1. Marketing using cold email is effective (If You Have This One Thing..)

The notion that marketing using cold email is ineffective for service-based firms is the most widespread fallacy.

If you are trying to sell expensive items, you won’t have any success with it.

“Cold emails are only effective for acquiring clients for SaaS firms,”

“Spammy email outreach will never result in a sale.”

You have very certainly seen a variant of these assertions in the past. Furthermore, they are not correct in any way.

My evidence is: By sending cold emails to potential clients and linking them straight to our link building agency website, we have been successful in closing significant agreements with some of the largest software businesses in the world.

An example of just one of the hundreds of new customers I’ve earned over the last year via the use of cold emails is as follows:

How to get a greater number of leads using digital marketing. Calls made on a whim

This is the message that I received from a Senior Director of Content Marketing for a software firm that has between 1001 and 5000 workers and has received investment of about one billion dollars. Yes, we’re talking about a billion.

One year later, they are still one of our clients and they are ecstatic with the results that we are producing to transform SEO india expert into the organic growth engine for their company.

When sent in the right way, cold email may be effective. There are three main reasons why the majority of people believe that “cold email doesn’t work”:

1. They do not send out sufficient amounts of emails.

It is not indicative of a channel that has failed if after sending fifty emails there are no qualifying leads generated. This should be anticipated.

1.50 accounts to focus on? You need a total of 5000.

The wonderful thing about this is that you just need a few individuals to be interested in order to 100 times the return on your investment.

Research companies by making use of the Market Explorer tool provided by Semrush. You are able to do an analysis of certain niche markets:

It provides you with essential information, such as the primary competitors in the industry, the total addressable market (TAM), and a great deal more, so that you may construct a list of target accounts:

2. Cold emails don’t shorten your sales cycle.

Cold emails aren’t some miraculous cure-all for a dried up sales funnel.

To “warm up” email accounts and domains, a period of thirty days is required. It might take days or even weeks to establish a focused email list that has been cleansed and is ready to distribute.

After then, it will take you a few of weeks to send out all of your first emails. There is a possibility that your full sequence will take months to transmit.

This does not take into account the duration of your own sales cycles.

Emails don’t shorten your sales cycle. It’s not often that you can just write someone an email or give them a call and instantaneously complete the deal.

Sending unsolicited emails is a long-term strategy, and as such, you should regard them.

3. You have no brand

Sending unsolicited emails to a corporation worth a billion dollars demands one thing in particular:

A trusted name brand among consumers. If you are completely new to the space, you can expect your cold emails to be ignored virtually all of the time.

The very first thing that someone does after receiving your unsolicited email? Look you up. That’s your name. Your organisation. You’re socialising. Who are you, why are you contacting me, and what makes you someone I should have faith in?

You should prepare for awful response rates if there is not much that comes up.

This gets us to the meat and potatoes of the post, which is how to sell your own marketing firm to make every action related to lead creation ten times simpler.

2. Establish Your Own Name in the Market

Even if the phrase “becoming a thought leader” has a cheesy tone to it, it is very crucial for an agency that is wanting to grow to work on creating their personal brand.

People have a strong desire to be employed and to form social connections. Moreover, if you establish your own brand first, people will be far more inclined to consider you an authority in your field.

There is a much lower level of attachment and brand loyalty in the agency market compared to those of software firms, direct consumer (D2C), or consumer-packaged goods (CPG) industries.

People have a strong attachment to their preferred programme. Notion. Clickup. Semrush.

But how many different companies can you think of by name that don’t instantly bring to mind a specific company founder or CEO?

Probably not even a handful. There is an unfathomable number of agencies, and almost none of them have the same level of instant brand awareness as businesses in other sectors.

Conversely, personal brands are one of the key reasons excellent agencies bring in new business: consumers want to work with someone they know is an expert in the industry, not an agency that simply happens to have great graphics and logos and claims to be “#1.”

Building a personal brand may pull in millions of impressions a year that would otherwise cost a lot on ad expenditure. And becoming recognised for your work leads to tonnes of new business.

Platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Tik Tok are ripe for brand building and virality. Their algorithms maximise reach for valuable, popular content.

And, I’m not just talking the talk. I walk the walk. My Twitter following is active, generating me millions of impressions per week:

How to get leads for digital marketing. Build your brand

Posting on Twitter and sharing my expertise in the space of SEO has lead to:

Podcasts\sSpeaking gigs

Partnerships

Referral networks

And most importantly as it relates to this article topic, new business!

All you need to do is start. Get a fresh Google Doc out, and start brain dumping information on various topics and subjects you know well.

Then, find people in your space on Twitter, LinkedIn, etc, who are active. Network with people, comment on their posts, build your loyal following.

Reminder: this isn’t a quick win. It’s going to take you months of posting consistently to see any results. But when you land a single deal worth $100,000+, you’ll be glad you did.

3. Do 1 Podcast Per Week

One of the most simple yet effective ways I’ve marketed my own agency is through podcasting.

Not hosting my own, but going on popular, existing podcasts, like so:

Not only does going on the podcast expose you to the host’s audience, but it builds a real relationship with the host, thereby extending your referral network exponentially.

They now see you as the expert in that field, meaning anytime someone they know is looking for a service you provide, you will be top of mind.

Identify a list of the most popular podcasts in your niche. Get as relevant and specific as possible. And don’t limit yourself to direct 1-1 niche fits.

These can actually be the worst when it comes to lead generation, and is one of the biggest mistakes I see agency owners make.

If you offer PPC services, stop marketing directly to fellow PPC folks. They are not your target audience. They are there for tips they can implement, not for you to replace their job.

If you offer PPC services for healthcare companies, go on healthcare related business podcasts.

Line up 1 podcast per week for the next 6 months and it’s almost guaranteed to produce leads.

I go on podcasts frequently, and my Head of Business Development has stated that “I heard you guys on a podcast” is one of the most common lead gen sources.

podcast per week should only take 1-2 hours including prep time, depending on the length and style.

And podcast hosts are always looking for new angles, guests, and ideas.

4. Acquire or Build Tripwires\sTripwires are smaller ticket offers that reel in your target market without devaluing your agency positioning.

Things like $50 SEO audits massively devalue your positioning as a premium agency. Trying to secure $10,000 retainers after offering that is going to be an uphill battle as you’ve devalued your time in exchange for extremely price-sensitive leads.

Meanwhile, a $1000 course or $100/mo software tool does the exact opposite.

I’ll give you a real life example: my business partner and I acquired a software company for low six figures. Wordable — a tool that exports Google Docs to your CMS in just a few clicks, with perfect formatting, clean HTML, and saved settings.

It’s directly in our niche: people publishing content at scale also need off-page SEO experts to distribute that content and earn links. That’s where my agency, uSERP comes to the rescue.

Wordable acts as a first-step tripwire: a $50-1k/mo SaaS that brings directly primed leads to our front door. We build real relationships. We deliver impeccable service.

And then we reach out at the right time, with a great relationship built, and fill them in our agency services.

It’s resulted in multiple contract deals that have effectively paid for the entirety of the acquisition cost.

If you can’t acquire tripwires, build them.

Courses. Small tools. Guides. Video series. Anything you can think of that is useful in your area and leads to your service as the next step is a good candidate for marketing your business.

5. Run Minimum Viable Ads

The cost of CPC-based advertisements might be rather high.

For instance, if you want to target top decision makers on LinkedIn, it would cost you $6.40 for each click.

A sizable advertising budget is required in order to successfully run conversion-focused advertisements on LinkedIn. Instead, I favour a kind of advertisement known as minimum viable ads:

Publicizing the fact that you are:

Because of the reasonableness of the cost, there is never a need to switch them off.

It makes no difference to you that the attribution and tracking are pointless.

Are you making investments in the continued awareness of your brand in the long run?

The answer is found in point number one, which is that your advertisements are so inexpensive that it is illogical for you to worry about how much they cost or how much time it takes to attempt to credit brand awareness advertisements.

In simple English: run advertisements that are so inexpensive that even if you can’t prove a single dollar’s worth of return on investment from them, you still won’t be able to turn them off.

As can be seen, this campaign has incurred costs of $393.32 over the course of the previous several months, resulting in a target market reach of 50,000 people and 145 clicks (even though the goal is just impressions, not clicks).

My objective isn’t to get clicks, but doing so results in a cost per click for VPs of marketing of just $2.71, which is much lower than LinkedIn’s worldwide average of $6.40.

Even if I can’t provide evidence that even a single new lead was generated by these advertisements, I will continue to run them for years without worrying about the money they cost.

Read more: click