Client’s challenge
U.S. market penetration. While they had an established database and strategy for reaching prospects in the United Kingdom, they needed a team with solid expertise to develop a scalable lead generation strategy for the U.S. market. However, their research capacity was limited for this.
Solutions
- ICP identification and modification. We decided to target two different audiences — HR professionals and employee benefits managers. To cater to these audiences, we adjusted our value propositions accordingly. We also sought to build partnerships with brokers, showcasing the benefits of reselling the tests and earning profits. When targeting HRs, our focus was on educating them about the client’s product, illustrating how it could help them retain employees and attract new talents.
Once we figured out that HRs are not really open to testing any new benefits and didn’t respond to our emails, we changed the ICP a bit to HRs within innovative and progressive verticals such as software development and digital marketing.
- Lead research. In the initial 3 months, we conducted tests targeting employee benefits brokers and HRs. However, since HRs were unresponsive during the early stages, we shifted our strategy to solely focus on brokers for the next 2 months. While they performed better initially, the overall ROI was low. To increase ROI, we collaborated with the client to expand the audience and develop a scalable strategy to engage HRs and employee benefits managers.
- Implementation of 2 hybrid outreach campaigns for various target audiences. We designed two prospect engagement workflows, tailoring them to different target audiences. Each campaign comprised 3 parts — cold email outreach, LinkedIn outreach, and LinkedIn content creation and promotion.
This is how our 4-step workflow looked:
- Step 1: LinkedIn connections and audience warm-up
We sent connection invitations to members of employee benefits LinkedIn groups and filtered them accordingly. By establishing connections, we increased the chances of having them join the client’s LinkedIn network. Additionally, this step enhanced the effectiveness of the email outreach campaign. We allowed two weeks for prospects to accept the invitation and warmed up the audience with relevant content.
- Step 2. Email outreach
We crafted personalized templates, leveraging the fact that we were already connected with these individuals on LinkedIn. If prospects responded negatively, we allowed them one month to cool down before implementing an educational campaign with another email sequence.
- Step 3. Educational campaign
Over 4 weeks, we produced 6 to 8 publications as part of an educational campaign. The goal was to keep the client on the prospects’ radar and ensure their need for food sensitivity testing in their process. We generated content to attract relevant audiences to the client’s profile.
- Step 4. LinkedIn outreach campaign
Two weeks later, we engaged prospects in our LinkedIn outreach. The mechanics were similar to the email outreach, with the only difference in the number of waves and appearances both in messages and the prospects’ newsfeeds. This approach helped us significantly increase the response rates.
