Lead Generation For Startups: A Workable Guide

To start a business is hard work. You may have the greatest idea and the best brand, but if you don't have leads, you won't sell. Even the best business won't survive without profits.

At Answer, we've helped all sorts of businesses of all sizes optimize their marketing and we've learned a lot about how to get leads. With this guide, we'll help you decide on a lead generation process that's ideal for your particular situation and consistently produces leads that lead to start-up sales.

unique challenge of generating leads

Generating leads is important for any company to thrive, but it can be a particularly difficult challenge for startups. Why?

Inventory limited. Once you start a business, you'll never have enough time and money to do whatever you want. Each penny counts whether it's paying staff, leasing new office rooms, or even collecting enough cash to survive. Which means you can't throw money at all the various lead-generation approaches you've heard about.

Nobody's name. A brand-new startup is a wall. No good word-of-mouth, no references, no testimonials, no social evidence. You always contend with well-established customer base companies and brands— convincing customers to take a chance on something different will always be hard work.

There's no experience. Each business is as special as the people in it, and no one can come in and tell you the best strategy for your specific situation. It works for others won't work for you. You will be able to look back and see what works to draw leads and what doesn't.

There are two primary leading routes: outbound and inbound. Everyone's own strengths and weaknesses. Ideally, your company would employ a little bit of both, but when you start, you might have to prioritize each other.

Outbound strategies

Outbound is all about reaching out and attracting their attention. It includes strategies such as door-to-door marketing, cold email, billboard and pay-per-click ads. There's an immense range, from traditional to new, from offline to digital.

Outbound strategies Outbound strategies generally require more than inbound strategies, but can also produce faster results. The following method is the perfect way to plan an outbound campaign.

Before reach out to someone, you need to know who they are. New businesses make a common error thinking their product or service is for everyone. When you try to appeal, you end up appealing to no-one. It's a bad business plan, and a poor outbound campaign strategy.

If you have any existing customers, it's a great place to start; give them a survey, or better yet, interviews. If you have no clients, don't worry. Through studying your competitor's customers and reading their posts in forums and public blogs, or sites like Reddit and Quora, you will learn a lot.

Researching your competitor's customers You are looking for solid data that you can use to create an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Don't base it on your imagination or' best guess,' or your entire strategy can end up useless.

Ideally, you're looking for the following information: industry specifics, specialization, scale, structure.

Demographics— place, age, education.

Psychographics-Industry issues, difficulties encountered, consumer concerns / anxieties.

Often, consider creating a' poor' buyer profile for people you don't want to sell to. You can refine your messaging further.

From this information, you'll want actionable insights: what's the best way to reach your prospects? 

What message attracts most?

With a clear idea of what the customer feels like, it's time to find them.

This meant buying prospects lists, but can be risky. Performance can vary greatly, with obsolete emails and misinformation. While it may seem simpler than building your own list, a high-quality list's benefits make up the time and effort needed.

Hopefully, you got some useful clues in your ICP. For starters, finding your ideal lead work at B2B companies and hanging out on LinkedIn is a great place to start looking. On the other hand, if your target market is Gen Z and you spend all your time hashtagging at Instagram, there's no point in looking anywhere else.

If you're in the B2B market, you can use plenty of resources (like Crunchbase) to create your own lead list. With their filters, you can quickly narrow the requirements to find your ideal customers.

Using resources to create your own lead list. Finally, check at any blogs or news channels that cover your target market. Announcements and press releases will help you find the right leads, but the time to follow them.

Finally, you need to determine which specific method you will use to reach your prospects. Your main choices are: Cold calling Cold emailing Social selling Each one comes with its own strengths and weaknesses. Most people hate making cold calls and how it scares people, however quick decisions can be highly effective. Social selling takes much longer, but has the benefit of building a relationship with the prospect before reaching out.

Cold email is our preferred method— after all, it's how we construct our own business — because it has a good balance of focus without being too invasive. Open and answer rates vary by sector, but if you include 1-3 questions, you will increase your chances of getting answers by 50%.

The most important thing to consider is what's most appropriate for your prospects. If you enjoy social marketing doesn't matter; if your prospects aren't on social media, you're wasting time. Even with your research, finding what works best may take some experimentation. Overall, a combination of all three will give the best performance.

Quick tip: Fighting the right contact information? Tools such as Find email address and MailsHunt can help you find and verify email addresses, while enrichment tools can help with other information.

Inbound strategies

 Instead, you can use inbound strategies to draw leads. Inbound is about building and generating interest to prospective leads.

Inbound strategies This is most often in content form, such as blog posts (like the one you're reading right now), ebooks, webinars, and video content. Inbound can take longer, but it costs less (62% less, to be exact). For years, the right content can attract prospects. For succeed, you'll need a clear strategy.

Build relevant content The first step is the same as with an outbound campaign; if you want to create content that attracts your ideal customer, you need to know who exactly that ideal customer is. Once you have your ICP, you are in a much better position to start creating content. Through answering your ideal customer's needs and concerns, people are lining up to test your content.

For example, suppose your ICP, established for your internet security business, is concerned with creating back-ups. Your interviews show they're worried about getting back-up regularly, and finding the whole thing difficult. Through writing a blog post or video on' The easy way to arrange back-ups,' you answer their biggest concern. You give real value.

Check out: 5 Reasons How Personalized Content Drives More Revenue It's worth spending time improving your search engine content. For eg, what exactly are your prospect search terms? What's search language competition? Using a SEO tool like Moz or Ahrefs will answer these questions and make sure your buck content gets the most bang.

Distribute your content

Until your future leads can find it, all the world's content won't do you good. SEO can help organic traffic, but it takes time. And make sure your hard work doesn't go to waste, you need an active way to share it, where your leads hang out.

While you can always use paying platforms to promote your content, there are plenty of free options. This could include creating your own distribution channels, such as social media profiles and newsletters.

If your content is (and should be) important, you should be able to leverage other people's platforms. You could make guest appearances on other popular blogs or podcasts, for example, or encourage people to share content with their followers.

Stay innovative with your distribution channels and try to get original coverage.

Check out: Why Content Distribution Is Ever Before 

Collecting leads

I've seen many sites with great content, but they've sadly overlooked the main goal: collecting leads.

This usually requires several types of content forming a funnel. You may have a free blog post on your page, along with a more comprehensive ebook offered in exchange for email address of the user. If you're a guest on someone else's page, you're normally allowed to include a profile, a great place to connect to your blog.

Make it easy to sign up for valuable content.

Having followers on your social media is fine, but leaves you at the provider's mercy. If Facebook decides to close your profile, you'll lose those leads. That's why we highly recommend getting prospects on your email list as soon as possible.

Quick tip: If people sign up for your list, let them know you're going to submit promotions and deals. Being open not only prevents you from emailing customers who are not interested in buying from you, but is also a prerequisite under the GDPR if you email people in Europe.

Congratulations to you! You've got a list of self-qualified leads.

Conclusion

An effective method of producing lead is important for long-term success and survival.

An efficient lead generation method By choosing the best method for your business, whether through inbound or outbound, you can create a consistent lead stream.

Yet sticking to that approach and continuously improving your performance will get you to your target.

Find email user

We've also heard stories of people opening up million-dollar offers through a single cold email, or ramping up by personally pitching prospects they're first $10,000 in sales.

But there's only one thing: how to get in contact with these people?

Random strangers shouldn't have a blanket email blast. That's bad (and possibly illegal) news. Nevertheless, sending someone, you don't know a personal message will open the door to huge opportunities. Only know what to send and where to go.

Sadly, both pieces can be hard to figure out. But for this article's sake, we'll talk about that second part — how to find email address.

While some people are easy enough to track, others do not always disclose their email address, whether intentionally or not.

This guide is a step-by-step method for finding almost anyone's internet email address. And it's unbelievably effective, without relying on expensive tools or software (unless necessary).

Here is the list of some key point find email user

1.       Check the obvious places:

2.       Guess it:

3.       Test not - so-obvious positions:

4.       Turn to Google:

5.       Call in technology:

 Check the obvious places:

Before we go into some fancy tricks and tactics to find an email address, be sure to exhaust the obvious, simple solutions.

·         Twitter bio LinkedIn the tab

·         "Chat" Personal website (page, chat page)

·         Company website (contact, masthead)

In many instances, you can find your contact information right from one of these websites. Especially people like journalists who actively seek inquiries.

If you're reading this guide, you probably already thought about it. Now, let's move on to some other strategies that work for hard-to-find email addresses.

Guess it:

If it is not listed, most people will turn to technology or use some advanced strategy to try to hunt down an email address. What's my advice? Hold on that.

One of the simplest ways to find someone's email address if it's not immediately apparent is to guess what it is.

It works beautifully when adding any technical know-how.

·         [ firstname]@[domain ]

·         [ firstname][lastname]@[domain ]

·         [ firstname].[lastname]@[firstname]-[lastname]@[domain ]

·         [ firstname][lastname]@[domain ] ] [ firstname][lastname]@[domain ] ]

When each email turns into the little grey bubble, some details can be exposed via the email address. If the email is legitimate, you'll probably see more detail than the address you typed in.

It sometimes shows a picture. Some times, it has a picture and full name. Sometimes it's more subtle and can have an extra data line or include a secondary email address (like above).

This will vary slightly by phone, and not every valid email will pull a full profile card (I think this depends on whether they use Gmail or Google Cloud). But you can often find an address that is more specific than the others, which shows you it's in use.

First, I use this step because the probability of being able to guess an email address with the first name, last name and domain are high and this is a very fast way to validate it or find out if you need to move on to more creative methods.

Note: Use a tool like Mailtester to check the address through the mail server. Don't be fooled by their ugliness — it works!

Test not - so-obvious positions:

If you're still looking for an email address, we'll be jumping back to social media for two more tricks to help you find what you're looking for.

Check the Facebook page:

This may not be as simple as searching LinkedIn or Twitter profile, but if you want to contact someone running a small operation (like, say, a blogger or influencer), you may be able to find their contact information from their Facebook page.

Tap "About" and see "Contact Info." Sometimes a standard address is listed here, but sometimes it's a personal email address you can use to communicate.

This also fits well if you're trying to find a certain company's contact information and can only find standard email addresses. Marketing or social media person often lists their email as a contact here.

 Search their tweet history:

Occasionally, if anyone tries to reach them, people tweet their email address. Unfortunately, because of Twitter's ever-scrolling feed, it's difficult to scan all of someone's tweets without scrolling practically to the top of their page.

Thankfully, there is a workaround to quickly finding email addresses: Allmytweets.net.

This nifty tool collects all tweets from a single account and shows them in a broad plain text list. That's great because then you can search for terms like "@gmail" or "email" and see if they've tweeted their address at any point.

It's also cool because it contains "replies" (messages starting with another person's Twitter handle) – so even tweets that wouldn't appear in their regular feed are included here.

Turn to Google:

Okay, so you've scoured places where an email address might be listed and nothing is turning up. Maybe you feel a bit nervous now — will you find contact information for this person?

Don't get on yourself yet. There are plenty more tricks available.

A simple Google search can sometimes be the key to unlocking those hidden email addresses. Try different variations:

[ first name ] + [ lastname ] + @[domain ] + [ lastname ] + @[domain ] + email [ firstname ] + [ lastname ] + email.

It works mainly by looking for instances where the first and last name of the individual is near an email address in the same domain. It's incredibly powerful and always leads to an obscure origin you'd never look up yourself.

If the full email address appears in the page text or document results, the result snippet (meta description) will usually highlight it. You can usually search the results very easily, keeping an eye on the snippet for anything that looks like a full email address.

Call in technology:

Last but not least, there are many resources to locate email addresses.

Here's a list of some of the most common tools:

·        Find email address :

company email finder will essentially pull a full list of email addresses associated with a given domain. It does this by basic web crawling and scraping, but finding a stubborn address that's hidden deep on a website can be successful.

It gives you, along with the address, a percentage indicating how confident it is that it is a valid email address based on where and how many times it appeared. It also shows you where the email address was found, so you can decide if it's trustworthy.

My advice is always to save technology as a last resort. We can be precious for one. While most apps have a free tier, you suck up your free searches easily, and you're forced to pay for any extra. Second, the tools they use to locate emails are usually very vague and sometimes inaccurate.

In many instances, a tool like finding the email — as useful as it is — will only return a list of standard domain-related email addresses. The same you've seen 100 times. But to get them, you had to pay a search fee.

Hard-to-find email addresses: What to do if you can't find the address you're after using a mixture of all these approaches, it's fair to say you should be able to find an email address for about 95% of the people you want to contact. Of course, there are still some who remain very good at hiding their email address.

 Final Note:

I'd be remiss if I didn't offer one more word of caution about this post's entire premise. And that's: use these methods responsibly.

While it's possible to find nearly anyone's email address online, nobody likes being blanketed with generic spam and hundreds of sales pitch emails. Even if your message gets through, it can do more to harm your reputation than improve it, unless you're very careful and careful about how you're doing cold email outreach.

Always consider that the other end of the email is a real person and they have their collection of emotions, concerns and obligations.

For more information about emails finding please check : find corporate email addresses