Find Freelance Copywriting Clients Without Job Boards

If you are looking for B2B clients, you should look into mailing lists. Mailing lists are a proven way of finding the names, addresses and contact details for businesses large and small. Mailing lists help you target your marketing messages to specific industries and specific individuals. The more specific and relevant your mailing list is, the more successful you will be.

This class describes what mailing lists are, shows you the criteria to use when selecting mailing lists, and then guides you step by step through the process of finding potential B2B clients using an online mailing list tool. This class ends with a project that helps you discover if the niche market you are wanting to approach is small enough (and large enough) to be worth your time and effort.

If you are looking for B2B clients, you should look into mailing lists. Mailing lists are a proven way of finding the company names, addresses and contact details for businesses large and small.

Mailing lists used to exist just in the world of direct mail. The only businesses that rented these lists were mailers, namely, companies that sent offers and promotional messages to potential clients using the postal system. Today, mailing lists often contain email addresses and phone numbers as well. Companies of all kinds use these lists to reach out to potential clients by mail, email and phone.

There are essentially three types of B2B mailing lists: response, subscription and compiled. A B2B response list consists of businesses who are known to respond to direct mail and email offers. An example of a B2B response list is the Uline Catalog Buyers Mailing List.

A B2B subscription list consists of companies who subscribe to a product or a service offered by a business. An example of a subscription list is the Forbes Email Masterfile Email List [https://lists.nextmark.com/market?page=order/online/datacard&id=501375].

A B2B compiled list is a list of names and addresses that is created specifically for renting to direct marketers, and represents a target market. It differs from most other lists in that it does not necessarily consist of previous direct-mail buyers. Compiled lists are created by gathering data from public data sources, such as the Yellow Pages, directories, trade show rosters, surveys, court records and other data in the public domain. An example of a compiled B2B list is the Female Home Based Business Network Mailing List. [https://lists.nextmark.com/market?page=order/online/datacard&id=133321

There are basically two ways to get your hands on a mailing list. You can approach a list owner or a list broker, and rent one of their existing lists. Or you can use one of the many online portals that let you create your own list from scratch using their tool.

For example, you could approach a list broker called Infocus Marketing, and rent their American Academy of Family Physicians Member Mailing List. As you can see, this list has 122,852 records, and you can rent the list for $165 per thousand records.

Or, you could visit a website like Data Axle USA and create your own unique list of family physicians [https://www.dataaxleusa.com/]

But before you start renting mailing lists or creating your own, you need to understand exactly what you are looking for. And that is the subject of our next lesson: data cards.

But before you start renting mailing lists or creating your own, you must understand exactly what you are looking for. And that means understanding data cards.

A data card is an information sheet that describes the contents of a mailing list that is available for rental. The data card tells you the source of the names on the list, how recently the list was updated, pricing, data you can select to customize the list, and plenty more. You get these data cards from the list owner or a list broker.

Let’s take a look at the Source Media Business Masterfile. The header at the top of the data card includes the list name and type – in this case, a Masterfile, which is a collection of multiple lists. The paragraph just below the company name and logo tells you more about the list owner. It’s a good early indicator of which lists may be a good fit for your campaign.

Here's what it says: “Arizent is your source for reaching leaders in financial and professional services. Reach key financial, accounting and general business decision-makers within the banking, accounting, payments, mortgage, employee benefits, wealth management, municipal finance, digital insurance, mergers and acquisitions and data management markets with the Arizent Business Email, Postal and Telemarketing Masterfile.”

The next section you see in the left column includes segment data. Reach Marketing breaks out list data by channel to show you total counts for email addresses, postal addresses and phone numbers. In this case, the list universe includes three million postal addresses, two point five million phone numbers and two million email addresses. By each figure, you see a price per thousand names, expressed as $160 per thousand for mailing addresses and phone numbers, and $325 per thousand for email addresses on this Masterfile. M is an abbreviation for the Latin, mille, a thousand.

On the right side of the data card, you find a column of summarized information in a gray field. The ID number, universe and list type headings identify the list’s size and composition at a glance. List maintenance tells you how often the file is updated, and when the next update is. Take a closer look at the selects section here. Selects let you refine your market and focus your efforts on specific groups of prospects. For example, within the SourceMedia Masterfile, you can select list members by job function, title, number of employees, industry type and other criteria. The charges for selects are added onto the base rates. You see them listed here by category.

The lowermost portion of the at-a-glance section on the right margin includes a fee schedule for a list of available services. If you want to test the effectiveness of your message, you might choose A/B split variable testing, which would incur no charge. To add an additional variable and split your campaign into three test messages, you would pay an extra $100. Most of these additional services are priced at a flat fee rather than costs per thousand, designated by the “F” after the cost.

The data card’s main body description expands on the brief at the top of the page, giving you an in-depth look at the list’s audience, scope and market affinities. Every list has a well-defined audience, and reading this section carefully helps you identify the lists that are the best fit for your needs.

On Reach Marketing’s Masterfiles there is a section describing the list’s scope. Here you find details about the publications or other sources that comprise the list. Compare this section to the sources listed in the at-a-glance column on the right to get a comprehensive view of the list’s properties and how names were added to this list. For the SourceMedia Masterfile, you can see that publications are listed as a source; in the description, you’ll find the list of publications to which business professionals have subscribed.

At the bottom of the page is the list profile, a powerful source of information about the list’s demographic and firmographic composition. Note that these headings correspond to available selects, giving you a highly detailed, top-down view of each segment. When choosing a list or Masterfile, this section lets you pick the selects most relevant to your industry or find new areas in which to expand your market.

I realize that this is a lot of data to take in, excuse the pun. But you will appreciate why I’ve just described data cards when you sit down to create your own custom mailing list. And that’s the topic of the next lesson.

When you sit down to create a list of potential clients that you want to reach out to with your marketing messages, one source of names is mailing lists. And the key thing to remember about mailing lists is that the more relevant your mailing list is, the better.

I used to earn my living as a direct mail copywriter. I learned early on that the most important part of any direct mail campaign is the list. What you say is not as important as who you say it to. For example, a mediocre sales letter mailed to a list of prime prospects will outperform an amazing letter mailed to a list of mediocre prospects.

This is still true today. The most important component of your sales and marketing outreach is your market. If you pitch your amazing product or service to the wrong market, you will flop. But if you pitch your amazing product or service to the right market, you will succeed.

You reach the right market by creating a customized mailing list. In other words, you create a mailing list that consists only of the businesses who meet your unique criteria. As you saw in the last lesson, you can customize your list based on dozens of criteria.

For example, you can select your market by industry, number of employees, annual revenue, geography and more. You can customize your mailing list by gender, job title, job function and more.

So, your first job is to paint a picture of what your ideal client looks like. Once you have completed that exercise, you are ready to create your mailing list.

So, let me show you step by step how to create a custom mailing list. For this demo, I am using Data Axle USA, a company that used to be called Info USA. [https://leads-app.infousa.com/UsBusiness/Selections].

Let’s pretend that we are looking for businesses that fit the following criteria: The industry we are targeting is software firms. They must be located anywhere in the United States. They must have at least 100 employees, and annual revenue of $10 million or more. The person we are targeting at each firm is the CEO.

We go to data axle usa dot com and click on Business Lists. We click on Start a Business Search.

This takes us to the tool that we use to create our custom list. Notice from the tabs along the top that this tool takes us step by step through the selection criteria, starting with Industry, then onto Geography, Size of Business and Other Selections before letting us Review our Criteria and generate our list.

So, we start by typing “software” into the industry field and hitting search.

The most relevant result is Software. That code after the word is the Standard Industry Classification code, or SIC code, for this industry. We check this box.

This page suggests other categories. We review this list and select all that are relevant, namely Computer Programming Services.

Then we scroll down and click Show Related Results.

Here we see a list of all industry classifications that are related to software. So, we check all the categories that relate specifically to software and skip the rest. We check Prepackaged Software, Computer Software-Manufacturers, Computer-Software Developers and Publishers-Computer Software. Then we click Continue.

Here we choose the geographical scope of our search. We want to include the entire United States, so we click States, select all the states, and click Add. We scroll down and click Continue.

Now we further refine our search by selecting companies with 100 or more employees. And a sales volume of $10 million or more. Then we click Continue.

Our final selection is job titles. We are looking for the CEO at each company. So, we click Contact Person and then select Chief Executive Officer and President. Then we check, “Give me one contact name at each business.” Then, we click Continue.

This is the final screen, where we review our criteria. Notice in the top right corner that our criteria has found this many potential clients. We scroll down the list of criteria, removing any that we no longer want. Removing a criterion broadens the scope of our search and increases the number of potential clients found. Then we click Continue.

Now we are ready to buy the list. We login to our account, or create an account if we don’t already have one, and make our purchase. After making our purchase, we get access to the mailing list in the form of an Excel spreadsheet.

This spreadsheet you see here is only a sample, but it shows you what to expect when you create a mailing list using an online service like Data Axle USA. Notice, for example, that there is a column for each of the criteria we selected, including Industry, Job Title, Country, Number of Employees and Annual Revenue.

This is the main reason that I recommend mailing lists as a way to find potential clients. Mailing lists let you target your marketing messages to specific industries and specific individuals. Remember, the more specific and relevant you are, the more successful you will be.

If you are looking for B2B clients, you should consider supplier directories. Supplier directories are either print or electronic listings of companies that supply products and services to a particular industry.

Depending on the industry, these suppliers include consultants, manufacturers, value-added resellers, wholesalers, integrators, inspectors, service firms and plenty of other types of suppliers.

Supplier directories are often compiled and published by trade publication publishers as a service to their readers. Trade associations often publish directories of vendors who supply their industry. There are also third-party firms that publish supplier directories.

A good example of a supplier directory is the Comprehensive Oilfield Service & Supply Database, the #1 energy services directory in North America. This supplier directory contains the names of suppliers and vendors who offer products and services to the oil industry, everything from aerial photography to equipment rental to food services and janitorial services.

Like many supplier directories, The Comprehensive Oilfield Service & Supply Database is found online and in print.

The goal of a supplier directory is to connect buyers with sellers in a particular industry. The publisher aims to create a comprehensive list of the companies that offer products and services, and to make that list easily available in one place.

One thing to remember about industry supplier directories is that they are not the place to look for the original equipment manufacturers or the industry leaders in a particular market. For example, if your target audience is major oil and gas companies, such as Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Royal Dutch Shell, don’t look for these companies in a supplier directory. The supplier directory list the companies that supply these major players.

The advantage for you is obvious. If you are wanting to target your marketing messages at a particular industry or vertical market, a supplier directory gives you the names of all or most of the suppliers in the space. You don’t have to go online, searching for companies one at a time. Simply find the supplier directory, and search it instead.

And that brings us to our next lesson: how to find supplier directories.

If you are looking for B2B clients, you should consider supplier directories. Supplier directories are print and electronic listings of companies that supply products and services to a particular industry.

To find those directories, the first step you have to take is naming the industry. For example, let’s say the industry you want to target with your marketing messages is the oil and gas industry. Go to Google and search for “oil and gas supplier directory.”

In the search results you notice that this industry also goes by the name of “oilfield.” This means, if you want to be thorough, you should search for both “oil and gas supplier directory” and “oilfield supplier directory.”

Or, let’s say the industry you want to target with your marketing messages is aerospace. So you search for “aerospace supplier directory.” Notice that this industry also includes the terms “aviation” and “aircraft.” In these search results, for example, you find the Member Directory of the AEROSPACE Industries Association of Canada. Then there’s also the AVIATION and Aerospace MRO Supplier Directory and the AIRCRAFT Parts Manufacturer Directory.

This means, if you want to be thorough, you should search for “AEROSPACE supplier directory,” and “AVIATION supplier directory” and “AIRCRAFT supplier directory.”

Once you have determined what the industry is called, create a spreadsheet of all of the supplier directories you can find in that industry. To keep with our example of the aerospace industry, your spreadsheet will look something like this.

These are the supplier directories that are found on just the first two pages of Google search results. There are 14 directories. Look carefully and you’ll see that some of these directories are national. You have the Member Directory of the Aerospace Industries Association of Canada, and the Directory of French Aerospace Suppliers.

Some of the directories are regional. You have the Manitoba Aerospace Directory of suppliers in Manitoba, Canada, and you have the Texas Aerospace and Aviation Company Directory of suppliers in Texas in the United States.

Notice, also, that you have niche suppliers as well, such as the Aircraft Parts Manufacturer Directory and the Aerospace Fastener Suppliers Manufacturers directory.

If we sort this list of directories by category, it looks like this. There are eight general directories, four directories that are national, two that are regional and two that are specialty.

Again, this spreadsheet contains just the supplier directories that we found on the first two pages of results. If you want to be thorough, I recommend that you visit the first 10 pages of search results at least.

And since some regions of the country are well-known for a particular type of industry, I recommend you also include that region in your search. In the United States, for example, the area of Washington State containing the cities of Seattle, Tacoma and Bellevue has 319 aerospace firms employing around 100,000 workers. So, if you looking for businesses that supply the aerospace industry in Washington State, you should include this state and the names of these cities in your search.

Once you have completed your spreadsheet of supplier directories, you are ready to start mining these directories for the names and contact details of potential clients. And that is the topic of the next lesson.

If you offer your products and services to a particular industry, one source of potential clients might be companies that supply that industry. To find these companies, you search through supplier directories. Supplier directories are either print or electronic listings of companies that supply products and services to a particular industry.

Some supplier directories are more useful than others. For example, if you visit the Member Directory of the Aerospace Industries Association of Canada (https://aiac.ca/member-directory). You discover that the directory is simply a list of companies, arranged alphabetically down the page.

Yes, you can filter this list by province, but other than that, the directory is not all that helpful. For example, this supplier directory includes Tier One aircraft manufacturers, such as Bell Textron and Boeing, it includes small suppliers, such as suppliers of aerospace parts, such as Avior Integrated Products, even law firms who supply the industry, such as Blake, Cassels & Graydon.

The only way you can use this directory is to click each company, read each company profile, and then decide if each company is a good fit for your products and services.

A more useful directory is the Aviation Week Marketplace (marketplace.aviationweek.com), also known as the Aviation and Aerospace MRO Supplier Directory. As you can see from the horizontal navigation, this directory lets you browse suppliers of original aerospace equipment, materials suppliers, suppliers who manufacture tools and equipment, suppliers who offer a particular technology, maintenance, repair and operations suppliers, and suppliers that offer services.

As you hover over each category in the navigation, notice that you can drill down into each category to find either companies or products.

Let’s take a look at one of these categories in particular to show you the value of supplier directories. We’ll look for materials suppliers, companies, and then Advanced Materials and Composites.

The directory lists the companies alphabetically down the page, with a few featured companies at the top. Scroll to the bottom of this list and you see that this directory features 20 suppliers per page and has 16 pages of results, for a total of 320 suppliers in this category alone.

Let’s go back to the first page of results. Notice that each blurb about each supplier gives you the company name, a brief description of the firm, and a link to their profile. Click on the profile and you see that the profile gives you the mailing address and website address of the company. Click on the link for Contact Information and you get as much as this company has supplied, in this case, just a phone number.

On the left, you see that you can change your search at any time by selecting the kind of supplier you are looking for, the product or service they offer, and you can limit your search to a particular country.

This is the value of supplier directories. They help you find hundreds and even thousands of potential clients in a particular industry, all of whom you can filter by country, region, product or service, and specialty.

If you offer your products and services to a particular industry, one source of potential clients might be companies that supply that industry. In this project, you will find out how many supplier directories there are in an industry or niche market you want to target with your marketing messages.

Start by searching for the top-level keyword for the industry, followed by the phrase, “supplier directory.” Look through the search results to see if there are any other terms that describe the industry. Then go through the results one at a time, and compile a spreadsheet that features every supplier directory you find.

At the end of the project, you will have a master list of all the major supplier directories in the industry, and a total count of the number of companies that you can target. You may end up with a few duplicates, of course, since you will find some suppliers listed in more than one directory. But you will still end up with a good idea of the size of the industry you aim to reach.

If you offer a product or service to businesses in a particular industry, and if you are looking for new clients, you should consider vendor partner directories.

So, what are vendor partner directories, you ask?

Well, some businesses market their products and services through a network of partners. If you want to buy from these companies, you have to work with one of their partners.

SAP, for example, is one of the world’s largest software companies.

Most of their software products require expert help to implement, customize, service, support and run. You can’t just buy SAP software off the shelf and install it on your own.

So, SAP operates a partner program. If you want to buy SAP software, you must first find an SAP partner to work with.

You do this by finding an SAP Partner who has expertise in your industry and who has experience working with businesses of your size.

To make this process as easy as possible, SAP maintains an online directory of its partners.

This directory lists every SAP partner in every country who can help you buy, install, and operate SAP software.

SAP has around 21,000 partners that help their customers of all sizes, across all industries, and in all countries worldwide.

So, when I talk about vendor partner directories, this is the kind of directory I am talking about. SAP is a software vendor. It is a vendor that uses partners. These partners can be found in a vendor partner directory.

If you click on the link for of one of their partners [https://partneredge.sap.com/content/partnerfinder/search.html#/partner/details/0000987387], you see that the profile tells you a great deal about the partner, such as their number of employees, number of countries they operate in, and annual revenues.

Scroll to the bottom, and you find their mailing address, phone number and the name and email address of a person to contact at the company.

Another example of a vendor partner directory is HubSpot.

HubSpot is a customer relationship management and marketing automation platform.

HubSpot is software that you can use yourself if you want, but if you need help getting the most out of the platform, you can work with a HubSpot Certified Partner.

HubSpot lists these partners on their online HubSpot Solutions Directory.

As you can see, HubSpot helps you find a partner who operates in your industry, works in your country and speaks your language.

HubSpot has more than 5,000 partners worldwide.

Vendor partner directories are particularly popular in the technology space.

Plenty of technology firms that offer technical products and services deliver their solutions through a network of partners.

Facebook uses partners. Adobe uses partners. So do Cisco, IBM, Google and hundreds of other technology firms.

By now you can appreciate the value of these partner directories.

They give you the names and addresses of businesses that use a particular product or service and that operate in a particular industry niche or country.

Finding these companies yourself through Google will take you days or weeks. But by using a vendor partner directory, you can find them all within minutes.

But first, you have to find these vendor partner directories. And that’s the subject of the next lesson.

In the last lesson, you learned that if you offer a product or a service to businesses in a particular industry, and if you are looking for new clients, you should consider vendor partner directories.

Some companies sell their products and services through partners, and they help you find these partners by listing them all in one place, typically an online partner directory.

If you want to target your marketing messages at a particular group of companies, a vendor partner directory might help you find them.

But first, you have to find the vendor partner directory. Here’s how you do it.

First, pick an industry, then find the top players in that industry.

For example, let’s say that you want to market your products to companies that operate in the “smart cities” space. In other words, you want to reach technology firms that manufacture the sensors, devices and software that help cities collect data so that they can manage assets, resources, and services efficiently, and improve operations across the city.

So, your first job is to find the major players in the smart cities space.

Boot up Google and search for “top smart cities companies.”

Here is a list compiled by Smart City Hub [https://smartcityhub.com/technology-innnovation/the-top-ten-companies-that-build-smart-cities/]. It’s a few years old, but it helps you understand this process.

This page lists the top-nine companies in the smart cities space. So, create a spreadsheet and put these top nine companies in the first column.

Then search for the first company. Search for “cisco partner directory.”

Here it is [https://locatr.cloudapps.cisco.com/WWChannels/LOCATR/openBasicSearch.do].

Choose the United States as your region, hit search, and you find more than 10,000 partners.

So, in your spreadsheet, enter the number of partners in the second column and the website address of the partner directory in the third column.

Now, go to the next company in the list. Search for “Schneider Electric partner directory.”

Here’s the link. [https://exchange.se.com/shop/products-services?publisherCert=Technology%20Partner&source=marketplace]

As you can see, there are 461 partners. So, enter these results into your spreadsheet.

Go to the next company. Search for “Siemens partner directory.”

Here it is. [https://www.partnerfinder.automation.siemens.com/s/siemens-partner-finder?language=en_US]

Choose Solution Partner, leave the other fields empty and you end up with fourteen-hundred firms.

Enter these details into your spreadsheet.

One thing to keep in mind is that not all companies call their partners, partners. What they are called depends on the industry.

You may find that vendor partners in your industry go by another name, such as “reseller,” “value-added reseller,” “systems integrator,” “channel partner,” “distributor,” “vendor” or something else. So, make sure you search for the correct term for the industry or niche you are targeting.

By the end of this exercise, you will have a list of the top nine companies in the smart cities space and a directory of the firms that sell and implement the solutions offered by these top firms.

Now, you do need to be careful here. Yes, all of these top nine firms operate in the smart cities space, but you can’t assume that all of their partners do as well.

For example, if you go back to the Siemens Partner Finder, you discover that Siemens operates in dozens of industries. Top of the list is Abrasives. A Siemens Partner who works with Abrasives firms doesn’t necessarily also work with cities and municipalities on their smart city initiatives.

This means you need to do some more digging into each partner directory to find the companies who match your profile of an ideal client.

And that is the topic of the next lesson.

In the last lesson, you discovered that vendor partner directories are a great way to find companies that deliver products and services offered by a major supplier, such as SAP, IBM, Cisco, or Siemens.

But at the end of that lesson, you also learned that finding potential clients in a particular niche requires more digging.

Let’s go back to the Siemens Partner Directory to see what I mean.

If you offer a product or service to firms in the Automotive industry, your search is straightforward enough. You choose a Partner type of Solution Partner and you choose Automotive as the Industry.

You end up with around 300 potential clients.

But if what you are searching for is not so much an industry as it is a trend, or a movement or a technology application, you have to be more creative in your search.

For example, in the last lesson, we used the example of hunting for companies that offer products and services in the “smart cities” space.

I asked you to imagine that you want to reach technology firms that manufacture the sensors, devices and software that help cities collect data so that they can manage assets, resources, and services efficiently, and improve operations across the city.

Well, if you look on the Siemens Partner Directory portal, you won’t find an industry called “smart cities,” or “cities” or even “municipalities.”

So, get creative by opening a new tab and searching for “Siemens smart cities.”

Here you see that Siemens has a page on their website dedicated to this exact topic. They have subpages that discuss airports, air quality power, smart buildings, traffic and more.

Let’s look under Smart City Solutions. And let’s choose Intelligent traffic systems.

Notice at the top of the page that the breadcrumb navigation tells us that we are in the Road section of the Siemens Portfolio.

Notice the keywords that Siemens uses on this page. “Traffic,” “infrastructure,” “roads.”

Now go back to the Siemens Partner Directory portal. In the Partner Name or Keyword field, type “traffic.” You find four partners.

Type “road.” You find 23 partners.

Type “infrastructure.” You find 33 partners.

You get the idea. If you are wanting to target technology firms in the smart cities niche, or any other obscure niche, then one way to find them is through vendor partner directories, with a search for the keywords that are used in the space, such as “airports,” “air quality,” “traffic” and “infrastructure.”

As you can imagine, if you do this exercise with every company in an industry that sells its products and services through partners, you will end up with a sizeable list of potential clients.

That list won’t be comprehensive, of course, since not all companies have partner programs. But in industries that tend to use partner programs, such as the tech industry, if you compile a list of all the companies in all the vendor directories of all the major players in the space, you will have a comprehensive list of potential clients. Or, at least you’ll have a list that’s big enough that you can start cold-calling or cold-emailing large numbers of prospects each week.

This is the beauty of vendor partner directories. They help you find hard-to-find potential clients. These directories, for example, help you find small, niche manufacturers and consulting firms that pay no attention to SEO and who are on page 300 of Google search results.

You would never find these firms unless you went 300 pages deep into Google search results. But you will find these potential clients by searching for them in their niche through a vendor partner directory.

Once you have found all of the businesses that you want to target, you create a spreadsheet of these companies. Include columns for company name, address, website address, industry niche, number of employees, annual revenue and any other criteria that are important to you in a potential client.

You can create this spreadsheet yourself, manually, or you can hire one or more freelancers on Upwork to do this tedious and time-consuming work for you.

Once you have your spreadsheet, create a compelling sales proposition, go to the first company in your spreadsheet, pick up the phone, dial away, and give them your best sales pitch for hiring you.

Create a master list of all the top vendors in a niche market that sell their products and services through partners. Add up the total number of partners each firm has. By the end of the project, you will have a spreadsheet that tells you how many potential clients there are in your niche that you can start approaching with your sales and marketing messages.

If you sell a product or deliver a service to a particular industry, and if you are looking for potential clients in that industry, you should consider trade associations. And for two reasons.

First, trade associations are where you are likely to find the largest number of potential clients in a particular industry. Many national trade associations have hundreds of thousands of members.

Second, names. Every trade association publishes a directory of its members. That directory contains the names, addresses and sometimes the contact names of every business that is a member of the association.

This class introduces you to the world of trade associations, shows you how to find all of the associations that are in a particular industry, and then takes you step-by-step through the process of mining these trade associations to find their membership directories and scrape them so that you have a master spreadsheet of potential clients to approach with your marketing messages.

If you sell a product or deliver a service to a particular industry, and if you are looking for potential clients in that industry, take this class.

If you sell a product or deliver a service to a particular industry, and if you are looking for potential clients in that industry, you should consider trade associations.

A trade association is a volunteer organization founded and funded by businesses that operate in a specific industry. Many trade associations are non-profit organizations governed by bylaws and directed by officers who are also members.

Examples of trade associations are the American Association of Advertising Agencies, the International Council of Shopping Centers, the Professional Lighting and Sound Association, the American Welding Society and the International Association of Elevator Consultants.

Trade associations are also known as an industry trade groups, business associations, sector associations and industry bodies.

Trade associations exist to promote the interests of the industry in general and to promote the interests of their members in particular.

For example, trade associations host conferences and trade shows, publish trade magazines and newsletters, host webinars and other educational sessions, educate the public, and lobby governments on behalf of their members. The goal of all of this activity is to make their industry stronger and to help the members of the trade association more effective.

Now, I need to make a major distinction here between trade associations and professional associations. Trade associations represent everyone who is a member. Those members might be businesses, individual consultants, students or government departments. The only requirement for membership is that the member have a pulse and enough money to afford the annual membership dues.

Professional associations, on the other hand, are organizations that act as umbrella organizations for professionals working in the same field. These associations define the profession, control entry into the profession, maintain standards, help members further the profession through ongoing learning, quality control and research, and represent the profession in discussions with other bodies.

Examples of professional associations are the American Bar Association, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and the Society of Petroleum Engineers.

If you are wanting to target professionals who hold the same designation or certification, hunt for them using their professional association. But if you are wanting to find business clients in a particular industry, look for them using that industry’s trade association.

A couple of things to know about trade associations are that they can be either broad or narrow geographically speaking, and they can be broad or narrow in terms of their industry focus.

Let’s look at the residential construction industry to see what I mean. In the United States, you have the National Association of Home Builders. That is a national association.

You also have the California Building Industry Association. That’s a regional association. Same industry, just with a regional focus as opposed to a national one.

Then, within the construction industry, you find the Independent Electrical Contractors, the Mason Contractors Association of America and the National Roofing Contractors Association.

These associations all fall under the residential construction industry, but they only deal with a small slice of that industry.

By now you are likely wondering why you’d want to find potential clients by approaching industry associations. And I’ll give you two reasons. Numbers, and names.

First of all, numbers, trade associations are where you are likely to find the largest number of potential clients in a particular industry. The National Association of Home Builders, for example, has 140,000 members.

Now, names. Every trade association publishes a directory of its members. That directory contains the names, addresses and sometimes the contact names of every business that is a member of the association.

As you can see, if you don’t have the time or the budget to spend looking on Google for potential clients, you can instead find the trade association for the industry you want to approach, and take a look at their membership directory.

But first, you have to find that trade association. And that’s what you’re going to do in the next lesson.

In the last lesson, you learned that trade associations are where you are likely to find the largest number of potential clients in a particular industry. And the big advantage of these trade associations is that they publish directories of their members.

But the first thing you have to do is find those trade associations. Here’s how you do it.

Let’s assume that the industry you want to approach is the wine industry. Boot up Google and type in the search term “wine trade associations.”

You will end up with a search result that looks something like this. As you can see, people in the industry have compiled lists of trade associations in this space. The Beverage Trade Network has compiled a list of Wine Trade Associations in the USA. Canadian Vintners has compiled a list of Canada’s Wine Associations. And the Wine Institute has compiled a list of Wine Associations.

Let’s click on the top search result and take a look. [https://beveragetradenetwork.com/en/selling-leads/full-details-326.htm]

This is a list of Wine Trade Associations in the USA compiled by The Beverage Trade Network.

This page lists 12 associations, ranging from the Wine Federation, to the American Wine Association to the Napa Valley Grape Growers Association.

Some of these associations will be more helpful to you than others. The top association, for example, the Wine Federation, “was created to be the one-stop destination for people seeking information about local food and drink events. Which means this is not a trade association at all.

Even though the top of this page says, “On this page you will find information about Wine Trade Associations in USA,” the first result is for a group aimed at consumers of wine, not businesses involved in the industry.

The next result is the American Wine Society, “a non-profit, educational, consumer-oriented organization for those interested in learning more about all aspects of wine.” Again, this is not a trade association, exactly, but instead a society aimed at consumers.

Further down the list you have the Napa Valley Grape Growers Association, “a community of wine industry leaders committed to working together to advance the heritage and reputation of the Napa Valley appellation.” This is the kind of trade association you are after, one that clearly represents “industry leaders” and exists to help those members “produce quality grapes in a sustainable fashion.”

Let’s look at the next link in the search results, Wine Trade Associations, this one compiled by the Beverage Trade Network. [https://beveragetradenetwork.com/en/list-of-wine-trade-associations-305.htm].

This page lists leading Wine Trade Associations around the world, such as those found in Australia, Germany, Argentina and Chile. If you want to target businesses in countries other than your own, this type of listing will help.

But notice that this page also lists trade associations that focus on the business side of wine.

You have the Wine Market Council, “a non-profit association of grape growers, wine producers, importers, wholesalers, and other affiliated businesses and organizations.”

You have the Wine and Spirits Trade Association, “representing over 340 companies producing, importing and selling wines and spirits.”

Let’s go back to our search results and click on the next result, the list of wine associations compiled by the Wine Institute. [https://wineinstitute.org/our-industry/wine-associations/]

Scroll down the page and you find Wine America, “a national grass roots trade organization of American wineries representing 800 wineries in 41 states.”

You have Winegrape Growers of America, “A confederation of state organizations representing 95 percent of American wine-grape production.”

And you have the Wine Market Council, “A non-profit association of grape-growers, producers, importers, wholesalers, retailers, restaurateurs, and others in the wine industry.”

You get the idea. Your next step after conducting this search is to compile a list of all the trade associations in this space. It should look something like this.

In the first column, put the name of the association. In the next column, enter the number of members in this association. In the next column, put the website address for the association. And in the final column, put any notes you need to help you remember the scope and focus of this association.

A spreadsheet like this helps you document all of the major trade associations in any industry. And it also helps you discover how many potential clients there are in any industry. Just remember that there are always more businesses in any industry than there are members of the trade associations.

This is not true of professional associations. Every person who holds a professional designation has to be a member of that professional association. Membership is compulsory.

For example, every lawyer in the United States must be a member in good standing of the American Bar Association. The American Bar Association membership directory contains the names of all of the practicing lawyers in the country.

But this is not true of trade associations. Membership in trade associations is voluntary. No one is forced to join. Which means there are typically more businesses in an industry than there are businesses who are members of that industry’s trade association.

And that brings up another point, not every member of a trade association is a good prospect for your products and services. To find the best prospects and to weed out the poor ones, you need to mine trade show associations for potential clients. And that is the topic of the next lesson.

Once you have decided to target a particular industry with your marketing messages, and once you have compiled a list of all the trade associations in that industry, you are ready to start mining those associations to find potential clients.

The big advantage of trade associations is that they publish directories of their members. Instead of you wasting days, hunting through Google search results for individual businesses, you simply visit the website of the trade association and look through their member list.

Let’s assume that you are wanting to target businesses in North America that are in the wine industry. Your search for trade associations is going to uncover the Wine Growers of Canada [https://www.winegrowerscanada.ca/member-info/member-directory].

As you can see from the top navigation, this trade association has a tab for Member Info, and under that tab they have their Member Directory.

Here you find the members of this trade association broken into three categories. This is common with trade associations that service a national membership.

First of all, the directory is divided into regions of the country. In Canada, all of the grapes are grown in just four provinces. So the Wine Growers of Canada member directory shows you all the members of their trade association by the province they operate in.

You’ll notice that British Columbia has the most grape growers, followed by Ontario, Nova Scotia and then Quebec. This helps you focus your prospecting activity on the areas of the country that have the most potential clients.

Notice that under each province, there is a list of members, arranged alphabetically by company name. Click on each name and the site displays a profile for that member and a link to their website.

Return to the Member Directory and you see that there are two other categories of members, Association Members and Associate Members.

Association Members, as you can see, are provincial associations of wine growers. National trade associations typically have members that are associations that represent the interests of members in provinces and states throughout the country. Each of these provincial or state associations will have their own membership lists.

Then there are associate members. These are businesses and organizations that are involved in the industry, just not directly. Miller Thomson LLP is a law firm that represents grape growers. VineTech Canada is a technology company that supplies grape growers.

Looking over this trade association member directory, you can see that you have some work to do to separate the best potential clients from the least likely ones. You can also see that, for you to compile a contact list of members of this trade association, you are going to have to click on the name of each member, click on the link to their website, and get your contact details there.

You will likely have better success by drilling down to a province or state, and searching their state association website for the member directory.

If you visit the website of the Colorado Association for Viticulture & Enology, for example, and hover over the link in the navigation for Membership Services, you discover that they publish their membership directory. Click anywhere on the page and you see that this directory is an Adobe PDF that you can use to copy and paste member details into another document.

For example, if you are looking for Wineries and Vineyards, just take your cursor and copy that column of members. Notice that this directory publishes all the information you need for a database of contact details of potential clients, namely, the company name, name of the contact person, the mailing address, phone number and website address.

Naturally, this contact name might not be the person you want to approach with your sales pitch, which means you still have some work to do. But can see just by scrolling down this PDF that this state wine trade association gives you the names and contact details of all of its members. You tend to get this with smaller regional and state trade associations, and less so with larger, national associations [https://www.winecolorado.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/CAVE-2019-Directory.pdf].

Most of the time, you will not be so fortunate to discover a member directory published on the web as a PDF that you can simply copy and paste. Instead, you will find that the trade association lists all of its members on a vast webpage, forcing you to click each link to learn more about each member.

If you visit the website of the Iowa Wine Growers, for example, [https://iowawinegrowers.org], and look on the right side of their homepage, you see that they publish their member directory under their Association tab.

Notice that each tile on this page represents a member of this trade association. Click on any tile and you are taken to a profile page that describes this member in brief, and then supplies their name, contact person’s name, address and phone number and website address.

Now, I know what you are thinking. You’re thinking, “Alan, clicking on each of these tiles one after the other, and copying and pasting these contact details into another document will take me forever.”

And you’d be correct. Scraping a member directory manually is tedious and time consuming. But take heart. There are freelancers all over the world who will do this for you, for a modest fee. I have hired plenty of them on Upwork to scrape websites like this.

Some of these freelancers do the scraping manually. Other freelancers use a software program to do the scraping for them. Either way, hiring a freelancer saves you the time and energy of scraping member directories yourself by hand.

I use a freelancer on Upwork called Sedat, who lives in Turkey. He is considered to be the best freelancer for web scraping and automated data extraction from websites. He charges just $25 an hour and turns projects around within 24 hours. He will scrape any trade association membership directory for you using his software tool, and deliver a spreadsheet containing all the details you want [https://www.upwork.com/fl/sedatcankaya].

When you hire a freelancer to scrape a site like this, they will send you a spreadsheet that looks like this. It will contain everything from the member directory that you requested. Once you have that spreadsheet, you are ready to pick up the phone, or fire up your email program, and to start reaching out to these new potential clients with your best sales pitch to hire you.

For this project, you will create a spreadsheet of the trade associations in an industry or niche market that you want to target with your marketing messages. First, find all of the associations, then discover how many members there are in each association. Enter this information into a spreadsheet so that you know how many potential clients there are in the industry or niche market you want to target.

If you offer a product or service to businesses, and if you are looking for new clients, you should consider government agencies that compile and publish lists of companies in their sector.

I can’t speak for other countries, but in the United States and in Canada, both federal and state governments publish directories of companies that operate in a particular sector or industry.

The big advantage of these directories is that they contain all of the details you need about a potential client, including the industry they operate in, the company name and address, and the company website address and phone number.

Some government directories even give you the names of contacts at each company, such as the name of the CEO or the president.

Let me give you an idea of what I mean.

The United States’ government has a Department of Energy. You find it online at energy dot gov. Visit that site and you discover that this government department publishes a Department of Energy List Qualifies List of Energy Service Companies.

HTTPS://WWW.ENERGY.GOV/EERE/DOWNLOADS/DEPARTMENT-ENERGY-QUALIFIED-LIST-ENERGY-SERVICE-COMPANIES

This is what it looks like. A list of companies, arranged in a table, alphabetically by company name. look at the columns in the table and you see the name and job title of the contact person at the company, the street address, phone number, email address of the company contact, and the company website address.

Scroll down the list and you see that this list contains ten companies per page, and the list has a total of ten pages, so this is a list of 100 potential clients for your business, assuming your ideal clients are energy service companies, of course.

Here’s another example. In Canada, where I live, there’s a province called Saskatchewan. It’s one of the prairie provinces, on the border with Montana and North Dakota. Visit the website of the provincial government of Saskatchewan and you discover that they publish an online database of companies that operate in the industry sectors that Saskatchewan is famous for, such as agricultural equipment, mining and oil and gas.

This is what the guide looks like.

HTTP://APPLICATIONS.SASKATCHEWAN.CA/MANUFACTURERS-AND-SUPPLIERS

Again, it’s a list of companies, arranged alphabetically down the page by company name. This directory gives you the company name, the city where the company is located, the contact name of a senior person at the company, and the company website.

Click on any company name and you see the company profile, which includes the mailing address, number of employees, email address, and a list of industry codes that tell you which industry sectors this company operates in.

Click back to the main page of the directory, and you see that it contains more than 800 companies, at 25 companies per page.

As you can see from the navigation across the top of the page, you can search for companies by name, by the products they sell, by the communities they operate in, by industry classification, and by industry category.

As you can probably guess, there are three major advantages of visiting government agency sites to find list of potential clients in an industry that you want to target.

The first advantage is that the lists are typically exhaustive. Government departments usually have the staff and resources to compile lists that contain the names of all companies that operate in a particular sector. That means, if you find a list of companies on a government website, you likely don’t have to look anywhere else.

The second advantage of company lists created by government departments is that they are complete. They give you all the details about a company that you need to know to decide if they are a good prospect for your products and services, including the industry classification and size of the company.

The third and final advantage of these lists is that they often give you the name and email address of the top person at each company, such as the owner or president. This saves you hours or even days or grunt work looking for these things yourself.

Once you have found one of these lists, all you have to do is start reaching out the companies listed, and give them your best sales pitch. But first, you have to find these lists. And that is what we’re going to cover in our next lesson.

In the last lesson, I described the top three advantages of looking for government agencies that publish lists of companies that operate in the industry sector that the government agency is responsible for.

These company lists are typically exhaustive, and complete, and they often contain the names and email addresses of the contact person at each company.

The main challenge you have is finding these lists. Here’s how you do it.

Your first job is to decide on the industry you aim to target with your marketing messages. Let’s say, for this exercise, that your industry is pesticides. You want to reach companies that manufacture pesticides and the equipment that is used to spread pesticides on fields.

Now that you know the industry you want to target, you search for the government agency or department that regulates that industry. You go to Google and type in “US government agency pesticides.”

At the top of the page, you discover that the federal government agency that regulates the pesticides industry is the Environmental Protection Agency, more commonly known as the EPA.

So, now that you have your industry, and now that you know the name of government agency that regulates that industry, you are ready to search for lists of businesses that this agency might publish.

Go back to Google and type “EPA list pesticide businesses.”

Here you go, right at the top of the page you discover that the EPA publishes a “National List of Active EPA-Registered Foreign and Domestic Pesticide and/or Device-Producing Establishments.”

Click on the link and you land here.

HTTPS://WWW.EPA.GOV/COMPLIANCE/NATIONAL-LIST-ACTIVE-EPA-REGISTERED-FOREIGN-AND-DOMESTIC-PESTICIDE-ANDOR-DEVICE-PRODUCING

This is a spreadsheet of companies based either in the US or overseas that manufacture pesticides or the equipment used to spread them. As you can see, the spreadsheet gives you the EPA establishment number, company name, company physical address, state, zip-code, county and EPA region. It also gives you the company office mailing address, company name, company headquarters physical site address, and company headquarters mailing address.

Scroll down this company lists and you see that it contains mor than fourteen thousand records. Some of these companies are listed more than once, because they have multiple divisions, and each division has to be registered with the EPA. But even after you remove all the duplicates, you are left with a list of thousands of companies, all of whom operate in the industry you are wanting to target. That’s gold.

Let’s do one more search so that you see what this looks like when searching for another sector.

Let’s say that you want to target non-profit organizations and charities in Canada. So, you go to Google and search for “Canadian federal government agency charities.”

Here in the search results, you discover that the federal government agency that regulates charities is called the Charities Directorate within the Canada Revenue Agency. Here in the description, you see that “The Charities Directorate is responsible for all program activities related to the provisions of the Income Tax Act regarding qualified donees, including registered charities.”

So, go back to the top of the Google results and change your search to “Charities Directorate list of charities.”

Bingo, right at the top of the page is the link to the List of Charities.

Click on that link and you land here.

HTTPS://APPS.CRA-ARC.GC.CA/EBCI/HACC/SRCH/PUB/DSPLYBSCSRCH?REQUEST_LOCALE=EN

Click Search and the website generates a list of more than eighty-six thousand charities. The table presents these charities alphabetically down the page, and tells you if the charity is registered with Canada Revenue Agency, the province or territory where they are headquartered, the city where they are headquartered, and the date when they were founded.

Click on any name and you arrive at the profile page for that charity. This profile gives you the website address for the charity, describes their programs and activities, and gives you details of their revenue and expenses for the last available tax year.

Click back to the results page, scroll down, and you discover that you can “Download the results.” Click on the button and you are prompted to save the file to your computer.

Open the file and you have a list of all the charities Canada, including their name and address and Category Codes that tell you which area of the charitable sector each charity operates in.

Scroll down the spreadsheet and you see that you have in front of you a list of more than eighty-six thousand potential clients. You don’t have to search for these charities on Google. You just visit this government website, generate the list, and away you go. Now you are ready to start phoning, emailing or mailing these potential clients and giving them your sales pitch

Who would have thought that a federal government department could be so helpful, eh?

Once you get into the world of company lists created and published by government agencies, you soon discover that not all directories are created equal.

Some government departments publish their company lists as just that, a list featuring one row per company, and columns giving you details about the company.

Other government departments host comprehensive databases of companies that you can search by industry classification, geography, and other criteria. These are the most helpful types of lists, because they let you narrow your search to only the most promising potential clients.

Let me show you what I mean.

Let’s say you want to target manufacturers of agricultural equipment in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. So, you visit the website of the government of Saskatchewan and find their Manufacturers and Suppliers Guide.

HTTP://APPLICATIONS.SASKATCHEWAN.CA/DEFAULT.ASPX?DN=1196DD72-3B80-42F7-BD16-9B995D862899

You can search by company name, community, product description or North American Industry Classification code.

But you can also search by category. Here it is, “Agricultural Equipment.” Check the box and hit “Search the Guide.”

You land on the search results. As you can see, there are more than one hundred and sixty firms that meet this criterion.

But click on any company name and you discover another way to search. On the right side of every company profile, the directory lists the N-A-I-C-S code for the types of agricultural equipment that this company manufactures.

This is the profile for Batch Manufacturing. They have two codes that describe what they manufacture. The general code for Agricultural equipment, miscellaneous, and the code for Grain conveyors. Click the code for grain conveyors and you get a list of all manufacturers in Saskatchewan that manufacture grain conveyors, more than twenty-five companies in total.

Now, something to note about company listings on government websites. They generally come in two parts. When you do a search, you get a list of companies that looks like this.

HTTP://APPLICATIONS.SASKATCHEWAN.CA/DEFAULT.ASPX?DN=1196DD72-3B80-42F7-BD16-9B995D862899

This tells you the company name, where it operates and the name of the top executive. But it doesn’t give you a website address or a mailing address or a phone number.

Click on any company and you find all the information you need on the company profile. But if you want this information in the form of a spreadsheet, with hundreds of companies on that sheet, you must visit each profile one at a time and copy and paste the information from this directory into your spreadsheet.

But take heart, you can hire a freelancer on Upwork to do this work for you, either manually or using a software tool called a web scraper. Either way, hiring a freelancer means you don’t have to create this spreadsheet yourself, and most freelancers are affordable.

That’s it. Now you know how to find lists of potential clients, courtesy of your state or federal government departments. By the way, you are most likely to find these company listings in industries that are regulated by the federal government, such as drugs, chemicals, aviation and transportation.

You are also likely to find these lists in states or provinces that are well known for a particular industry. Think agricultural machinery in the prairie provinces, oil & gas extraction in the Gulf Coast states, computers and software in California, and Federal Reserve banks and credit services in New York.

I hope this module helps you find lists of hundreds or even thousands of potential clients in your industry. I wish you every success.

In this project you will discover if a department of your federal or state government publishes a list of businesses in an industry that you want to target with your marketing messages.

Start by naming the industry you want to reach. Then, using the steps you learned in Lesson Two, use Google to discover the name of the government agency or department that oversees this industry. Then, search for this government department by name, along with a keyword phrase that is likely to uncover a list of businesses. By the end of this project, you will know if the government publishes a directory of businesses in the sector you want to target, and, by visiting that directory, you’ll know how many hundreds, or thousands or tens of thousands of potential clients are in that directory. Enjoy your search.