Guide To Prospecting Customers With SEMrush

• Using SEMrush for customer prospecting
  • Competing companies, potential customers
  • Backlinks indicate proximity
  • Hunting Your Persona
  • Conclusion

When we talk about tools for inbound marketing and content marketing, quoting SEMrush is certainly a must. In addition to the quality of the tool itself, it has the largest database of keywords, in Portuguese, among the tools for the same purpose. For this reason in particular, it is (or should be) ubiquitous in any company that takes inbound marketing seriously.

In addition to being important in attraction marketing, it can be used for active customer prospecting, or outbound marketing. That is precisely why I decided to write this post, to show marketers how to get even more out of SEMrush, now as a business intelligence tool .

Using SEMrush for customer prospecting

Choosing to actively prospect customers does not mean that inbound marketing does not work. In fact, here at Outbound Marketing, we see inbound as a complementary process, which is part of a larger strategy. We often need to accelerate the pace and run after that potential customer, but who would hardly convert into a landing page and become a lead.

It is not because your inbound marketing strategy is well done and running in the right way that you will attract only the personas that you focus on or that will attract your best customers. And when your company is still small and doesn’t have a large lead pool to support your inbound machine, waiting means billing below its potential .

Understand how we use SEMrush to prospect customers:

Competing companies, potential customers

So that the example is not so obvious, let’s say that your company aims to win clients who work in the interior design consultancy segment. Consider that what you have at hand is just a website that you found in a search, in which case we will use the Viés Design website .

Step 1

Create a spreadsheet for analysis. Enter SEMrush and use the Domain Analysis Overview and analyze the keywords that the company is ranking. Understand how well inbound marketing works according to keywords and give a score of 0 to 10 on the spreadsheet. The evaluation should not be only by volume, but on the quality of the words focused and the relationship with the purpose of the business.

Step 2

Analyze competitors. If there are many, export them to another spreadsheet, leave only those that actually compete with the company in question.

Step 3

Repeat the procedure with competing companies, until you have at least 50 companies on the list.

Step 4

Access the websites of the companies you have listed and check the following points through a checklist. I mention below some important points in this case:

• Do you have a blog?
• Posting frequency
• Is it present in the relevant social networks for the segment?
• Is there quality work on social media?
• Domain authority ( use Moz Bar )
• Do you have email marketing opt ins?
• Does it have an evident lead capture strategy?
• Is contacting the company easy via the website?

The better the company is in the questions raised by the checklist, the more difficult it will be to implement a solution / optimization. If the prospect is bad about the checklist, it could mean that the company may be immature to offer a solution. Keep that in mind.

On the other hand, the better a lead is in the checklist, the more educated he must be about his process, so he himself may have diagnosed problems and you can shorten your sales cycle, working out the best solutions. A lead with more problems will probably have a lower score on the checklist and will need a higher education, increasing its cycle.

Depending on the focus of your company, if the specialty is to implement inbound marketing or improve what already exists, discard companies that are not in the ideal fit.

Step 5

Now is the time to meet with decision makers. Considering that your budget is low, I am indicating the cheapest way to do the process, but if you want to invest a amount to speed up this step, click here .

Continuing, start the search for people who work at the company. Access LinkedIn and, using tools like Clearbit, Sellhack, Find that Lead and Email Hunter, collect emails from decision makers you find.

Step 6

Build a cadence flow to approach the prospect, so that the whole process makes sense, avoiding that your attacks are just a number of emails sent randomly.

As for emails sent , expect a response rate between 15 and 30%. Below 15% yours goes bad and you need to optimize. Above 30% is excellent.

Backlinks indicate proximity

By the logic of backlinks, the site that points to the other considers that there is quality information on the other site and that it is relevant to the audience of the site that it pointed to. Therefore, in general, the backlinks of the sites will be from sites in the same segments or segments close to operation.

Analysis of backlinks in SEMrush

Explore in the same way as in item 1. Generate a list of the network of prospects and at an opportune moment, if you were successful in converting one of these prospects into a customer, mention this fact during the negotiation. Ideally, this argument should be used when the prospect is ready to buy . This will be a facilitator in the generation of rapport , as the prospect will have a known as a reference.

Hunting Your Persona

Considering that you already have a persona built , and thinking about her purchase journey, do the opposite way of what happens in your inbound.

Create the personas of the companies you want to target . As in our case they are interior design companies, I can imagine the following scenario (do research):

• Roberta Faria
• 32 years old
• Married, mother of 2 children
• Financial manager
• Want to renovate your home and seek specialized companies

If your prospect’s persona searches for the keyword “interior design” at the top of the funnel step, search for the keyword in SEMrush. As the keyword is generic, use the Related Keywords to find the most suitable for the business in question and explore within it Keywords that go down the funnel. For example:

1. Interior Design
2. What an interior designer does (understanding about the service provided)
3. Interior design company (seeking solutions in the market)

The deeper the funnel in the customer’s journey, the more companies with a specific focus on the persona you will find, being able to do the procedure performed in topic 1, to collect the data and search for the contact of decision makers .