Entrepreneur

A little back story:

Last two years have been a rollercoaster to say the least.

Sold an affiliate business in summer of 2022 that kept the lights on and allowed me to live the "laptop lifestyle" for 4 years. I definitely took advantage of it! Traveled a lot, converted my van into a camper and had a blast traveling around Europe and even bought a plot of land, all thanks to the affiliate biz I started while I was still working a 9-5 as a CMO for a clothing retailer.

I got way too lazy and complacent - I started a lot of new projects during this time knowing that the affiliate sales are going to dry up sooner or later, but gave up on all of them.

Then an offer came along for a nice chunk of money. Taking that deal was the scariest thing I ever did. Trading a steady 5 fig income for a lump sum meant that I had to commit to one of my half-assed projects.

With my living expenses eating into my savings, I decided to focus on my local marketing agency. I already had 1 client and the experience of being a CMO.

I soon realised that it's freaking hard to get new clients. Especially ones that can afford what I was charging.

My bottleneck? No systems in place to generate a stable pipeline of new leads.

So down the rabbit hole I went - learned everything I could about cold email lead generation, even bought a course for 8k.

After a lot of trial and error (burning domains, not verifying leads, ect) I landed on a strategy that worked for me. I was booking 3-5 calls every week.

This is the part where I'd like to claim that I made $100k in bizarrely short amount of time, but that's not how it really happens. Especially not if you're a small agency (1 full time-me + 2 freelancers)

I decided to pivot away from offering paid ads to small businesses and started to offer the same cold email lead generation that I was using for myself to a lead list of potential clients.

My thinking was that I could work with fewer clients and make more by charging a retainer + commission to businesses that already had proof of concept and sales process to close the leads.

Boy, was I right..

I was doing the same amount of work while working with 1/3rd amount of clients, but since the deal sizes were much bigger, I was making 4x more.

I soon started to incorporate paid ads back into the offering, but tailored to B2B.

So what the heck am I focusing on in 2024 to generate leads and deals for me and my clients?

Short answer: META ads and hyper targeted cold email.

Let me explain.

With META ads you have the advantage of reaching a huge amount of your ICP with relatively little spend. This is great for smaller to mid sized deals, $2k - $10k, but you're unlikely to reach CMO of Nike.

With cold email, you have the advantage of filtering the list so you reach EXACTLY the people who you'd want to work with. This is great for bigger deals, $10k+. So you could easily reach CMO of Nike if you wanted to.

Not saying this to brag, but I helped a coffee company land a wholesale client who purchased a container of coffee for $100k.

I did that by scraping every roaster in the US and UK and sending a semi-personalised email to every single one of them. On top of that, I found a database that allows you to filter incoming shipments by category.

So naturally I scraped every company that imported coffee that year in the US.

I have a detailed post on how you can set up the architecture to send personalised emails at scale in my post history somewhere.

Took me a day to set up, 2 weeks of warming up and 40 minutes per day answering to interested emails and forwarding meeting requests to my client.

But it's not as simple anymore. You can't go in there, guns blazing, scrape 10k leads and blast 1k emails per day blindly.

Not with the new google restrictions. They're tightening the grasp on blatant spammers. In result, every bulk sender suffers. If 3 out of 1000 emails sent get market as spam, your inbox is done.

That's why, going into 2024, I'm putting much more effort into scraping and filtering leads.

That means sending lower volumes, but only sending to a laser focused list.

Less 5000 lead list campaigns, more 300-600 lead list, granular and laser targeted campaigns along with specific messaging.

For example, instead of reaching out to all US coffee roasters with the same messaging, I'd separate them all by state, size, revenue, etc and tailor the messaging based on that. Don't send to those who're too small or boutique, because they wouldn't buy in bulk anyway.

If the offer is good and relevant to the ICP, there's no way to not get a conversation started with a potential client if you do this.

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As for Meta ads, there's a lot of strategies floating around, but I like to keep it simple. Also, I see a lot of comments on this and marketing related subreddits that meta is not good for b2b. That's simply not true.

Everyone has an instagram and facebook profile. CEO's with 10m/yr companies have it, CMO's managing 80k/mo brands have it, purchase managers responsible for buying potatoes have it.
You're not going to reach Bill Gates with your ads, but if your market is broad and you have a good offer, you can definitely utilize meta ads.

For B2B, I always use 2 funnels.

First is direct response based. You have an ad with an offer, calling out your ICP and their problems which leads to an opt-in page on which you have social proof, overview of your unique mechanisms and a form. After the form is filled, there's a call booking page. Super simple, super effective IF your messaging resonates.

On average, we see $30 cost per lead, $50 cost per booked call, 60%-70% show-up rate and close rate of about 1 or 2 in 20.

Second funnel is value based. You create a valuable course, PDF or doc that solves your ICP's major problem and you give it away for free in exchange for contact details. Then you nurture them through email and SMS, asking to take action once in a while + setters who reach out to the most fitting leads.

Cost per lead we see across couple of accounts is $5 - $15.

Going into 2024, I'm going to put much more effort in building a central hub where leads will be directed after taking action. Facebook groups are perfect for this. This is where nurture and appointment setting will happen. I've seen people implement this and the biggest benefit is that once you stop the ads, you still can generate deals as long as you keep nurturing.

If you're interested in more specifics about either cold email or paid ads for b2b, I have a couple of posts on my profile where I go more in-depth.

Very excited for what's to come, I absolutely love B2B marketing.