Zero Budget B2B Guide: Growth Hacking For Small Businesses
Growth hacking has become a trend among marketers and, in particular, technology companies due to the tools and ease of coding bots.
Some companies and people believe that to do growth hacking they will need a full team of specialists, others believe in the methodology full of details and concepts that they knew in the last marketing summit.
Straightforward: the main idea of this material is to teach you step-by-step how to use marketing and technology to save your time, maximize your reach and generate more leads.
Before we jump straight to the step-by-step, let’s understand a little bit of the concept to know exactly what we’re about to do.
What’s Growth Hacking?
Generally speaking, it’s a mindset of constantly exploring new opportunities for growth, in the entire customer journey and making data-driven decisions.
We won’t get into much detail in this article. We will be focusing solely on one technique — LinkedIn scrapping.
The LinkedIn Eros Strategy
For B2B businesses, LinkedIn is a gold mine, full of resources for your business. We can find business decision-makers, influencers, experts, and influencer employees.
How can we make the most of it? Our goal is to tap into this audience, engage in a natural conversation with them, make them fall in love with our product or service, and generate new business opportunities.
The strategy that we will be using includes 8 simple steps, they are:
- Become attractive
- Find the right people
- Engage with them
- Throw an arrow
- Make them fall in love
- Generate business opportunities
- Reach new people
- Ready, set, launch
- Send and repeat
Step #1: Become Attractive (Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile)
Your LinkedIn profile is basically your landing page and you will be getting much more traffic to your page from now on, so it has to look professional, optimized to attract organic visitors and it’s the first impression people will have, these are enough reasons why your profile must be optimized.
We won’t go into much detail in this step, but some important elements you should remember are:
1. Have a Cover Photo
The first thing when people land on your profile is seeing your cover photo (if there’s any).
You don’t need to be a professional graphic designer to do it, free tools like Canva can do the job. Use this space to support your brand and help your audience understand what’s about.
2. Optimize Your Headline
Your headline is one of the most important things for LinkedIn SEO it’s an important ranking factor for when someone searches for a specific keyword.
Most people use their job title as a headline i.e. “Chief Operation Officer”.
Make it interesting and also use the right keywords.
Think of it as the meta tag of your landing page i.e. “iStamm — We help small businesses with their digital marketing”
It’s important for the next steps of this strategy as people will always be reminded of who you’re and what you do every time you share or post something.
3. Optimize Your Summary
Most people use this container to simply write very generic information about themselves, but you should use it to really explain who you are and how your product or service can help people. You can write a lot here, but make sure every single word counts.
Include featured media, awards, portfolio, press release, features, etc. Use this space to build trust!
4. Add Your Experience
Write your work experience. No, you don’t need to write every single job experience you had, unless all of them are relevant to your current situation. Focus on the experiences that will benefit you the most.
List the greatest achievements you had and projects you have worked with, make use of the keywords you want to be found for.
5. Include Relevant Skills
Include your relevant skills, not only your hard skills i.e. SEO, SEM, Web Development, etc.
Also, include your soft skills. These are also keywords that LinkedIn will be using to rank your profile on the search.
4. Include a CTA
Make it easier and help people to get in touch with your business by adding a CTA. You can include a link in your current business experience or your in the summary for featured media. Call-to-action to:
Schedule a call with your sales team: you can use Calendly, it’s free and easy to use. You can also embed it on your website.
Or even a CTA straight to your contact form and information of your business services.
Step #2: Find The Right People
The magic starts here. For this step, you can use LinkedIn Sales Navigator (if you have never used your premium LinkedIn before).
2.1. Activate Your LinkedIn Sales Navigator
If you haven’t used this feature yet, you can start by doing it now (for free).
If you have used it before, the price is $65 per month.
But, don’t worry. You can also perform the entire Eros Strategy for free.
For this guide, we’re not going to use the sales navigator (even though it can provide us much more granular results).
2.2. Search For The Right People
- Perform a regular search for them and filter them as much as you think it’s necessary. The main idea is to target the decision-makers.
Imagine I’m selling my software to recruiters to help them become more agile when hunting for talents, I could perform the following search:
- Search for job: “Talent Acquisition”
- Location: Dubai, UAE
You can make it as detailed as you wish. Click on the URL address that LinkedIn has created and copy it to a text editor.
Step #3: Engage With Them
Time to engage with them. For this step, we’re about to use an automation tool — a scraping bot.
Creating a bot requires some level of understanding of programming, but we won’t get to this point here. The idea is not reinventing the wheel. So let’s get to work!
The tool we’re going to use is PhantomBuster. It’s free for 14 days and it’s quite enough for what we need now. This is an extremely powerful tool for non-tech people and you can do so much with it.
Let’s continue:
- Create an account at PhantomBuster
- Install the Chrome Extension
- Select the workflow Grow Your Linkedin Network
- Press Connect to LinkedIn button
- Select the input type based on the search we did on Step #1 (if it’s sales navigator or basic search)
- Paste the Search URL in the input field
- Click on save and define a message to send.
3.1. Message To Send
This is an important part of this strategy. The main thing: you just don’t want to sound like a robot.
Create a generic, but still a personalized message. This is the very first impression you’re about to create and based on it, the other person will decide to accept you as a connection or not.
This is not the time to sell anything. That’s not what we’re trying to achieve. You first want to engage, create a connection, and then… sell.
How many messages do we receive every day of people being too pretentious and trying to sell on the spot?
You don’t ask anybody to marry you on a first date, do you? ( I really hope you don’t).
3.2. Personalize Your Message
You can use a bunch of variables to personalize your generic message. For example, we used this strategy for one of our clients in Dubai and we ran this tactic for each member of their sales team. The message was:
“Hi #firstName#,
Ramadan Kareem! Hope you and your loved ones are safe. I’m looking to expand my LinkedIn connections and would like to connect with you!
Thanks, Ahmed”
Does it sound personal? Pretentious? It’s basically a guy trying to expand his LinkedIn connections, nothing more. Make your own! Maybe you can mention that you’re both in the same industry, share the same passion for something, or whatever gets their initial attention.
Having a clear idea of your buyer persona will be very valuable here as you know exactly what they are interested in and what attracts them.
The image below shows how this tool saved us three hours of life while we were working on step #6.
Step #4: Throw An Arrow
After step #2, the magic starts happening! Give yourself a round of applause!
You have a bot that goes around sending a compelling message to people on your behalf. Saving you lots of time. But, this is not all, let’s continue with our strategy.
This tactic is an extension of Step #3.
Now, the person will have accepted your connection, but you will notice lots of “Happy to connect” automatic messages coming to your inbox that people simply click on, but not putting effort into writing.
We shall follow up with them!
We will configure the bot to send a message to people who accepted you and start a natural conversation with them.
Let’s do it.
- Create a workflow for LinkedIn Message Sender.
- Connect to Linkedin
- Click on My Phantoms
- Select: Grow Your LinkedIn Network — results.csv
- Write An Attractive Generic Personal Message (very important)
- Click on save and go to the Behavior section
- Conditioning to Send: Select the follow-up option. Click Save.
- Email Discovery: See #4.2
- Settings: here you set how often you want this automation to happen.
Done! You can sit back and relax while this automation does these tasks for you. Now it’s time for the next step of our strategy.
4.1. The Follow-Up Message
Here is the second magic thing. Choose your words wisely!
The main idea is to start a conversation.
Thank the person for connecting with you.
You can mention something they’re interested in, make a question, use some brand touches like humor, inspire them, ask or offer help, inspire them, etc. Use your creativity to inspire a response or simply be literal. The opportunities are huge.
You can personalize this tactic with many variables like #company#, #jobTitle#, and #location#.
If you’re using any of these #tags make sure you select the “Enable Profile Scraping” checkbox in the Behavior section.
4.2. Make The Most Of Engaged Prospects
Here is an option you’ll have to make.
The email discovery attempts to find the email of the person through a series of resources (it’s very interesting), however, there are limitations for these searches ($$).
None of these offered services are free but you can use them wisely. If your budget is tight, I would recommend searching for them manually on the next step of this strategy.
If you have the budget to invest in these tools, please, use them.
You can use Hunter.io and perform 25 free searches per month.
Step #5: Make Them Fall In Love
So far we have:
- Connected with the right people.
- Sent them a follow-up message.
- Engaged in a conversation.
It’s time to deepen this relationship.
- Install Crystal Chrome Extension
Crystal analyzes the personality of your potential clients, so you can easier build a negotiation strategy. It’s not all the time right but can give you good insights based on behavioral patterns for more effective communication.
It’s free for 10 profiles per month, choose clients with the most potential.
Step #6: Generate Business Opportunities
This part of our strategy is creating a lead magnet for your audience. What valuable offer you can present to your prospects? Spend some time thinking of possibilities.
Invest your time checking your prospects’ recent activities on LinkedIn.
- What kind of topics they like?
- What format do they prefer? (videos, infographics, text, etc.)
- What companies do they follow?
- Can you provide something that makes their job life easier?
- Understand them even better!
Create something with a new perspective of a problem and its solution, something appealing for them.
Our last Free Lead Generation Guide was created to meet the needs of specific clients on LinkedIn following some of the tactics presented here but with a different strategy.
6.1. Engaged Prospects (optional, if not following the next steps)
Now that you have created a relationship with your connections, you can send them your produced material tailored to solve their problem (in the ideal scenario).
Or you can use Hunter.io to collect their email and send it straight to their inbox.
Remember to add them to your CRM software and nurture them with relevant content until they’re ready to buy from you.
Step #7: Reach New People
Perfect! It’s time to reach new horizons. You have your lead magnet. Now, create or enter a LinkedIn Engagement Pod.
What’s a LinkedIn Pod?
It’s a private group of people who engages with and share each other’s content. Don’t worry, it’s nothing new. Instagram also has its own.
You can create your own group or participate in one. So you can engage with others’ content and they can engage with yours, increasing your reach on the platform.
It can definitely be a great way to go viral. Here’s an example of the LinkedIn algorithm:
It’s possible to find these pods online, i.e. Facebook groups, your company employees, your new connections, friends, etc. They can be free or paid pods.
- You may consider using the Lempod
Pick the pods you want to share your post with. Choose comments that people will leave on your posts, try to create relevant comments, make them generic but still relevant to the content.
I’ve seen so many random comments that make absolutely no sense to the content, just be careful not to have a bunch of bots commenting “YES” on your post, it just doesn’t look natural.
Step #8: Ready, Set, Launch!
Now we launch the lead magnet you’ve dedicated time and effort to create. You can have your own strategy for its launch.
- You can create a pre-launch campaign.
- You can simply launch.
The idea is here to boost the engagement on your post. Ask people to leave a comment and you will send them your material.
- What is in it?
- What they can expect from this material?
- How they can benefit from it?
- Why is important for them?
Create an appealing message to get engagement and also increase your reach.
8.1. Pre-Launch Campaign
The idea of a pre-launch campaign is to warm up your audience for what’s about to come and get them excited for your lead magnet, for example, an eBook.
Some pre-launch campaigns can take even 6 months before the actual launch.
- Generate buzz among your audience while you’re producing your material.
- Share visuals and quotes of your material with your audience.
- Gather feedback from peers and implement it on your ongoing material creation.
- Build your email list with “Coming soon” forms so you have people already waiting for it when it’s released.
- Create optimized blog posts if you have your own website, to show google fresh content and reach more people.
- Connect with influencers, bloggers, experts in the subject and let them know what’s coming soon
- Post valuable snippets on LinkedIn to get your new audience ready for it and see some value in it before the release date.
8.2. Consider Video Creation for LinkedIn
LinkedIn has been boosting video content and it does not need to be a Hollywood quality thing.
Videos are important for your strategy as they can connect with people in a more emotional way and give your lead magnet a more humane approach, at the end of the day people make business with people.
- You can use Loom to create a 30 seconds video and share it on your profile.
Step #9: Send it and Repeat
Now you can send your material to each person who has expressed interest in your material through the comments.
If you’re expecting hundreds of people, you may want to use an automation tool to do the hard work for you like PhantomBuster again, otherwise just simply message these connections and send them your material with a warm message.
Repeat the whole process again and again.
You can use this strategy aligned with other channels as well, if you’re using Instagram or Facebook Groups, ensure that your links are trackable so so you can measure the success of each channel and make better decisions later.
Final Thoughts
We hope this content was useful for your B2B Marketing, even though we’re using automation, try your best to connect with people on a personal level.
This post was originally seen at iStamm
