.

Why is Facebook ideal for B2B marketing?

  • It’s a cheaper marketing strategy

If you are just getting started and your bank account doesn’t permit you to market aggressively on all the major social media platforms, Facebook is where you should start. Simply create a company page, invite people to like it through friends, relatives, previous customers, and any other affordable method.

Once you have built a satisfactory number of followers, publish posts and run ads to a point where your budget allows.

  • More channels for customer support

Some customers believe that feedback is faster via Facebook than email. Therefore, with a company page, you can handle queries from your customers and improve satisfaction levels.

  • Sends more traffic to your website

Traffic can be so hard to come by. However, when you have a company page, Facebook gives you an option to provide a link to your website. This will redirect prospective buyers to your site to check out the latest offers. And that’s how you get free traffic.

  • Increased interactions

Do you know why musicians, actors, actresses, and other entertainers have a massive following of passionate fans? Because they know how to foster meaningful interactions. I can hear you say “but they are rock stars.” Sure, they are, but Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Oreo, Red Bull and many other companies are not rock stars, but they have millions of Facebook fans.

Your company can have a massive following too if you post frequently and prompt your fans to share their thoughts about your products/services. Regular engagement will help you build an army of loyal customers. Make sure to have contact details on the page so you can be reached in case of anything.

The Bottom Line

Gone are the days when you were expected to attend face to face meetings to strike deals with new clients. With the internet stretching to all corners of the world, you can market your business to individuals beyond your geographical borders.

Thanks to the growth of social media platforms, social selling is now a reality. Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin are some of the top options you can use for B2B marketing. But due to millions and billions of fans, it can be tiresome and costly to reach out to all the potential leads.

However, as you already know, automation tools are all the rage now. Marketers, growth hackers and sales individuals can now automate some of the smaller (but burdensome) marketing duties and go about their activities.

But there is a catch; despite the efficiency of these tools, your account can easily be banned for “spamming” users.

So here is the golden advice- if you choose to work with automation tools, make sure to send out messages, requests and other solicitations carefully.

Put simply, let it appear as if there is a human behind the process and not a bot or a machine.

Lastly, strive to build relationships before selling. Show prospects that you care about them and your marketing strategies will work like a charm.

Peace out!

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About the Author

The name's Houston Golden. I'm the Founder & CEO of BAMF — a company I've grown from $0 (yes, really) to well over $5M+ in revenue over a span of 5 years.

How did I do it? Well, it's quite simple, really. I've helped hundreds of business owners and executives get major traction (because when they win, we win), I tell all on this blog.

Growth hacking is a state of mind. Follow along as I explore and expose the unknown growth strategies and tactics that will change the way you think about marketing.
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