A comprehensive list of customer acquisition strategies for startups in the B2B sphere. Learn how to growth hack any startup.

1. 5 VALIDATED USER
ACQUISITION STRATEGIES
FOR YOUR B2B STARTUP
Shivankit Arora
marketingmasala.com

2. INTRODUCTION
Customer acquisition is loved by every business, be it a giant like
Salesforce or a startup like ZoomCharts.
The question is HOW to generate qualified B2B
leads?

3. CONTENT
Here are 5 proven customer acquisition strategies that work for
different types of B2B businesses:
• LinkedIn lead generation
• Blog marketing
• Guest blogging on other websites
• Freemium model
• Email marketing & automation

4. LINKEDIN LEAD GENERATION
Best suited for: B2B organizations selling products or services to
another companies whose executives are active on LinkedIn.
Ease of implementation: Easy to Moderate
Results can be seen in: Less than a week if implemented in the right
way

5. LINKEDIN LEAD GENERATION
Here’s how to do LinkedIn Lead Generation the right way:
• Create a customer persona to define your target audience.
• Narrow down to the size of company, geography, seniority of executives or
job roles you want to target.
• Head over to LinkedIn, premium account is recommended, and start
searching using search bar of LinkedIn.
• For example, JOB ROLE at COMPANY NAME or JOB ROLE in CITY/COUNTRY

6. Here is an example how to search for MARKETING DIRECTORS in
UNITED KINGDOM:

7. Once you find people to target in the search list, follow these steps:
1. Send them connect request
2. When they accept your request, send a message to introduce
yourself on 3rd day
3. Send them a pitch on 7th day about your product/service in a
conversational tone
4. Follow them up on 10th day, if needed.

8. Record everything in a process sheet like this:

9. BLOG MARKETING
Best suited for: B2B organizations selling products or services which
is solving problems that are being searched by people on the internet.
Ease of implementation: Easy to Moderate
Results can be seen in: At least 3 months if it’s starting from the
scratch. But results are extremely powerful and stays for life.

10. BLOGGING THE NEIL PATEL WAY
Neil Patel is a growth hacker and digital
marketing mogul who founded
marketing analytics software Crazy Egg
& KISSMetrics.
He writes posts on QuickSprout to help
digital marketers around the globe.
Writing posts for marketers not only
helps him generate leads but also
increases his blog’s ranking in search
engines.
Neil Patel’s strong blog presence ranks
him in the top 10 results in Google and
that builds more brand awareness.

11. HOW TO MAKE YOUR COMPANY
BLOG WORK FOR YOU?
Here are the ways that can be followed for any kind of product or
service:
• Understand the core problem you’re solving and who are you solving
it for. For example, you’re a website developing firm.
• Understand the person you want to reach out with your blog. Your
target audience is local business owners.
• What does this person search for on the internet when he thinks
about building a site for his business?
• For example, a search could be “why to build a website for your local
business”.

12. Head over to adwords.google.com and open Google Keyword Planner.
Add all these queries there and see how many people are actually
searching for it

13. Using the Google Keyword Planner, you’ve got the list of topics you
can write about.
The next step is to build links to get your blog posts rank higher. For
this, you can do the following things:
• Comment on other similar blogs with genuine answers and a link to
your post
• Start answering questions on Quora & Yahoo with your post’s link
• Approach other bloggers who write similar posts and pitch them to
include a link to your post in their relevant post.

14. GUEST BLOGGING ON OTHER
SITES
Best suited for: B2B organizations selling products or services where
their target is looking for a solution on the internet.
Ease of implementation: Easy to Moderate
Results can be seen in: At least a couple of months if it’s started
from the scratch.
What is a Guest Post?
Guest post is nothing but writing a post relevant to your topics for
someone else’s blog which publishes similar posts. It contains a link
to your post and information about your business.

15. WRITING GUEST POST FOR B2B
BUSINESSES
• To begin with, find a topic local businesses might be searching for
when setting up a website. Think of 2-3 similar ideas related to their
problems.
• Find a blog that will be enriched by your content.
• Reach out to the blog owner via email provided on their website or
their twitter handle.

16. Here’s an example of reaching out to the owner of a blog who writes about
SEO
Subject : Hi Andrew! Loved your post on “how to do
local SEO”
Hi Andrew,
Hope you are doing great.
My name is Shivankit and I just wanted to thank you
for the amazing post on Local SEO that you wrote last
week.
I have been an avid reader of your blog and love going
through it a couple of times every week.
I also blog at XXX about how local businesses can
design great websites and earn more business. I was
wondering if you’d be interested in getting a post
published by me about “How great website design can
mean more business for local businesses”
I’d love to entertain any other ideas you have as well.
Keep up the good work!
Shivankit Arora
Marketing Head
XXX
Local SEO Guide is Andrew Shotland's
blog on local search optimization,
small business marketing & search
engine optimization strategy.

17. HOW DOES GUEST BLOGGING
HELP?
• It gets links back to your site from this credible blog that you
pitched to.
• More guest posts equals more backlinks and more backlinks equal
higher rankings in the search engines.
• More visibility. You are seen as a much more credible person in your
domain
• Plus your visibility increases as the readers of this new blog that you
posted on also get to know about you.

18. FREEMIUM MODEL OF YOUR
PRODUCT
Best suited for: B2B companies selling a product that will cost the
client a recurring fee.
Ease of implementation: Easy to Moderate
Results can be seen in: At least a couple of months if starting from
scratch.
What is Freemium?
It is just a version/part of your product that you give away for free for
a limited or unlimited duration.

20. WHY TO CHOOSE FREEMIUM?
The answer is simple, to BUILD TRUST.
When you are selling a B2B product and you know that it does all
those beautiful things for your client, you need to understand that the
client needs to take a demo for themselves in order to gain some
hands on experience and trust on your product.

21. EXAMPLES OF FREEMIUM
BUSINESS MODELS
Buffer is a social media
scheduling service. You can
connect your social profiles and
schedule content.
• Free model allows you to
connect 3 social media channels
at a time and schedule 10 posts
per network.
• A person can easily upgrade to
a higher version (for just $10
per month) and connect more
accounts and schedule more
posts.

22. EXAMPLES OF FREEMIUM
BUSINESS MODELS
KISSmetrics is a marketing
analytics tool that analyzes how
customers and users are
interacting with your website.
Kissmetric’s free trial allows you
to see and build trust with the
product first before you want to
make a decision to buy or not buy
it.

23. EMAIL MARKETING AND
AUTOMATION
Best suited for: B2B companies where the decision maker (from client
side) is not active any where else(other than mail) including LinkedIn.
Ease of implementation: Moderate to Difficult
Results can be seen in: At least a couple of weeks if starting from
scratch.

24. MAILCHIMP - THE EMAIL CHAMPION
Mailchimp allows you to send
marketing emails, automated
messages, and targeted
campaigns.
You can fetch detailed reports of
your campaigns and monitor
which email is working best for
your business.

25. HOW TO USE MAILCHIMP TO GENERATE
MORE LEADS
• Use LinkedIn/company websites to scrape email ID’s of executives
who are my potential leads.
• Decide on a workflow. For example, a software development
company that builds software for investment banks. Now to
approach the technology heads of such companies, follow these
steps:
a) Day 1: Short email about my services and asking for a call
b) Day 3: Follow-up if they didn’t open the mail
c) Day 5: Follow-up if they opened but did not reply
• All these steps can be performed using an email automation tool like
Mailchimp.

26. What are your marketing
hacks to get more
clients?
I would love to hear your
thoughts! Drop me a mail at
shivankit[at]marketingmasala[dot]
com
You can also connect with me on
twitter at @marketingmasala