Basic Outreach 101
Basic Outreach 101
Using LinkedIn, Behance and cold email outreach.
As many of you may have read/seen, with the quarantine setting in, I lost literally every project I had pipelined for Spring/Summer. ~$50k of work gone in 10 days. Ouch.
After some fumbling, I saw this as an amazing opportunity to focus on a longer-play “marketing plan”. To start, I decided to focus on 3 things: updating my Behance, my LinkedIn presence, and cold outreach emails to industries/people I want to work with (this is fairly directly related to the LinkedIn).
What: the largest business social media platform.
Why: This is the social network where the money makers and decision makers dwell. Places like Instagram and Dribble are great places to receive pats on the back and positive affirmation on your design work, but LinkedIn is a great place for you to get noticed by the people who can afford top-tier, high-paying projects.
How: I’ll preface this by noting that I don’t claim to have a firm grasp of this platform yet. BUT, the way in which I’ve been using it over the past few weeks have led to a lot of warm leads and a few thousand dollars worth of actual projects.
I’m reaching out to University of Dayton Alumni that are high up in the creative industry (CCO’s, CD’s, AD’s, Marketing Directors, Founders, Talent MGRS, etc.) I’m able to say “hey fellow Flyer!”, and they’re instantly more invested than they would be if I was a complete stranger. Because we went to the same school and likely the sense program, there’s a sense of trust, realism and candor there.
I’m posting teasers of my projects on LinkedIn (think: a single portfolio image) and talking about the high-level process/thought. I’m talking about how the work makes the product/service sell or how it makes it better, and that’s what business people care about: ROI. I then link my posts to my website case studys. There, hopefully, they get lost in all of the work and feel like we “must” work together!
Cold Emails
This is kinda directly associated with LinkedIn. I read, researched and talked to multiple sales people in multiple industries for hours and hours to try and understand how to best do this. I'm still learning, but it's catching...
What: sending emails to someone i’ve never spoken to in the hopes of getting work. This is enough for a complex blog post in itself—I spent days researching, reading and learning to do this right.
Why: This enables you to get your work in front of the people that YOU want to be in front of.
How: As I mentioned, I started by scanning through LinkedIn for all Alumni that have graduated before 2010 (a year before me) and are in prominent creative positions. If their email wasn’t available on their LinkedIn, I went to their company website and used the Hunter extension in Chrome to search their business website for their email structure. It’s plug and play from there.
I did this for 200 alumni, and I made an excel list with their Fname, Lname, business, email, LinkedIn, and then a “unique message” (a message catered directly to them. I.e., “i saw that article you wrote and really liked how you said XYZ”) The unique message part takes some research and time. I then used an Add-On in GoogleDrive called Mail Merge to automatically draft emails for me, and then a Google extension called Snovio to track emails to see if they had opened them.
I formulated a plan for 5 days after the first email (first follow up) 10 days after the first email (second follow up) and 15 days after the first email (break up email). The unique message and persistence is key.
Exact process: send LinkedIn connection request, first email, if no response: second email, if no response, third email. (Of course, what you say in these emails is crucially important and must be personal, not general.) From there, I have a call to discuss how I can support them. Not, this is the work I do.
Note: this is a really weird time to be reach out to businesses. Yes, some businesses still need support. But A LOT of businesses are on a holding pattern. I’ve experienced countless people saying “love the work, can’t do anything now.” In that case, I ask them to sign up for my newsletter (different one than this one—catered to industry/business owners. You’ll be receiving the first version of it later this week, most likely.)
I did this same thing for the cannabis industry. And I’m working on a few other industries as well. I’ve been hiring people around the world on various platforms to help build these lists.
Behance
What: — one of the largest creative social platforms.
Why: — Worldwide, businesses and top creative directors are looking for freelance talent or support on this platform. Because of Behance’s powerful SEO, it is farrrr more likely for someone to randomly come across your work here than via google search.
How: — I have a brand spankin’ new website with TONS of new work, and there is literally no reason for me to not have it on another platform, like Behance, where people are regularly searching for freelancers. After 5 weeks of uploading a project or two a week, I’ve already received two inquiries from nation-wide brands. Nothing is official, but the fact that I’m catching attention is huge.
