A Complete Guide to Successful Targeted Lead Generation
Why is it that on the streets of San Diego’s nightlife district, at one in the morning, there are so many hot dog stands?
It’s simple.
These small business owners are following some of the best sales advice ever given, straight from the pen of famous copywriter Gary Halbert in his Boron Letters:
Sell to a ravenous crowd.
Also known as targeted lead generation.
But this strategy isn’t just for street meat vendors. It works wonders for B2B sales and marketing teams, too.
Today, you’ll learn how to find and connect with your ravenous crowd.
What Is Targeted Lead Generation?
Targeted lead generation happens when you narrow your scope to focus on attracting and connecting with highly specific segments of your potential market. These leads closely match your ideal customer profile (ICP)—they desperately need your solution.
Compared to general lead generation, targeted lead gen is laser-focused. You’re only engaging with leads that fulfill a certain set of criteria.
To illustrate, a SaaS marketing agency might work with all forms of SaaS businesses.
However, if they were doing targeted lead generation, they could focus their campaigns on a subset of that audience, the one they’re best equipped to help—like new SaaS startups with 1-10 employees struggling with outbound sales.
This hyper-targeting allows for extremely personalized and relevant messaging.
A sales rep cold emailing small startup SaaS brands, for example, is going to have a much easier time identifying common pain points to include in the email copy than if they were cold emailing all types of SaaS brands.
This level of specificity and relevancy is essential in today's attention economy, where decision-makers are bombarded with messages.
Also, from a cost standpoint, targeted lead generation helps you maximize your limited resources by focusing on the most promising prospects, rather than wasting time and money on broad, unfocused outreach.
Why Every Business Needs Targeted Lead Generation
Whether you’re performing B2B SaaS lead generation, running ad campaigns for your solopreneurship, or generating new business for an enterprise company, the likelihood is that you’ll benefit from targeted lead generation.
Higher Conversion Rates
Reaching out to companies that need your solution results in higher conversion rates across your sales and marketing campaigns.
Why?
Because a higher percentage of the decision-makers you reach out to will find your offer valuable, or, at the very least, relevant to their day-to-day goals and concerns.
It’s like switching from a stick-and-shoestring bow to an industrial-grade crossbow.
More shots hit the target.
Cost Efficiency
With targeted lead generation, your shooting percentage is higher.
Compared to broad lead generation, a targeted approach generates more revenue with less outreach, ad spend, and staff.
The result is greater cost efficiency.
Enhanced Customer Relationships
When customers receive tremendous value from your solution, they’re going to be happy and loyal.
As a result, they’re going to recommend you to their peers, boosting referrals and lowering your customer acquisition costs.
Plus, they’re going to stick around, reducing churn.
Oh, and they’re not going to threaten to leave every month for your cheaper competitor like some toxic high school significant other.
Faster Sales Cycle
One of the most common reasons your sales cycle lags is because leads aren’t a good fit.
You can serve them, sure. But their needs are less pronounced, and results are unlikely to match those of your ideal customers.
Therefore, they’re hesitant to buy (and rightfully so).
Pending any feats of exaggeration from your sales team, they struggle to envision the high pay-off.
The best way to remedy this problem is to prevent low-quality leads from entering your pipeline in the first place. Targeted lead generation does this because it prioritizes only the leads that match your ICP.
Increased Brand Credibility
Try and remember a time when you spoke to a serious authority on a subject. A doctor, perhaps. Or a professor or PhD student.
Odds are they gave the impression that they really knew their subject. And you trusted their expertise.
You can generate that same feeling in your prospects simply by niching down.
Compare these two sales messages:
“We help hospitality businesses worldwide”
“We help small bed and breakfast owners in Las Vegas”
Which one sounds better to potential customers?
The latter.
Why?
Specificity implies expertise.
Leads think, “Wow, this business is hyper-focused on serving companies like mine. They probably know my problems inside out.”
Another perk is that by consistently engaging with prospects in a smaller niche, you inevitably learn about their specific needs, which you can use to make your messaging even more resonant.
First, Understand How to Identify Your Target Audience
Before you can start reaching out to targeted leads, you must identify them.
The hot dog vendor doesn’t wave her tongs at everyone who walks by. She waves it at the person leaving a bar who looks sweaty, famished, and lacking in impulse control.
You must find your equivalent.
Let’s cover tactics you can use to identify, understand, and define the businesses that’ll receive the most value from your product or service.
1. Conduct Thorough Market Research
The first step to targeted lead generation is to conduct market research.
This enables you to create your ICP. You can think of the ICP as a more sophisticated, data-driven version of those drawings victims create of the person who stole their handbag. But instead of helping the cop find the thief, the ICP helps you pick your ideal leads out of a crowd.
In the B2B sales world, an ICP often consists of company demographics, location, technographics, and pain points.
Here’s an example of an ICP that a B2B lead generation software company might use:
Below are some quantitative and qualitative strategies for learning about your target buyers:
Sales data mining: Review your CRM data to identify patterns among your most valuable customers.
Run surveys: Send surveys to current and potential customers to learn about their needs, pain points, and other details.
Conduct interviews: Set up interviews with your best customers to learn how they think about your product and why they chose to work with your business over others.
As you conduct your research, look for common industry verticals, company sizes, tech stacks, pain points, and goals.
Then plug the most common attributes into your ICP.
Soon, you’ll have a high-definition picture of your ideal lead, which you can refer to during list-building, prospecting, ad targeting, and more.
2. Create Detailed Buyer Personas
Now that you have a good idea of what an ideal company looks like, it’s time to get even more granular, defining the various types of decision-makers at the companies you’ll target.
You’ll do this by creating buyer personas, semi-fictional representations of ideal customers based on data and insights.
To illustrate, let’s say you’re running a software business that’s targeting property management companies in NYC that are struggling to manage local law compliance.
A lot of people work in those businesses, from maintenance staff to CEOs.
To narrow down your target audience, you create three buyer personas, each reflecting a different type of decision-maker in the company:
The VP of Property Management
The Compliance Officer
The CEO
For each, you define their demographics, worries, goals, responsibilities, communication channels, and other information that helps you understand this buyer.
You create these personas much in the same way you built your ICP—that is, through interviews, surveys, and reviews of past sales deals.
Creating buyer personas doesn’t just help you create targeted prospecting lists and figure out who to connect with on LinkedIn.
It also helps your business tailor its messaging, content, and offers to resonate with each lead’s specific pain points and goals.
If you lack the customer data necessary to create accurate buyer personas, use B2B data enrichment tools like the one offered by Artisan to fill your CRM records with fresh data.
Artisan uses advanced scraping tools to collect data from dozens of sources across the web to build up-to-date, validated lead profiles.
If you'd like to see how Artisan can connect you with "ravenous crowd" leads while scaling your outreach, get in touch to schedule a demo.
3. Analyze Competitors
Use tools like Semrush or Similarweb to analyze competitors’ traffic and keywords.
If they target a similar audience as you, this gives you insight into how your own audience thinks and behaves.
For example, if somebody knew that Artisan was competing with their business for the same audience, they could look up Artisan’s website in Semrush and identify which keywords we’re targeting for our ads, content, and landing pages.
These keywords don't just help you figure out your prospects’ informational needs. Taken together, they give you a comprehensive picture of preferences, pain points, and desires.
4. Use Social Media Insights
Follow your target leads on social media, especially LinkedIn if you’re a B2B business.
Better yet, follow thought leaders that match your buyer personas, as these people are the voices representing your target leads.
Read their posts. Read the comments. Immerse yourself in the conversations they’re having with ideal buyers.
Do enough social media stalking, and over time, you’ll gain an intuitive sense of what your target leads care about:
Obsessions and concerns
Industry trends that matter to them
Perspectives and outlooks
Before you know it, you’ll be able to predict how leads will react to a piece of content you’ve crafted, enabling you to create higher-converting cold emails, ads, and other lead-gen material.
Also consider investing in social listening tools. These platforms automatically track what ideal leads are saying online about your business, competitors, and relevant topics, helping you identify what matters to them.
9 Strategies for Generating Targeted Leads Effectively
Once you know which businesses and professionals to target, it’s time to start engaging them. The following nine-step process covers all the bases for lead gen and you can pick and choose from tactics according to your needs.
1. Invest in Lead Generation Tools
Here are the top tools for streamlining lead gen and how to use them:
B2B contact databases: Generate prospecting lists of decision-makers who match your buyer persona.
Sales engagement platforms: Run automated cold email and LinkedIn messaging cadences.
Email automation software: Create and manage targeted email campaigns.
Referral marketing platforms: Set up and manage your referral programs, automating attribution and rewards delivery.
To avoid the hassle of multiple apps, teams are increasingly turning to consolidated stacks. For example, Artisan, which is powered by AI BDR Ava, automates the entire outbound lead generation process and lets you choose from a range of campaign playbooks.
2. Personalized Email Marketing Campaigns
84% of marketers use personalized emails for lead generation, according to Salesforce’s State of Marketing Report.
Personalization has two main steps:
Research the lead and company: Identify the person’s role at the company. See if their LinkedIn posts, job description, and company page reveal any pain points they’re experiencing.
Find relevant information to use in the email: This is also known as “show me you know me.” Check if there are any recent company news or personal events you can use as an opening, like “I noticed you recently hired your first SDR.”
Deep research pays off, but it’s time-consuming. Fortunately, outbound tools automate the personalization process. Artisan’s email tool, for example, crafts personalized messages on autopilot and at scale.
Want to see how Artisan can personalize hundreds of emails a day for your campaigns? Get in touch to book a demo.
3. Advanced Social Media Targeting
Social media platforms often offer advanced targeting capabilities that enable you to reach the right audience through social selling, content creation, and paid ads. LinkedIn Sales Navigator’s advanced search filters is a good example.
Tools like this allow sales reps to easily find and connect with leads who match your ICP and buyer persona criteria.
You can filter for:
Company size
Demographics
Job titles
Shared interests
Recent job changes
Mutual connections
This allows reps to connect with the right people. As a result, they can post relevant content on the platforms, expanding their network of potential customers while building a reputation as an industry expert.
For instance, here’s our very own CEO, Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, sharing his insights:
Many social platforms also offer the ability to run hyper-targeted ad campaigns. This is a highly cost-effective way to generate high-quality leads. And keep in mind that your ads don’t need to always sell your solution.
In fact, for higher-priced B2B products and services, it’s usually better to advertise a lead magnet, such as a free trial or industry report. These warm leads up, are easier to sell, and capture valuable contact info.
For instance, Shopify’s LinkedIn ad promotes a free downloadable guide:
4. Content Marketing
Content marketing attracts leads to your business, and it’s extremely good at it.
In fact, HubSpot’s recent Marketing Report found that, for B2B brands in 2024, the top marketing channel in terms of ROI was SEO, web, and blog.
Content marketing for targeted lead generation involves creating highly relevant educational content that helps your target audience achieve goals related to your product or service.
For example, we write a lot about B2B sales and marketing, since that’s what our target leads care about, and what our software helps them improve.
Educational content comes in many forms:
Blog posts
Ebooks
Case studies
Videos
White papers
No one’s made any feature-length films at this point, but some B2B brands are getting fancy and creating short funny videos, like Dialpad’s Failed AI Auditions video, which promotes its new AI tool.
Humor works, but it’s far from the only content marketing tactic.
Here are our content marketing tips:
Optimize your content for SEO: To rank high in the search results, use descriptive URLs, incorporate relevant keywords in headings and body text, and ensure content provides unique value while maintaining fast page load times.
Focus on answering questions: Create content that addresses your audience’s questions and challenges in the most helpful way possible. Often, that means clear explanations, detailed step-by-step guides, original insights, and plenty of examples.
Use lead magnets: Offer gated pieces of content like free trials, checklists, and e-books on your website. To access them, web visitors must give you their contact info. A good lead magnet will help your target audience fix a small problem while revealing a larger problem, which they’ll need your service to solve.
As for the different types of content to create, let’s see what the experts have to say.
In a recent post, Erica Schneider, a content strategist, said that she creates content in three buckets:
Market the problem: For example, a blog post answering the question, “Why do my customers churn so much?”
Market the process: For instance, a webinar explaining your secret sauce for how you help clients reduce churn.
Market the proof: A good example is a case study featuring a client that used your service to reduce churn.
Image source: Cut the Fluff
This approach is similar to the top-mid-bottom of the funnel approach, but a bit more intuitive. Keep this triangle in mind when creating content, and ensure each piece falls into one of them.
5. Run Targeted Webinars and Events
Want to forge a more intimate relationship with your targeted leads?
Get on live video and teach them something new. Host targeted webinars and online events that directly address the major challenges and needs of your target audience.
These also tend to make great lead magnets for collecting contact info. For example, Airtable, a database management tool, recently created a webinar titled “How no-code and AI is transforming digital operations.”
Notice how Airtable asks for phone numbers and email addresses to watch the webinar—information they can then use to facilitate their outreach efforts. Another great thing about webinars is that you can promote the recordings to target business leads across other marketing channels, like email or social.
In the same way that schools invite the fire chief to talk about fire safety, you can invite executives and specialists to speak on industry trends and best practices, thus boosting your brand’s credibility in the space.
6. Partner with Influencers and Affiliates in Your Niche
By partnering with influencers and affiliates, you tap into their audience. And if you’ve chosen the right partner, that audience should contain a lot of target leads.
Here are our top ideas for partnerships:
Host co-branded content
Run joint webinars
Have them promote your business on social media
Since partner selection is so critical to success, here are some tips for finding good fits:
Match data with your deal size: Focus on influencers whose followers match your target buyer personas and have purchasing power, rather than large follower counts.
Look for industry expertise: Choose partners with proven technical knowledge and credibility in your specific market space over general business influencers.
Evaluate engagement quality: Look for partners whose content sparks meaningful discussions and attracts an audience that actively seeks their recommendations.
Keep in mind that those with smaller audiences, often called micro-influencers, tend to be more affordable. A lower follower count isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially if a high percentage of the followers are all interested in one specific area that you can help them with.
7. Retarget Website Visitors With Personalized Ads
A lot of your website visitors leave your site without buying anything. To ensure they don’t forget about you, use retargeting ads. Retargeting tools track visitor IP addresses. This enables you to run advertisements based on leads’ previous interactions with your brand.
For example, a lead who recently visited your website’s homepage might see an ad for a free ultimate guide for solving a problem related to your business.
Meanwhile, a lead who just downloaded a recorded demo of your product would see a more bottom-of-the-funnel piece, such as a Facebook ad for a case study.
AI tools come in handy here, with 88% of marketers stating that they are either currently or planning to use AI for retargeting.
8. Referrals and Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Word-of-mouth is one of the oldest and most effective ways to generate new B2B leads for your business.
But, aside from winning new business, there’s another reason to institute referral marketing: referral contagion.
According to research done by the American Marketing Association, referred customers make anywhere from 31-57% more referrals than non-referred customers.
It’s as if they’re so appreciative that someone introduced them to your awesome company that they want to pass on the good deed, like the people in those heartwarming “acts of kindness” Coca-Cola commercials.
Here are some tips for building a referral marketing strategy:
Build a structured referral program with clear incentives: Create a formal system that rewards clients for successful referrals through service credits, freebies, and discounts. Referral marketing tools like Referral Factory make it easy to set these up.
Create valuable, shareable content: To build brand awareness, develop articles and industry reports that your customers will want to share with their professional network. It’s even better if sharing the material should make the client appear smart among their peers.
Use LinkedIn for personal referral outreach: Regularly search through existing clients' networks on LinkedIn for second-degree connections that match your ICP. Create InMail templates to ask clients for warm introductions through the platform.
Ask at the right time: Pick specific points in the customer journey to ask for referrals. That might be after successful project milestones or positive quarterly reviews. Train your customer success and sales team to identify and act on these moments.
Afraid to ask for referrals?
That’s common.
But there’s no need to be.
Clients who find value in your solution will want to help you out. More than that, they’ll want the brownie points from their happy peers who are loving their recommendation.
9. Cold Calling
How many times have you heard that “cold calling is dead”?
Well, it’s not.
The phone is still an extremely effective strategy for booking meetings with your targeted leads, building rapport, and speeding up the sales cycle.
To illustrate, the average cold call success rate across all industries is 2.3%, according to Cognism’s State of Cold Calling Report. However, the research also shows a 6.7% cold call success rate (measured by meetings booked) is possible with the right approach.
Here’s a six-step process to nail your cold calls:
Research, research, research: Find relevant details you can use in your opening, like a company expansion or an aspect of the lead’s role.
Introduce yourself: State your name and your company: “I’m [name] and I head up new business for [company].”
Personalize the opening: “I’m reaching out because I saw that you just launched a new website. A lot of new [company type] come to us saying they’re struggling with [pain point]. Does that sound familiar?”
Explore with open-ended questions: If the lead’s still on the call, nice work. You made it past the hardest part. Now, ask questions to learn about their challenges, processes, and needs to see if your solution can help.
Make a tailored pitch: if they’re still on the call for three minutes, they’re likely interested. Make your pitch. Ask for a meeting. In the pitch, focus on benefits and how your solution will improve their life and business.
Overcome objections: Create a list of common objections and the best rebuttals. Also, use the LAER Framework: listen, acknowledge the objection, explore with more questions to understand the underlying concern, and then respond with your rebuttal.
If you follow that approach, speak in a confident tone, make 20 targeted calls per day, and track what works and what doesn’t, you’ll generate some serious leads with the phone.
And here’s one final piece of advice: don’t give up.
Mike Weinberg, in his book New Sales Simplified, recommends asking for the meeting at least three times before giving up on a cold call. Respectful persistence works. For example, “I hear you. However, even if you don’t end up liking the solution, you’ll walk away from the meeting with insight into new best practices your competitors are using.”
Achieve More Targeted Lead Generation With Artisan
Prospecting tools make lead gen more effective. They handle much of the tedious work so you can focus on having real conversations with high-quality leads. A well-chosen stack can boost your win rate substantially.
Increasingly, sales teams are also turning to AI to take these efficiency gains to the next level.
Artisan is leading the way when it comes to AI prospecting. AI BDR Ava filters leads from a database of hundreds of millions of B2B profiles and sends personalized outreach at scale, all while auto-optimizing campaigns in the background.
If you’d like to see how Artisan can help you reach and convert highly targeted leads, get in touch to book a demo.
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