<aside> 🟢 Targeting starts with the simple question: what would your best fit customers look like? The more specific your targeting is, the better your campaigns will perform.
Mediocre teams rely on broad targeting, like “CMOs in the retail industry.”
Winning teams use deep, specific targeting to speak to precise customer profiles. Here, we’ll teach you how to find targets like “CMOs in the retail industry who are running Facebook ads, have <150 employees, and have inconsistent traffic numbers, are hiring for SEO help, and recently hired a website designer.”
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Broad targeting is the first step of start your targeting process. This involves the biggest cuts you can make to your universe of prospects, using filters like geographic region, industry, company size, role, etc. These are often available on basic sales databases like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Apollo, and ZoomInfo. An example for Clay would be “sales leaders at companies with 100-500 employees in the United States.”
Broad filtering will give you lists of people who generally fit your criteria. By definition, however, you’ll be missing a lot of nuances. You’ll be filtering at the level of “hospitals and healthcare,” for example, not “senior living homes” or “geriatrics care.” Catch-all filters will land you in the inboxes of orthodontists, pediatricians, and other doctors who’d mark you as spam.
Once you’ve taken the first step of broad targeting, make sure to move on to deep and/or trigger based targeting.
Deep targeting entails thinking about specific critera that make a company a good fit. This means getting granular about a prospect’s situation way beyond what’s available on normal sales filters. Many deep targeting techniques are only available for the first time today using tools like Clay.
In the example above, for a senior living product, deep targeting would entail scraping healthcare websites to check for keywords like ‘senior living.’ For other examples, if you’re selling ad services, you could check if companies are running paid ads. If you’re selling software to banks, you might want to check if they give credit to small businesses.
None of those pieces of information are available on LinkedIn, but you’ll be able to get them automatically using specialized tools like Clay with integrations like Google Search.
When you’re deep targeting, you might want to: