Pre-targeting

Cold outreach performs best when your targets already know who you are.

Two ways to make that happen:

1. You earn that reputation by building an online following and a strong user base.
2. Or you pre-target your prospects. Target them with ads before you reach out—at least until your brand is a household name.

Pretargeting is running ads to a specific list of email addresses before reaching out to them.

It boosts open rates and response rates, especially when you’re targeting people who need to establish more trust and care about your brand. This tends to be folks in larger, older companies, or slow-moving industries.‌

Think about every time you’ve seen an ad. When you see an ad, the product in it feels more “legitimate.” While irrational, we subconsciously believe that the company must be big enough to invest money into an ad campaign.

Facebook and LinkedIn are great because you can upload real lists of emails, and enough people use the site that a high percentage of them match. So you can serve ads to the exact individual people you want.

Pre-targeting industries

Here’s a list of industries that fit well for pre-targeting (larger, older, slower-moving industries):

• Government
• Construction
• Procurement
• Entertainment
• Hospitals
• Aviation
• Manufacturing
• Supply Chain
• Recruiting
• Real Estate

How to pre-target

You’ll want to test whether pre-targeting actually matters in your industry; otherwise, your ads will have a low ROI.

• Pull a list of 500 to 1000 emails using the strategies you just learned. This is Group A.
• Then, pull a list of another list of 500 to 1000 emails using the same strategies. This is Group B.
• Run ads on LinkedIn and Facebook and directly upload the Group A list (you’ll want to use “Direct Audiences”).
• In contrast, email Group B without running ads.
• See which group responds and converts better—does pre-targeting help?
• After your ads hit a frequency of 7-10—meaning they’ve been shown to everyone on your list 7-10 times—go ahead and send your cold email campaign.

Since your prospect list is likely full of work emails, you might need to take one additional step to pre-target effectively. People usually use their personal emails to sign up for LinkedIn and Facebook, so you’ll likely need personal emails to run direct ads directly to your prospects. To solve this, you can use Clearbit Advertising to run ads to the prospects who you will reach out to on LinkedIn. Clearbit Advertising takes your list of work emails, enriches the data to match work emails to the right LinkedIn and Facebook accounts, and then generates audiences for you to run your campaigns on.

For a less-expensive alternative, try Primer.

LinkedIn has turned into a viable B2B sales channel. So we decided to write an entire (public) guide to acquiring customers through LinkedIn.

The main advantage of LinkedIn is its "firmographic" data: business and employee information you can target by. No other social network has this level of specificity and consumption context.

LinkedIn is primarily a top-of-funnel channel—you won’t see many deals close directly on LinkedIn. Instead, LinkedIn should be treated as a tool to find relevant prospects, engage with them (via content and DMs) and get permission to email them. That’s when prospects turn into warm leads.

The LinkedIn strategy looks like this:

1. Contribute meaningfully to LinkedIn's content pool.
2. Acquire LinkedIn followers from posting that good content.
3. Build trust with those followers.
4. Get their email addresses.
5. Email them to get off-platform conversion.

If you’re interested in testing LinkedIn organic as a channel, read the guide here. You’ll eventually acquire warm leads and repeat the email process we discussed earlier—with additional personalization.