Outbound marketing strategy is important, too.
Marketers like to talk about opt-ins and automations but, in the healthcare tech world, inbound marketing is only half the story.
The other half is outbound.
For the last three months, I have been testing a new social media strategy that definitely falls in the “outbound” camp. I have been so happy with the results that I have been recommending it to my clients.
The strategy is as straightforward as you can get: I send a message via LinkedIn or Twitter and ask for a conversation.
Of course, nothing is ever quite that simple, and it has taken a number of tries to get a message that people actually respond to.
Right away, I could tell that my latest message was doing much better than previous versions. Still, until today, I hadn’t set up a report to track the key performance indicators I needed.
As a result, I was not able to say, for sure, just how much “better” the new message was doing.
Now I know.
Be clear on what you want to track.
The most important understanding I wanted to gain from my report was how many conversions happened at each stage of my funnel. That means, I need to measure:
- How many messages result in a conversation
- How many conversations result in a sales conversation
- How many sales conversations result in a client
I also needed to establish the baseline. After all, you can’t tell what “better” looks like until you know what you’re comparing it to.
In this case, establishing the baseline was sadly easy, since my previous messages had gotten me absolutely nowhere. In other words, my baseline for everything I wanted to track was 0.
Know what data you need to collect.
In order to answer my three questions, I needed to collect these data:
- # Outreach Messages Sent
- # Conversations
- # Sales Conversations
- # Clients Gained
I also needed to calculate these percentages:
- % Conversations (Conversations/Messages Sent)
- % Sales Conversations (Sales Conversations/Conversations)
- % Clients (Clients/Sales Conversations)
Plus, I wanted to compare my results on LinkedIn vs. Twitter, so I needed to have the data broken down by social medium.
Here’s what I learned.
With a little digging, I was able to pull together all the data I needed going back to July.
I can be a bit of a data geek, so I found it pretty interesting.
For instance, more of my messages land a conversation when I approach via Twitter. However, all of my sales conversations have originated in LinkedIn.
(I am curious to see if that pattern continues over the next few months!)
Overall, 36% of my outreach by this method has landed me a conversation. That’s more than 1 in 3. I’ve also learned that 5% of my outreach lands a sales conversation, while 14% of my conversations land one.
All of which is a hell of a lot better than 0.
Know your numbers.
Any B2B company is going to need an outbound marketing strategy. For each outbound campaign, think about what you need to know in order to determine if it was successful. Then, create a simple report so you can track your results.
And don’t forget to establish your baseline! 😉