When it comes to SMMA outreach, the majority of new agency owners do this completely wrong. They get comfortable with one outreach strategy and then they just rinse and repeat. But it doesn’t work like that, at least when you’re first getting started.
If you’ve just launched an agency and you’re following one outreach strategy, you’re undoubtedly missing out on hundreds of potential customers.
So today, I’ll show you the multiple SMMA outreach strategies you can use to get the most out of every single lead on your list.
Table of Contents
1. Cold Email
Cold emailing is an age-old outreach strategy that so many businesses use from all corners of the world. Cold calling consists of 2 parts: lead scraping and outreach.
Lead scraping means that you go to a website or a tool, and it’s able to scrape name, phone, email, and business name of people inside of a specific niche.
If you’re looking for the best softwares for local business lead generation, it’s going to be:
Once you get all of that information, then you can plug it into one of these outreach methods and have a ton of scale that way because you’re able to reach out to, let’s say, 500 people a day instead of trying to cold call 20 people a day.
The Importance of Personalization in Cold Emails
Cold emailing can be extremely effective. In fact, it is currently the number one most effective cold outreach strategy we’re using in our agency. But there are a few reasons why I don’t think it would be the most effective strategy for new start-up agencies.
The key to successful emails is personalization. Gone are the days when you could get a list of thousands of potential customers and just copy and paste an email, merging it out to everybody. That used to work, believe me, because I used to do it and I was able to get customers from a completely copied and pasted email script.
But these days, it just doesn’t work at all. People don’t like feeling like a number; they don’t like receiving spammy emails in their inbox.
They are wise to it, so we have to personalize every single email that we send out. We have to add a line of personalization at the start of the email, mention a blog article on their website, one of their products, or their stance on a world affair that they’ve mentioned on their website.
Just say something that shows you have done your due diligence, that you have done your research, and earned the privilege for a response. You cannot expect somebody to invest their time in responding to you if you’re not even going to invest the time into researching their business.
Now, we’re having an incredible amount of success with email outreach at the moment. We have two full-time team members whose dedicated role is to send emails and DMs to potential customers. These emails are always hyper-personalized.
But we can still automate this process using tools like Instantly.ai. We can build a big list to send out in a merge and add our personalizations to that list.
If you want to learn more about this SMMA outreach method, I’ve put together a super in-depth guide on SMMA email outreach.
2. Text Messages: SMS, WhatsApp & iMessage
The great thing about lead scraping is that once we’ve scraped a list and we have their name, email, and phone, why would we email them if we can just send them a text?
There are three ways to do this:
- SMS
- iMessage
So for SMS, you’ll send text or software like GoHighLevel (30 day trial).
And for iMessage, there’s an app called Reach, which you can just automate messages coming from that app.
And the really cool thing about iMessage is obviously that it shows up as a blue bubble for people with iPhones, and so it seems way more legit.
And for those of you who may be worried about the SMS legal laws and regulations, this is not legal advice. However, pretty much all of the lawsuits around this have been targeted at businesses sending messages to consumers. So B2C, not B2B, which is what you would be doing.
Secondly, in the worst-case scenario, if this actually gets a huge crackdown and you’re getting fined for sending text out from GoHighLevel, you could just hire somebody to go into GoHighLevel and send the text manually for you.
I feel like government has bigger fish to fry than you sending out 500 text messages. However, I will say that SMS is getting a little bit more regulated. However, most of those things aren’t necessary for your first campaign, and you can still get clients this way very easily.
But overall. sending out messages that people literally get on their phones right next to the messages that they get from their wives is unreal. It’s almost unbeatable, in my opinion.
3. Cold Calling
Cold calling is still one of the best ways to get SMMA clients for agencies on any level.
The problem with this outreach method is that it’s literally just manual labor, and it doesn’t build on itself at all. When you cold call someone, they’re not going to remember who you are or your name.
They’re not going to think to call you when they need an advertiser or a marketer. You’re literally just an annoyance in their life. And to get anyone to listen nowadays, you have to have a ton of tricks up your sleeve, some crazy offer. You have to speak very quickly, very confidently.
But it’s not to say that it doesn’t work. I just think it’s a tough SMMA outreach method.
And if you want to know how to do it the right way, check out this guide on SMMA cold calling, where I break down the entire script.
4. Cold Walk-Ins
Now, this one is a little bit bolder, and it’s a lot harder to get ignored, so it’s a better option than cold calling. That said, there’s absolutely no leverage as well.
In fact, there’s less leverage than cold calling because you have to actually physically move your body, and you’re going to run out of local businesses very quick.
You’re going to have to drive a lot of places, etc. But it can be good to build your confidence, just actually interface with local business owners and just get out of your head, which a lot of us get stuck there when we’re just at a computer all day.
5. Facebook Messenger
This one is beloved to me, and it’s because this is the strategy that got me my first SMMA client.
There are three huge benefits of Facebook Messenger outreach.
First of all, you can cold message people on Facebook, and you can actually automate this. There are software like Friend Connector Pro that actually just allows you to automate friending and sending messages.
Secondly, you can cold call. Now, this is a pretty crazy strategy but if you’ve friended somebody and message them in the past and perhaps they haven’t gotten back to you, you can literally just click the call button on Messenger and it will call them and your face will come up.
Then third, people can reach out to you when they see that you’re posting good stuff on your profile. We’ll go a little more in-depth on how to do that later. But I love Messenger. I think it’s amazing. The delivery rates are awesome.
Yes, you have the potential to get banned. Don’t be stupid about it, but it can have a lot of success.
6. Cold Voicemail
With cold voicemail, all you do is record a voicemail of yourself saying something like,
“Hello, this is [Your Name]. I help concrete lifting companies get more clients. Would you like to discuss this? Go ahead and give me a callback if that’s good.”
Then you just upload that and send it out as a voicemail drop to 500, 1,000 phone numbers.
There’s no legal regulations around this. It’s just like cold calling, so it’s pretty cool. I’m not personally that interested in people just calling me back. And I think voicemails get checked way less than phones, etc.
7. Cold Loom Outreach
Cold loom outreach is all about sending pre-recorded Loom videos pitching your services. Like with any other SMMA outreach method, not everyone will be interested.
Maybe 10 out of 100 will be like, Wow, this is very cool. I can’t believe they recorded this video for me. We should get in touch with them.
But the problem is you have to record a loom video for 100 people, whereas you could text them and get that one out of 100 to text you back and then make a Loom video for them without wasting all the time on the other people.
Now, what you could do is record a generic video and then record a unique 30 seconds for the specific business that you’re sending something to.
8. LinkedIn Cold Outreach
The thing with LinkedIn is that everybody is just pitching everyone. It’s super fake, but that makes it perfect for prospecting because people are already in this mindset.
People are on LinkedIn to transact business. If you get in front of them while they’re in that mindset, it’s pretty powerful.
If you want a really good way to automate LinkedIn outreach, MeetAlfred is a great software to do so.
It has the most automation capabilities and built-in stuff that allows you to prospect. People end up being reasonably easy to find here.
9. Instagram Cold Outreach
For this, I’m going to say it totally, totally depends on the niche. If you’re going to do Instagram, you should easily be able to find the pages and then outsource the outreach to a virtual assistant who can do it for you, or use a bot like Axiom.ai that can go through and message people inside of that niche.
Now, for some hashtags or niches, this can be very difficult. However, I have a friend absolutely crushing it in real estate in this niche because almost every single realtor has an Instagram.
They check it regularly, and they’re quite easy to find there. It’s easy to outsource. What my friend does is he has a few virtual assistants that he hires. He creates fake pages, and then he messages real estate agents, and his profile looks like a real estate agent, so they end up connecting with them, and then they nurture that into a phone call.
10. Facebook Groups
Facebook groups are hands down one of the best ways besides texting to get clients. Free niche groups. Do I need to say more? There are literally thousands of people inside of groups, inside Facebook, that belong to the specific niche that you’re trying to target.
They’re active and they spend time on there every single day. The reason this one is so awesome is that you can do one input and get massive amounts of output. This is what you do.
Go to Facebook and find the groups with your niche. First of all, get familiar. Don’t post something right away. Just start commenting, reading what other people are talking about, and getting a feel for the niche in general.
As you’re doing this, start posting some valuable stuff to your personal Facebook page: marketing tips, how to grow in a specific niche, etc, just basic stuff that helps people out.
Then you’re going to go in the group, and you’re going to start posting polls, stuff like:
- What’s the biggest problem you have in your business?
- What have you tried for marketing in the past?
- Who’s having the most success with X project and landscaping?
And then see all of the comments trickle in.
There are some massively successful and active Facebook groups where you get tons of comments right away. And then, lastly, depending on where you’re at in your journey, you just start posting precious stuff in that group. It could be like.
“Hey, I worked with this client. These are the things we did. These were the results.”
Just post a case study. You’re going to get tons of people reaching out to you from that. Here’s an example of one that I posted and I got a client from. Then, you can take some of the value posts you’ve put on your personal page and just put them in the group. If the group has really strict rules, just interact, friend people, comment. Then eventually, they’ll start to see your personal posts once your friends and you’ve talked to them on Messenger a little bit, and then they’ll ask you questions.
11. YouTube
This isn’t really an outreach strategy, but it’s one of the best ways to get your first SMMA client.
I wanted to put it in here because many people are just stuck on this treadmill of outreach. When really they should be thinking of, how do I get people to reach out to me. That’s how I grew my agency and they reached out to me. I wasn’t begging them to become my client; they already trusted me.
Once this gets going, it’s amazing. There’s almost nothing as good as YouTube at booking appointments, building your brand, etc, but it does take a long time.
It’s very good, but it’s a very long-term thing. If you’re just starting out, it’s probably not the best thing to focus on.
12. UpWork
Upwork is a freelance platform where you can sign up as a freelancer. And the great thing about this is all the people that you would be reaching out to, you know are looking for the services that you have because they posted a job post about it, and you’ll be applying to that job post.
Now, the drawback is there’s also probably 8 to 10 other people will apply for the same post as you. However, it’s not that hard to stand out if you know what to do. Make a personalized Loom video or the person going over their business being like,
“Hey, I think I can help you with this and this service.”
And then just bid whatever they set the project at; if it’s $25 an hour, bid at $25 an hour.
Then you get on the phone with them and build some rapport. You help them realize
“Hey, this is the right thing for you. I can help you with this. Look at the people I’ve helped before. This is the plan we have for your business. Then you say, instead of hourly, how about we do a monthly retainer? It’s going to be this much.”
One massive drawback with Upwork, however, is that they will take a lot of fees. But what a lot of people do is just move off of Upwork after the initial hire. I’ve never seen anybody get in trouble with that, even though it is against terms of service.
