Fundraising through LinkedIn Pt. 2 - Reaching out.
In this post I will explain how to automate your outreach to the targeted audience on LinkedIn.
In the last post I have explained how to find the perfect target audience and in this post I will explain how to properly reach this audience.
For those who have missed the last post or didn’t read the full version, trust me, it’s a worthy 5 minute read and in this post I’ll show some data that proves it.
Ok, now that you have your target audience on hand, let’s figure out how to save you time on the outreach process while ensuring that you don’t sound like a robot.
Before we go any further, I wanted to share the data that I got from running a test of this strategy 4 days ago. 103 invitations, 55 responses. Of course you can’t expect the same rate for every outreach that you do, but this is just some extra proof that this strategy doesn’t work only on paper!
Automation🤖
A big portion of this strategy is hinged on smart🧠 automation. I call it smart because there are hundreds of thousands of founders out there trying to use dumb automation that results in messages like “Hey First_Name, I saw that you invest in startups and decided to reach out to talk about my Unicorn company!” The chance of getting a response to this message is close to 0.
This is why the automation that I use involves a very careful selection of the right audience. Once again, if you don’t know how to find the right investors on LinkedIn, read the previous post.
If you have found your audience, you are half way done and can use any LinkedIn automation of your choice or just do it manually. However, I have tried dozens of different LinkedIn automations and by far the best one is Waalaxy so in this post I will use it as an example.
1. Set up waalaxy.
This is very easy, just go to https://www.waalaxy.com/ and follow their instructions. Once you are done setting up your account and downloading Chrome extension, come back to this post.
2. Exporting your target audience to Waalaxy.
Once you have the extension, your LinkedIn should look like this:
You can just click on this button and add all attendees to your list but for better results I highly recommend clicking on the “other attendees”. This will lead you to this screen:
And now it’s time to use some filters to improve your results. Here are some key things to remember while improving your target audience:
The more narrow the audience, the more personalized the message will feel.
If the audience gets too narrow (less than 10), it might be a good idea to either change the target and use broader filters.
Take your time finding the right audience. I can’t provide you a perfect solution that you can copy-past so go be creative.
For the sake of the test, I will use the keyword filter to find all VCs who will attend this Nordic Startup Festival. And get 89 results:
Now just click “Validate” button and wait for 10-60 seconds for Waalaxy to export the contacts.
3. Choose the outreach sequence on Waalaxy.
Based on your subscription plan, you will have different options for the automation sequences available to you but for this post I will pretend that you have the free plan (just so you can test out this strategy without spending a dime).
Go to your Waalaxy account and click on “Prospects” tab. The first list should contain the people that you’ve exported from LinkedIn.
Click on this list and at the top you will see “start a campaign” button:
Just hit that button and let’s get to selecting the right option for you! At the bottom of each sequence you can see the Level - they are labeled from 1 to 3 and since I assume that you have the free plan, you will be looked at Level 1 sequences. Those are made for free plan users
This is an example of such a sequence. You can completely ignore their descriptions for each sequence and instead, click “preview” and see how many messages each sequence offers. Depending on how persistent you want to be with each prospect you can go up and down in number of messages. This sequence “Find beta testers”, for example, has 4 messages in it.
Having 4 messages in a sequence means that once you sent an invite to your prospect and they have accepted it, you will automatically send 4 messages with the time intervals of your choosing. Once the prospect responds, the sequence will be automatically paused and you’ll have to respond to those messages manually.
The preview of the sequence will look like this:
Just ignore the description of the sequence and focus on the number of messages that you’ll be sending out. For the purpose of getting in touch with investors, 4 messages after the invitation is a good number so I recommend sticking to this sequence.
To avoid massive posts, I have to break this one into two and in the next (and last) part, I will explain how to construct a good message for your audience. It will get you connections, responses and of course, fingers crossed, investments further down the road!
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Very valuable info. Thanks Konstantin!