If you’re already done with basic targeting (you can find an article here) you probably may want to master it now!

Here you’ll find a piece of advice for targeting in the best possible way:

1. Target - Try to define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). ICP is a description of the person or company that's a perfect fit for your solution. Maybe you already know some companies that are your perfect target? If so, go to their LinkedIn profiles and websites and try to find what they have in common: their industry branch, description (including some keywords), size, location, technologies they use etc. When you find these connections you can apply them to a whole campaign.

2. Keywords - if you know that the companies you are looking for are located in very specific industry, have a unique business model or some innovative technology using the company keywords is a must. However, to let the keywords find the precise companies in a specific industry, it's a good practice to combine them with the Industry branches filter.

E.g. looking for strategic sourcing software, you can choose the SaaS industry branch, and look within it by typing in phrases such as strategic sourcing or suplier management. Using synonyms is very important here as companies may be using only one of these on their websites.

Note: remember that you can use negative keywords as well to exclude specific words or phrases. Just add them with a "-" at the beginning, for example "-social media".

Note2: keep in mind that you can also type keywords in quotation marks or brackets. It means that it will look exactly the same as you put it, e.g. type “land services” or (land services) to find all the companies that have keywords put exactly like this instead of finding other companies with “land” or “services” in their description.

3. Company size and industry - if the company size or industry the prospects are working in is not similar to your whole target group, the best option is to create more than one campaign. The way of writing to CTO’s in small start-ups and VP’s of marketing in a multinational company shouldn’t be the same. It would be great to take into consideration the differences and personalize those emails.

4. Job position - Many companies use different job titles to define the same position. Try to find each combination of specific words defining job title you’re looking for. You can use the hints in Job Position field to put in as many different names as possible.

5. Check - when you think the targeting is done you should not rest on your laurels, there is one more important step in front of you. First, you should look at the Estimation and check how much the prospects match your criteria, but you have to remember that prospects shown within estimation are not exactly the same which will be generated.

So, more importantly, go to Prospecting stage when you can Accept or Reject the prospects our system have found for you. Look if they meet your expectations and if not maybe think what could you improve to match your ideal customer profile better? What we recommend is adding positive and negative Keywords to exclude companies that don’t match your ICP. Remember that you can always ask our Outbound Strategy Consultant (if you have premium support) or our Support Team if you need any help with Targeting! As we are done with basic rules, below you will find some examples of targeting done in the Growbots app.

You are a small start-up specialised in Growth Marketing/Demand Generation and Website Design. You want to find and contact B2B SaaS/PaaS companies based in the US.

You can mix both industry branches and keywords to look for precise companies within the right industries:

As large companies usually have their own marketing teams, so you are focusing on small ones. You can narrow down this criterium in several ways (e.g. by reducing company headcount and annual revenue):

We use many different Company Keywords→ this will mostly lead us to these startups. Writing shortcuts of those terms as well as full names will enlarge the number of prospects. The reason for that is that our system searches the keywords in the websites of the companies and some may use only the shortcut and some only use the full name.

→ C-level, VP, Director and Manager of IT and Marketing

In small companies, almost every decision must be approved by a C-level employee. That is why contacting them in the first place is a good decision, but also every person may lead us to contact them.

IT and Marketing may have different needs and the way of writing to them may differ. Creating two campaigns instead of one merged may help you get better results, as you can write more personalised emails.

We recommend you to choose to contact 2 prospects from one company, decreasing this number will lead to reducing the number of prospects that you will generate. We recommend to send the same campaign to a maximum of 2 people from the small/medium company, otherwise, the company may find you “spammy”.

NOTE: If the campaign is finished or almost finished and you can see Unresponsive status for some of the prospects you can come back to Targeting and generate more prospects from one company. To do so, simply unmark "Generate no more than x people from one company". Then you can use the Personalization feature to inform them that you have already been contacting some prospects from their company. Bear in mind that unmarking this feature means generating more prospects from each company, so you'll need to select only the prospects you'd really like to contact.

You are a company that sells enterprise integration software to all verticals worldwide. You are focusing mostly on banking, but you do also have clients in healthcare, real estate, telecommunications. Size of the company that you are targeting is big.

Industries that you are choosing are Banking, Investment Banking, Real Estate, Commercial Real Estate, Hospital & Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals. In this case, keywords are not necessary.

You can divide the target into 2 or 3 main groups (e.g. Banking & Investment Banking, Real Estate, & Commercial Real Estate, Healthcare & Pharmaceuticals) and create separate campaigns for them, so that the sequence to each of them will be more personalized.

You need to contact big companies that use many software tools. Company headcount should be at least over 200, and annual revenue should exceed $100M:

→ VP, Directors of IT

Do not contact C-level employees. In big companies, C-level employees focus mostly on the big vision of the company and not on the details like integration software. This way we should contact middle-range employees and they may lead us to the decision makers

In this case, another option is searching for Job Positions, what is important here is not only writing the full names of the job positions but also abbreviations - this will lead us to the most accurate prospects that we can find. The people you are looking for may use the titles:

→ VP of IT, Director of IT, Director of Data Quality, VP of data quality, Chief Data Officer, Data Governance Officer

As we are looking for big companies which can have many offices and not all the employees have direct contact we can choose more people from one company to contact, 4 or 5 seems like a good option

That's all of our examples, basing on them you may be more able to deduct what kind of targeting should you use to cover your own target group! Remember that you can always our Outbound Strategy Consultant (if you have access to premium support) or the Support Team if you need any further help in this matter.