With the EU eager to ring the death knell for one-to-one marketing and bloggers on the web shouting that cold emailing doesn't work, we look at new ways to cut through the information overload and reach the unresponsive corporate executive.
Post is too expensive, no one takes telesales calls anymore and gmail-type filters put all your cold email shots into the 'cold email shot' file which your target corporate executive never opens. How can you get your message in front of your target - the senior executive with a serious corporate budget?
The bad news: people exaggerate on LinkedIn. That head of marketing for a hot tech start up; it's a guy in his bedroom in his Mum's house with a great website and big plans. But he hasn't got a budget, so he's no use to you.
More bad news: people don't update their profile on LinkedIn or they forget their password and the email address they used to sign up is defunct and so is the company that issued the email, so they can't access the account and they are forever listed as head of marketing for Woolworths. So they start a new account. LinkedIn is littered with abandoned profiles.
But the good news is that LinkedIn is full of people in big companies with heavy responsibilities and big budgets to match them. It is just a matter of identifying the right people.
Using a researched mailing list to identify the people you want to target and find them on LinkedIn overcomes the site's drawbacks. You can make contact either by requesting to connect (free) or using the InMail service. Either way you know you are putting efforts into starting a conversation with a relevant prospect for your business.
Twitter is a great place for driving traffic to your website. But you want the right people going on your site, so use a targeted, researched mailing list to identify the people you want as clients and start by following them.
Your targets may follow you back, but if you follow them, Twitter allows you to respond to their tweets. Strike up a conversation, maybe just retweet one of their posts or reply to a tweet with a simple 'I agree' or 'great idea'. If you're feeling timid, just favouriting one of their tweets will get your name in front of them. Most tweeters have their Twitter account set so that they get an email every time someone follows them, favourites a tweet, replies to a tweet or mentions their Twitter name in a tweet.
There you are, your name in their inbox and not in the spam filter. And you've said something nice about them, publicly. Who doesn't respond to a compliment in their inbox?
And if all this chat about tweets, posts and retweets sounds complicated, read the Electric Marketing guide to using Twitter in business-to-business marketing.