The Social Media Marketing Agency (SMMA) industry has exploded in recent years, making it an extremely competitive space in the digital marketing realm. Agencies across the globe are vying for a larger slice of the market, offering services such like Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and social media management for business growth.
But with an increasing number of SMM agencies popping up every year, client acquisition remains a key challenge.
Now, you can definitely opt for traditional methods such as SEO & even paid ads – but they too, come with their own limitations. Paid ads, for example, can quickly turn expensive – with increasing ad costs and no guarantee of conversions. Alternately, SEO is a long-term game and can take months to attract inbound traffic.
For agencies looking to scale quickly, these options are neither sustainable, nor efficient.
That’s where using cold email for SMMAs comes into the picture – helping you build a predictable and scalable leads pipeline without any added costs. With over 4400% better ROI, it provides you an immediate & more affordable way to connect with decision makers.
But how do you really make the most of it? And what are some key things to keep in mind before launching cold email for SMMAs?
This article covers exactly that – giving you a complete overview of how you can sell SMM services through a combination of hyperpersonalized cold emails & outbound automation at scale.
So let’s get started.
Key Challenges With Current Methods of SMM Lead Generation – A Closer Look
Before we jump into exploring cold email for SMMAs, its crucial to understand the key challenges with current methods of SMM lead generation.
Here are a few you need to know about:
1. High competition
The SMMA space is saturated with agencies offering similar services, particularly when targeting local businesses and SMBs. This intense competition creates a race to the bottom, where agencies undercut each other’s pricing to win clients. Unfortunately, this approach not only reduces profitability but also lowers the perceived value of your services.
In addition, it also drives up ad costs, with more companies bidding on the same audience & driving up the per click cost (CPC). Now while the average CPC for a Facebook ad is about $1.72, it can quickly ramp up in a super competitive niche like SMMA.
Leveraging cold email for SMMA helps you bypass the crowd, and directly engage prospects in their inboxes. With hyper-personalized, targeted emails – SMMAs can position themselves as trusted growth partners rather than just another outsourced marketing team.
2. Inefficient targeting
Ineffective targeting is one of the biggest reasons why many SMMA lead generation efforts fail. Without a clear Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), agencies often waste resources reaching out to businesses that aren’t a good fit. For example, targeting large corporations with complex marketing needs might be unrealistic for a small agency specializing in social media management for local businesses.
Traditional targeting methods, such as using online directories or running broad ad campaigns, often result in irrelevant or low-quality leads. By contrast, cold outreach for SMMA allows for laser-focused targeting.
Using tools like Apollo or ZoomInfo, you can segment prospects based on factors such as industry, revenue, location, and even their digital presence.
3. Personalization at scale
Personalization is no longer optional in today’s marketing landscape—it’s expected. However, scaling personalization is a major challenge for most SMMAs. Writing individual, highly personalized emails for hundreds of prospects is time-consuming and impractical without automation.
That’s where using advanced hyper-personalization techniques can be a game-changer: recording a 20% increase in sales. Yet 67% marketers struggle to scale it the right way, instead relying on generic templates that fail to resonate with the audience.
That’s where AI-powered personalization comes into the picture. Tools like Clay can help you analyze prospect data (such as business activity, industry trends and pain points among others) and generate emails that feel tailored to each individual.
This not only improves engagement but also builds trust & credibility with potential clients.
5 Best Practices to Scale Cold Email for SMMAs
Scaling cold email for SMMAs requires a strategic approach, and a few best practices to consider. Here’s a quick overview of the top ones:
1. Research your ICP
The first step to scale cold email for SMMA is to research your ideal customer thoroughly – simply because it serves as the foundation of your outreach. Without a clear understanding of who your ideal clients are, your campaigns will lack focus and direction.
Tools like Clearbit and ZoomInfo can help you gather firmographic and behavioral data on your target audience. To define your ICP further, you can consider factors such as:
- Industry (e.g., retail, hospitality, healthcare)
- Business size (e.g., small businesses with 10–50 employees)
- Revenue range (e.g., $500K–$2M annually)
A well-defined ICP ensures your cold emails are sent to the right people, increasing your chances of success.
2. Leverage personalization
As stated previously, personalization is key to building trust & capturing the prospect’s attention. You need to go beyond using the recipient’s name – and reference specific details about their business, industry or job role alongside your offer.
A high-quality, hyper-personalized cold email could look like this:
“I noticed your restaurant has excellent reviews on Yelp, but I didn’t see any Facebook Ads running. Are you interested in driving more traffic through social media?”
You can use tools like Lavender or custom AI agents to automate personalization and ensure each email feels unique without hours of manual work.
3. Have a compelling subject line
Your subject line is the first impression your email makes—it’s the gateway to your message and directly determines whether your prospect will open your email. In cold email for SMMA, where competition for attention is fierce, a well-crafted subject line can make or break your outreach efforts.
To craft effective subject lines, focus on keeping them short, relevant, and curiosity-driven.
Additionally, A/B testing is crucial to identify which subject lines resonate best with your audience. By leveraging tools like Smartlead, you can test different variations at scale and analyze the numbers to refine your approach.
4. Show more than tell
When doing cold email for SMMA, vague promises like “We’ll grow your business” or “We’ll get you more leads” don’t carry much weight. Prospects are bombarded with similar claims every day, and without evidence, these statements are easily ignored.
To stand out, you need to back up your promises with real results, showcasing your agency’s value through proof points like case studies, testimonials, or specific metrics.
For example, instead of saying, “We’ll improve your ad performance,” you could say, “We helped [client name] increase their Facebook Ad conversions by 35% in three months while reducing their cost-per-lead by 20%.”
This provides tangible evidence of what your agency has accomplished and builds trust with the prospect.
5. Follow-up regularly
Following up is a super-critical aspect of any cold email for SMM agency, and yet it stays effectively overlooked. Many agencies send one email and stop, assuming that a lack of response means disinterest.
With over 80% of all outbound sales efforts requiring a minimum 5 follow-ups, this represents a missed opportunity to turn initial silence into engagement.
Automation tools like Lemlist make this easier by allowing you to schedule follow-ups in advance while personalizing each message.
How Can AI Help Scale Cold Email for SMMAs? – Full Clay Workflow
AI transforms the way agencies approach lead gen for SMMA. By automating data gathering, prospecting, and personalization, AI reduces manual effort and increases efficiency. Platforms like Clay can be crucial to identify businesses not running paid advertisements and craft hyper-targeted emails that resonate with their audience.
Given that, here’s an in-depth overview of a Clay AI workflow to check if a business is running Facebook ads or not.
So let’s dive right into it!
1. Finding local businesses
The first step to automate cold email for SMMAs involves finding local businesses that you want to reach out to. To do this, you can leverage the Google Maps Clay integration to search for businesses within a specific radius. This could actually work amazingly for a Facebook ads agency serving HVAC companies in a specific location.
Once you do that, Clay will populate a table with relevant data such as:
- Business names
- Phone numbers
- Ratings & reviews
- Website URLs
For instance, when you search for HVAC companies in Utah, you might generate a list of 92 businesses, complete with their essential details.
2. Identify businesses running ads
The next step is to determine whether these businesses are actively running Facebook Ads. This information is critical for tailoring your pitch to offer SMMA services to businesses that aren’t currently utilizing ads. Here’s how to automate this process:
a. Find Facebook Pages: Use Clay’s AI-powered prompt to search Google for each business’s Facebook page. For example:
- Query Google for “[Business Name] Facebook Page.”
- Extract only the clean Facebook URL from the search result.
b. Check Facebook page transparency: Facebook page transparency provides valuable insights into whether a business is currently running ads. To automate this:
- Use Clay’s AI integration to visit the “About” section of the Facebook page.
- Look for the line “This page is currently running ads” or “This page is not currently running ads.”
- Set a confidence level of 95% for accuracy, ensuring the output is reliable.
c. Output clean results: Clay will return a table indicating which businesses are running Facebook Ads and which are not. For example:
- “This page is currently running ads.”
- “This page is not currently running ads.”
By doing this, you not only save hours of manual work, but can also automate the process of identifying ad activity and subsequent lead qualification at scale.
3. Clean and structure your data
Raw data often contains unnecessary elements, such as brackets or additional text. This is where cleaning and restructuring your data ensures the workflow remains efficient and easy to manage,
Here’s a quick overview of how you can do that:
a. Refine Facebook URLs: Use Clay’s AI tool to extract only the URL from messy data outputs. For example:
- Input: “https://www.facebook.com/xyzbusiness [info added by AI]”
- Output: “https://www.facebook.com/xyzbusiness”
- Organize results: Once you’ve cleaned the data, the next step involves structuring your data into clean columns for:
- Business Name
- Facebook URL
- Ad Activity (Running/Not Running)
4. Add prospect’s contact information
To cap off automating cold email for SMMA, you’ll need to add the prospect’s information. In order to achieve this, you can follow the below steps:
- Run the following prompt: “Extract email address from URL”, where you’re asking Claygent to visit the business’s Facebook “About” section or official website to locate their email address.
- Once you’ve done that, Clay will return a list of email addresses for each business, after which you can run the email verification to confirm that you’re only reaching out to verified decision-makers and businesses.
- You can also write similar prompts or run Clay operations to extract phone numbers from the company’s Google My Business listing or their official website.
Following the above steps .you can easily run a campaign leveraging the various enrichment options at your disposal.
5. Automate your outreach
Once you’ve qualified the leads and gathered the prospect’s information, the next step is to launch your cold email campaign. Here’s how you can automate each part of this process:
- Use tools like Clay and ChatGPT to craft highly-personalized emails that align with a relevant observation or insight about the prospect’s business and how it relates to your solution.
- You can then automate sending by uploading your lead list directly from Clay to Smartlead – keeping it ready to launch.
- In the last step, you can also add follow-up sequences to ensure that no lead falls through the cracks. Each follow-up should add value to the prospect and very subtly nudge them to take action.
Once you’ve followed the above steps properly, you just need to sit back and analyze the reply rates, click-through rate and other key metrics – using it to refine your campaigns and improve results.
Scaling Cold Email for SMMAs – The Cleverviral Way!
By leveraging tools like Clay, you can revolutionize your SMMA lead generation strategy. Automating tasks such as identifying Facebook Ad activity, gathering contact information, and crafting personalized outreach saves time and improves accuracy. This allows you to focus on scaling your agency and delivering results for clients.
If you’re ready to supercharge your cold outreach for SMMA, Cleverviral can help. Our AI-powered outbound systems are designed to maximize your client acquisition efforts – while leveraging years of outbound experience to fill your pipeline with hot, ready-to-convert leads.
Reach out to us at [email protected] or visit our website to get started today.
Until then, happy prospecting!
