Identifying qualified prospects can easily turn into a tedious task, often dissuasive...
Though, this is the first step in your sales funnel. And the better you are at identifying prospects, the likelier you are to generate business.
According to 99Firms’ survey, 50% of prospects chased by salespeople turn out to not be a good fit. That’s half of the time wasted! So, how do you ensure that prospects match with what you offer?
At The Scale Lab, we’ll help to know how to do that with some super helpful tips. In this article, you’ll know:
Smart ways to identify & connect with prospects found on social media
How to use Quora & Reddit for finding consumer pain points?
A surprise place to look for leads (which many businesses are not doing!)
But before you start, here’s an…
Essential Checklist
Okay. First thing first — before you even begin the process of finding leads and acquiring customers, here’s a list of essentials that you need to do before moving ahead. Read on…
Identifying Your Prospects 🎯
The most important aspect of customer acquisition and lead generation — i.e. creating a buyer persona.
A buyer persona is a detailed description of your ideal target audience, consumers, or leads. As a business, you need to identify key traits including your consumer’s pain points, interests, goals, professional details, gender, location, age, etc. — to analyze why they’d want to buy your product and how you can pitch in.
If you are not sure about how to create a detailed buyer persona, check out this guide.
Extracting Prospect Information
Now that you know who your ideal target audience is, you’ll need to search for it. But how do you gather the information about your target audience when you find it?
We suggest you use a tool like Phantombuster that will help you generate a prospect list into nice and clean spreadsheets. It’ll make your life easier and avoid the standard copy/past.
Each of the Hacks below will include a Phantombuster feature to help you extract prospect information at scale.
Now, after the mise en place, you’re all set to know how to search prospects and convert them into customers for your business
1. Leverage LinkedIn to Connect with Decision Makers
LinkedIn has more than 740 million members, out of which 61 million users are senior-level influencers, and 41 million are in decision-making positions.
Leverage LinkedIn by using advanced search filters. We recommend using LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find your buyer persona.
Once you finalise your search, use the below Phantom to extract your Sales Navigator search results. You will get a spreadsheet that includes Names, Titles, Company Names, LinkedIn Profile URL, Company URL ... For each prospect 🥰
Use the LinkedIn search to find posts that relate to your industry or service offering.
Extract the post commenters with their comments.
To automate tedious processes like sending personalized connection requests, and even engagement 👇👇
2. Social Networks — Beyond LinkedIn
Social media is more than just LinkedIn (even if your target audience is B2B). 39% of marketers generate leads through Facebook and 30% through Twitter. When it comes to Instagram, around 200 million users visit at least 1 business profile each day. That’s huge!
Customer Acquisition on Facebook Groups
Look for relevant groups in your business/industry.
For example, if you are into digital marketing, head to Facebook Search and type digital marketing. Then, select groups from the filters. You can even choose a city to ensure you target only the people who live in a particular location (if your operations are global, leave the city tab empty).
Join several groups and start engaging on the posts that seem relevant to you and your business.
If a group is particularly interesting for your business. You can extract the group members into a spreadsheet with this Phantom. You will get their profile URL, first name, last name, profile picture...
Customer Acquisition using Twitter
We advise Twitter when you want to target volumes.
First, think about hashtags that are relevant to your industry ex: #ColdEmailing #DigitalTransformation #FinTech
Then use these hashtags to find tweets that really match your service offering.
Extract these tweets so you can engage with them accordingly
NOTE: You can automatically launch this scraper everyday to regularly capture tweets that match your preferred hashtags. This ensures you have a continuous stream of qualified leads and don’t miss any opportunity 😉
Customer Acquisition on Instagram
Similar to the previous Twitter approach, we suggest to
Use hashtags to identify posts relevant to your industry.
And, automatically extract these posts into a spreadsheet so you can pic and choose which one should be engaged with.
3. Browse Through YouTube / TikTok Comments
It’s the age of the video! YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine, while TikTok is the 2nd most popular social app. Used right they can be a gold mine to identify leads (B2B and B2C).
Browse through the comments on videos from your competitors or popular content creators in your niche.
Look either for comments from people who want solutions to problems that your business solves, or for negative comments.
Negative comments mean prospects want a solution but didn’t find something that worked for them. It’s gold. ✨
You don’t have to spend hours browsing through the comments. Instead, you can use a YouTube comment scraper tool to automate the process. Set keywords that you want the tool to look for, and it will download those comments from your target videos. Easy!
4. Use Quora to Showcase Your Expertise
Did you know an average adult spends 2x as much time on Quora than LinkedIn? Have a question? Quora is your best bet. So, by extension, your potential customers are expressing their exact pain points and looking for a solution — that you have!
So, on Quora, you can surely get high-quality leads (who are probably already interested in your product or service). Follow these steps to use Quora for lead generation:
Search for questions that relate to your service offering.
Extract all the search results into a spreadsheet.
Pick the questions that match best to your service offering.
Engage by answering the questions on Quora and follow the individuals who ask the questions.
5. Scan Reddit for Customer Pain Points
With over 430 million monthly active users, Reddit offers a great business opportunity.
Because people are asking questions, sharing their concerns on the platform. Leverage this to know what your prospects are interested in — and form a lead generation and customer acquisition strategy accordingly.
Here are some ways to generate leads and find prospects via Reddit:
Find relevant subreddits to join. Search for your primary keywords and analyze the results to find which subreddit is a good fit for your company.
You can use the search box to find posts related to your industry.
Extract the posts with this Phantom
NOTE: We suggest to use the trending posts to feed your content or newsletter as they will be a good indicator of what your target market is looking for. 😉
Use Reddit’s AMA (Ask Me Anything) feature to mention your business and encourage engagement.
Even business leaders like Elon Musk and John Malkovich use AMAs to engage their audience.
6. SURPRISE! — Browse Yellow Pages
Hey! Don’t count out the big daddy yet.
If your target audience is a niche group of businesses residing at a specific location, then Yellow Pages is the best place to look for.
It is an online (yes online!) business directory where you can find super-relevant details like:
Business name
Business address
Business description
Phone number
Email address
Website URL
Reviews
Yellow Pages has different websites based on countries. Depending on your target location, visit the regional website to find your ideal leads. (Also, don’t forget to list your business on yellow pages ;) )
This one is simple:
Search for business matching your persona
Extract the search results with this Phantom to get Business name, Full address, Phone number, Official website...
Wrapping Up
Finding the right prospects requires you to look at various platforms and some level of creativity. But it’s accessible to everyone, and homework does pay off.
Follow these 6 hacks to amplify your lead generation and customer acquisition strategies, to ultimately scale your business. 🚀
And, while you’re at it, check out this article on how to successfully send cold emails so when you have identified potential prospects you can increase your chances of converting them.
Until then, signing off…
The Scalelab Team
hello@thescalelab.io