What is the key to successful outreach to new audiences/how can I give myself the best chance at successfully engaging audiences via my direct outreach activities?

Success connecting with new audiences comes down to a few factors that can sound awfully simple but do take some work to get right.

Fundamentally, success comes down to you:

1. Having a genuinely useful and valued product or service. It is hard to work miracles without something fundamentally good to offer people. With that box ticked, the next critical factor is:
2. Knowing who you are targeting; NOTE: it is ok if you haven't quite got the clearest idea of who your ideal customer profile is - or where to locate them - experimenting with outreach to different groups with tailored messaging can help you really nail down who your message is most relevant to and who engages best with your communication. Once you know who is most receptive to your proposition, the next thing to get right is:
3. Your approach and what you say to them; aka your messaging. Messaging (what you say and your approach) is a very important part of being successful when trying to engage and connect with people; especially so for new people who you have no prior relationship with. When it comes to messaging think about it from your prospects point of view. You are wanting them to take interest in what you have to say and make time for an interaction with you; to do this you need to entice them with something they will find interesting and valuable so that they are willing to take the next step in the process/respond positively to you. Personalization comes into it but just because you have an 'Ice Breaker' sentence that references something related to the contact, doesn't mean you have personalized the message; and nowadays contacts can see right through top line basic personalization efforts. Sometimes it is better to leave the fluff out, and just focus on who you are targeting, why they would be interested in interacting with you, and getting those basics right. These days a lot of personalization efforts have become predictable and gimmicky - which contradicts with you wanting to come across as genuine and valuable.
4. Take the long view. New relationships take time and multiple interactions to develop - it is very important that you keep this in mind. Being too focused on sales and converting a stranger into a sale for your business is a recipe for disaster. You need to focus on building trust with each contact; an activity that you need to invest time and patience into. Remember that the contact doesn't know you yet, so they are unlikely to be receptive to doing business/transacting with you until there is some level of relationship rapport in place.
5. Reasonable persistence and using multiple outreach channels where possible. New contacts in particular are busy, are targeted by others like you, and have preferred channels of communication. Getting through to a contact can often rely on your persistence and commitment to reaching them. This is where contacting people over multiple channels becomes valuable; you can increase your success rate by investing the time to communicate with someone across multiple contact mediums. Yes it is more expensive and requires greater effort from your team than simply sending LinkedIn or email messages alone, but the results can be well worth it. When it comes to being persistent, there is a fine line between what a person would consider reasonable vs what a contact would consider to be irritating, annoying and desperate spam-like behavior. When you think about being persistent in your outreach, it is often good to consider segmenting your outreach into attempts that are separated by a material period of time; enough time for the prospect to not be irritated by you but still remember (even if only vaguely) who you are/your last outreach attempt. If you are new to outreach and connecting with new audiences, don't be shy about being persistent; it is better you feel slightly uncomfortable with your outreach than not trying at all because by not trying, you guarantee no results.
6. Technicalities related to each outreach channel and getting these right so that your messages actually reach your intended contacts. This FAQ article wont go into the specific technicalities of each outreach channel BUT as an example; when it comes to using email as an outreach channel for cold outreach communication in particular, there are a great many factors you need to take into consideration in order to give yourself the best chance at reaching the inbox of the contact you are targeting/wanting to communicate with. You need to consider your email and domain settings and making sure you have set these up with all the right credentials (DMARC, DKIM, SPF, etc...). You also need to consider how many emails you send out and how fast you send them out e.g. sending 300 emails to new contacts in 1 bulk send, can immediately lead to your email account being blocked which will make emailing contacts from that blocked email address very difficult if not impossible going forward.

If you consider and apply the 6 points above to your outreach activities, especially when targeting new audiences, you will give yourself the best chance at being successful at using direct outreach communication to grow and benefit your business.

If you need any help with your outreach activities on Hypadrive.ai, then please consider contacting one of our Certified Expert Partners who will be able to really help you optimise your efforts and succeed using the Hypadrive.ai platform.