How to Pick the Right Target Audience for Cold Calls

When creating an outbound sales and marketing strategy, the audience is a large part of your decision. Not only do you want to reach the audience that can use your products and services, but you have to consider reaching the right audience in the right medium. For example, the people who benefit from your email marketing might not be the same people who are interested in cold calls and vice versa. 

If you’re going to make cold calling effective, you have to have the right audience among everything else. If you’ve taken the time to create a strategy, craft a script to follow, and are convinced that you can provide a solution that gets people’s attention, you need to know who those people are. Many of the top lists of tips to improve cold calling tell you that the first step to make successful cold calls is to know your audience and their needs. 

Here’s how to figure it out. 

Analysis and research

Research is your best friend. Take advantage of as much as you can. The Internet offers a lot more resources these days to assist you in finding target audiences, testing strategies and prospects, and so forth. You want to identify things like:

• Who is your target customer? Do they prefer cold calling as a means of communication?
• What is their demographic information?
• What kind of behaviors do they have?
• What pain points or problems can you solve with your product/service?
• What kind of customer could you attract with cold calling based on the rest of the questions? (if you struggle to answer the first question, going another way could help)

If you’re trying to find a new audience, make sure that you identify new pain points and solutions that you can offer. Otherwise, you’re just expanding an already tapped market and that’s not nearly as effective. 

Google Analytics and other tools

Part of your research should include using tools like Google Analytics. These can help you identify your target markets, test audiences when you’re still figuring it out, and find out where you need to course-correct. You might even identify untapped markets you didn’t expect when you put these tools to use. 

Use surveys and online feedback to see what customers want. Feel free to research your competitors and see what they’re bringing to the table, too, so that you can deliver on your end. Think of benefits, not features, and additional ways that you can improve people’s lives with the products and services that you offer—your target audience might be closer than you think. 

HubSpot also has some great tools for things like audience insights and behavior tracking, which is a great way to identify new audiences. Sure, you can monitor all of the things that are managed by tools like these on your own, but it’s time-consuming and laborious. Not to mention that Google is essentially the best resource for analytics regarding marketing, so you might as well work with the best. 

Define who you aren’t marketing to 

One of the best ways to narrow down and better define your target audience is to rule out who your audience isn’t. If you take the time to look at people that you know that you can cross off your list of potential prospects, you’ll narrow down the list of prospects you do want to reach out to much more quickly. 

It can be hard to search for new target markets without any other insight, but if you consider it from the other side of the conversation it becomes a little clearer. Get rid of the audiences that aren’t for you and then you can evaluate what’s left. Don’t market to people that are too much work, that don’t have any interest in cold calls, or who might be better suited for a different marketing campaign like social media. 

Cold calling is different 

Even though cold calling has been around for practically as long as the telephone, it’s a different art form than it ever has been before. We live in an interesting time where people spend more time on the Internet than anything, and yet some will still respond best to a cold call. How are you supposed to keep up? It can be a challenge, but these tips can help you get off on the right foot by identifying the right audience for your new campaign. 

As cold calling continues to evolve over the years, it will prove to be a challenge for you to keep reinventing your marketing strategies and sourcing new audiences, but this insight will alleviate that a bit. You have to embrace rejection and learn as much as you can here—this is the true secret to finding the ideal audience and succeeding with cold calling in any capacity. 

Once you’ve got your audience, who’s making all those new sales calls?

If you’re a small business or you’re just growing in a way that you can’t quite match with manpower, you might not have the capacity to add to the team at this exact moment. And yet, if your marketing strategy is a success and your cold calls work, you’re going to have a whole lot more new leads to manage. Not only that, but you’ll have tons more cold calls to make in the first place. 

What if you could take it off your plate? When you partner with the dedicated virtual receptionists at Smith.ai, you can. Our team can assist with everything from outbound sales and support to appointment scheduling, lead intake and qualification, after-hours answering, and so much more. We can even help you create a strategy to manage it all and integrate with your software to keep you in the loop as we go. 

To learn more, schedule a consultation to discuss what the virtual receptionists from Smith.ai can do for your cold calling and other business needs. You can also find us at hello@smith.ai or (650) 727-6484.