12/12/2021 : 9:56

How Air Media went from Zero to Client Services Hero in under 3 months:

Here’s the marketing that took Air Media from a cold start with ZERO leads, to a thriving business with thousands. 

Whilst the founders retained a handful of accounts from their previous work in traditional advertising, we wanted to first set an example for our future clients that you don’t need a network to launch a successful business - it can all be done from scratch. So that’s what we did.

So where and how did we start? 

Email marketing was and still is the single most powerful tool at our disposal for onboarding new clients.
We began by making a cold outreach list of the businesses we felt we could deliver most value to. 

Using a combination of freemium tools, we then gathered data on each company in order to best determine how we would approach. This due diligence step is the single most important phase of cold email outreach. It’s all well and good to compose a killer email sequence to pique your prospects interest, but if you’re sending it to the wrong person then it could all be for nothing. 

Using the AIDA principle, we concocted our email sequence and personalised the content to each prospect using attributes.

It’s tempting to run before you can walk with mass outreach tools. The convenience at ones fingertips to contact hundred’s, even thousand’s of leads simultaneously can distract the uninitiated from ensuring content is adequately personalised - and optimising deliverability.

A key attribute we always use on first contact is an “Icebreaker”. If your prospect can tell your email is automated, they’re much less likely to reply. 

An Icebreaker is a question or mention within the first few lines of your email, that’s specifically relevant to the company your reaching out to. 

This could be acknowledging an achievement, asking a relevant question or referencing recent activity, etc. 

So long as you’ve done your homework and your approach is genuine, the Icebreaker attribute will feel natural to the prospect and dramatically increase the odds of their reply.

So how did we fare on our first cold outreach campaign?

600 prospects
60% open rate
15% reply rate

Of those 90 replies, we successfully converted 9 prospects to paying customers.

This is just the beginning of the client lifecycle, stay tuned for a study on how to successfully retain clients and maximising accounts.

What did we do next? 

Social media ads. As a new company, we needed to build our audience. Using highly targeted lead magnets, we boosted our posts using Facebook & Instagram ads to get in front of the right people. (For a study on efficient social ads marketing click here) 

As a small company, we were able to be highly agile in how we managed incoming leads. We made sure to request all those we spoke to follow us on our social channels to stay tuned and receive updates or our latest insights and offers - the importance of this stage is realised later in this study on “How we leveraged our audience to onboard our biggest client - for free”.

With our email outreach and social ads well underway, we were able to generate at least 5 client calls a day, but we didn’t stop there. 

2 months into this campaign, we were in a position to start committing more budget to paid traffic. Utilising PPC and LinkedIn ads, we amplified our exposure to the point where we couldn’t accept any new clients, we were at capacity; where all businesses hope to be. 

With cashflow growing, at this point we began looking at new hires and ways to increase our capacity. 

By the end of month 3, we had acquired 45 clients, 3 full time members of staff and had turned a profit. There’s a long way to go, but we felt this sufficient to claim the title of “Client Services Hero” and share this study with you, dear reader :)

To find out more about how we got there, get in touch, stay tuned for updates with the newsletter below.