This is not an article about email marketing. Or about GDPR. It’s about what comes next.
In this post-25-May 2018 world of email marketing, we can only send people the content they’ve signed up to receive. This has left many marketers with a gaping hole in their prospecting strategy - without the cold email in your arsenal, how do you reach out to new prospects? Here are some prospecting methods that don’t rely on email;
Face-to-face prospecting
While cold emails are quickly forgotten, personal interactions leave a lasting impression. Exhibiting at trade events, attending networking sessions and conferences and joining industry groups all provide opportunities to make new connections and introduce your company to fresh – and relevant - audiences.
Getting noticed on social media
You can still reach big audiences organically on social media if you have engaged followers - every like or share gets your company in front of a new network of contacts. Including relevant, active tags in your posts and sharing useful or interesting content in groups can help expand your organic reach further and, with paid social campaigns, you can target who sees your posts according to anything from location to job title. If you want to reach specific targets, LinkedIn InMail and Sponsored InMail provide the closest thing to cold email capability, allowing you to reach a targeted audience with messages sent directly to their LinkedIn mailbox.
Tapping into trade publications’ audiences
Submitting news releases and contributing to editorial content in trade publications is a great way to increase your brand visibility and demonstrate your company’s success and expertise. Many industry publications also offer opportunities for you to reach their audiences by sponsoring email campaigns to their opted-in readers or hosting content on their websites.
Introductions and referrals
The broadcast and AV industries may seem big, but they’re very connected communities. One way that you can capitalise on these low degrees of separation is by using LinkedIn to discover mutual connections with potential clients and then asking your contacts to introduce you to the prospects they’re connected with.
Show up in your prospects’ searches
Make sure that your website copy includes the terms and phrases that your prospects are likely to use when they’re searching for your services. Optimising your website for SEO helps your company rank well and pay-per-click campaigns can guarantee you the top spot in in search engine results.
Support all these prospecting methods with strong inbound campaign to attract customers to sign up for your newsletters and content - if you produce high quality, useful content that addresses your clients pain points and shares useful information (rather than inundating people with promotional content) then they’re more likely to seek your content out and sign up to your lists. Email marketing is actually still a good prospecting tool, once people have expressed an interest in hearing from you by signing up to your lists, then emails are a great way to develop that relationship.
Happy prospecting!