While the term ‘growth hacking’ is usually more familiar with B2C businesses, it can produce just the same impact in the B2B environment.
Growth hacking is essentially about using the most cost-efficient methods to achieve the most exponential growth possible. In practice, we can use various marketing channels to achieve growth hacking from content marketing, social media, and advertising, among others.
Below are some of the most effective B2B growth hacking techniques we can try this week and how to implement them.
1. Use LinkedIn Message Ad To Promote Your Free Trial
This is especially effective if you are in a niche like SaaS which allows you to offer a free trial or a freemium version of your product. However, you can adopt this strategy to any niche, essentially by offering something free that is related to your product/service via LinkedIn Inmail.
Why is this effective? First, LinkedIn Message Ad (previously Sponsored InMail) is an effective platform to reach a lot of B2B prospects and can be more effective than traditional email marketing in reaching a more targeted audience. LinkedIn is obviously the social media platform where a lot of B2B buyers are active in, and by sharing freebies, we can effectively build awareness.
An effective technique to try here is to make this a time-limited offer to create a sense of urgency. You can also personalize the InMail and tell them that this is an exclusive offer only for a selected few people (which is always true for targeted InMail marketing).
The most important thing to focus on here is the perceived value of your offer. You have to communicate that you are offering something valuable for free (in exchange of their contact information). With this, simple but effective technique, you can generate a lot of leads quickly.
2. Effective and Creative Content Marketing
B2B audience prefers educational and informative content, and in general, the most effective content forms that generate the most B2B leads ebooks, slideshares, and webinars.
Again, it’s important to show that your content can offer immediate and clear value to the prospect, and the value must be related to your product or service. In general, we can grow leads by offering this valuable content for free in exchange for their contact information.
An important principle in today’s content marketing is not to hard-sell your product or service but focus on informing your audience with something valuable. For example, if you are a vendor selling an accounting software solution, you can create an Ebook Creator about how to effectively and easily implement accounting for startups. Show your brand’s credibility and thought leadership on your niche.
With today’s power of social media, the more shareable your content is, the better you can attract more prospects. So, make sure to encourage your audience to share your content, and make it easy for them. Provide social share buttons on your content, and make them easy to find.
Also, remember that nowadays there are various forms of content to leverage: from traditional blog posts to infographics to YouTube videos to podcasts. You can experiment with these different forms and combine them together (i.e. embedding videos in the middle of your blog post). The principle remains the same: provide value to your audience and establish your expertise/credibility on the topic.
3. Be Proactive In Offline Events
While today we should focus our marketing efforts mainly on digital channels from B2B SEO to social media to influencer marketing, we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of offline events like industry expos, conferences, and even offline contests related to your product/service.
You can meet a whole lot of people in these conferences and expos, especially representatives and executives from companies that could become your future customers. Expos and conferences are effective places to engage prospects since people visit these events naturally to discover and learn new things. So, be proactive and take advantage of their natural curiosity to share your product/service and your brand’s value.
You can also host and participate in contests. If you can get the awards and accolades, it can be a really effective way to build your credibility and reputation. However, even if you don’t win the contest, it’s still a great way to build brand awareness and reach potential prospects.
Also, don’t forget that these events can be a great place to meet the media, influencers, and potential partners in your industry. While they might not directly contribute to your growth, building long-term relationships can provide a lot of benefits in the future.
4. Target Your Competitor’s Audience
This technique is relatively simple and cost-effective but can be a great way to generate a lot of leads, possibly within a day.
In this technique you only have to:
- Identify your competitors, they might list their clients on their websites.
- If you are selling digital B2B solutions (i.e. SaaS products), you can also use a web scraping service to find websites that have your competitor’s solution installed on their site. You can also use email finder tools to identify email addresses related to your computers.
- Reach out to them and introduce your business. You can say something like “We notices you are using X, and you might like our option, here is our free-trial and discount link”.
Yes, cold calling (or cold emailing) still works even in 2020, as long as you do it right and you are targeting the right audience. The key here is how you communicate that you are offering something better (or something unique) compared to what they are already using.
5. Use LinkedIn Audience To Launch A Targeted Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads is still one of the most effective advertising methods due to Facebook’s huge audience and very sophisticated targeting capabilities. On the other hand, we have discussed how LinkedIn is a great place to find potential B2B customers.
So, how can we combine the two together? Here is one technique you can use, involving Facebook Ads’ Lookalike Audience option:
- Connect to as many people as you can in the industry via LinkedIn (you are also building valuable connections in the process).
- Export this connections from Linkedin to CSV
- Use the data to create a Facebook custom audience using the lookalike audience feature and deliver highly targeted ads
This method can work really well since you can reach out to audiences that are already very interested in your brand or product/service.
Probably the biggest challenge for this technique is exporting connections from LinkedIn, and you can follow LinkedIn’s guide on this topic here. While it might be a challenge at first, it’s fairly easy to implement once you understand how.
End Words
The five growth hack techniques we have shared above are fairly easy and cost-effective to implement this week and can be really effective in growing your leads in a fairly short time. So, pick one (or more) of the techniques above, and just implement them on your business today.
The main principle to consider here is how you should communicate your brand’s unique value proposition to your potential customers: how your solution is better than your competitors’. The better you can communicate this and show this to the right audience, the better you can hack your B2B business’s growth.