Challenges
Even if you're fully invested in cold outreach, booking appointments with enterprises still won't be easy. Why?
- Everybody wants to book an appointment with a Fortune 500 enterprise. Therefore, the mailbox of your targeted decision-makers is teeming with incoming emails that contain unique offers or promise a one-of-a-kind opportunity.
- Since emails of large companies are easy to obtain, spammers often add them to their list. Therefore, large businesses resort to increased security measures: Their spam filters are susceptible to spam trigger words, the overall content of the email, and even link placement.
- The more significant the company is, the larger its decision-making group grows. The outcome doesn't depend on one person. A particular group of titles, representing each department, has to look at your offer, evaluate its pros and cons, and then decide to book an appointment with you. Before that, you should build momentum and grow connections within that group. That isn't done in a day.
Understanding these challenges, BetterComp decided to add the LinkedIn Influencer Program to their outreach and generate appointments that matter. Wanting to create a solid and productive channel, BetterComp collaborated with Belkins to build the LinkedIn Influencer campaign worthy of Fortune 500 businesses' attention.
Brief summary
Securing a successful campaign depends on your palette of styles and tones. You must know how you start a conversation, how you continue it, and how you finalize your dialogue with your prospects. When you add a dash of LinkedIn influencer marketing to your campaign, choosing the right language is particularly important. Your goal is to be knowledgeable, professional, but, at the same time, fun.
Our LinkedIn influencer campaign was built on a friendly approach — just comp geeks sharing interesting facts with other comp geeks. As non-formal and straightforward as it was, it allowed us to book appointments with big industry players.
Connecting with businesses of that scale on LinkedIn sounds more like wishful thinking rather than a real opportunity.
The right strategy, planning, and conversation pace will get you far.
Detailed summary
Before you get started with anything, you need an in-depth plan. We followed ours closely, putting max effort into each stage.
- Work with the client. Since our goal was to present the client’s expertise, professionalism, and ability to provide the best outcome for their target industries, we needed information for building compelling and intriguing posts. To gather data, we did the following:
- Content form. Every company has a unique business culture and style, so we don’t start our work until we understand our client and their approach to content. This is why we send all our LinkedIn Influencer clients special content briefs. By filling those briefs out, the client lets us know what kind of posts they like to see, what style they prefer, and what subjects they want to elaborate on.
- Industry research. Repeating the same patterns wouldn’t keep anybody interested. We explored other companies in BetterComp’s field of expertise and evaluated their LinkedIn presence: How often they post, if they have unique content, provide valuable insights, what their activity in LinkedIn groups and their contribution to the community is, etc. This step allowed us to find major competitors and figure out the ways for BetterComp to stand out from the rest.
- Editorial calendar. Consistency and planning are the supporting pillars of any successful campaign. To stay true to this statement, we made an Editorial Calendar, an Excel table containing posting dates, post subjects, and links to published and upcoming posts. For better synergy, our LinkedIn teams and client’s reps can access the table anytime and make sure that everything is executed at the right place, with the right message.
- Solid email outreach. Remember: LinkedIn marketing exists to enrich your cold email outreach, not to replace it. This is why, at the same time, our teams worked on securing stable and consistent email communication. We helped BetterComp fine-tune their mailboxes, improve their relationship with spam filters and increase their deliverability. We used email outreach to target SME and Fortune 1000 companies that could benefit from BetterComp’s services.
- Building a style. After getting materials and recommendations from BetterComp, we started working on our posts and shaping the right LinkedIn image.
- Friendly tone. If you want to succeed on LinkedIn, you should avoid a dry and formal tone in general. LinkedIn is a platform for professionals who exchange opinions about their industry, share insights and achievements. Thus, look for a human-to-human conversation, just not the one that revolves around personal matters, such as family, hobbies, etc. Since our goals were to reach out to the titles familiar with BetterComp's field of expertise, we settled for a simple, welcoming, and relaxed pace.
- Non-formal terminology. Picking your words carefully will help you drive better results. Some titles are very responsive to industry jargon because it means that the person who sought them out understands the subject they want to discuss. With BetterComp, we went even deeper, going for industry slang used not in business correspondence but heart-to-heart conversations between professionals. It's an excellent way to pick the right key to your prospects' hearts, a subtle signal "I'm probably going through the same things as you are. Wanna talk about it?" that people appreciate.
- Soft CTAs. When you go all friendly and informal, don't push a sale. This is a golden rule. Our blend of tone and language opened us the doors that were closed for more salesy representatives. However, one slip-up could ruin it all. Therefore, we refrained from making direct sales offers. Instead, we kept our calls-to-action soft — we invited our prospects to a conversation, letting them share their industry-related frustrations and map their business goals. From our side, we'd throw in some valuable facts and tips, provide our prospects with extra food for thought and keep them interested in maintaining contact.
