What do you like the most freedom of choosing the businesses you want to take services from, or businesses telling you to buy products and services from them?
I’m sure most of you will want to go with the first scenario!
Everybody wants freedom of selection. Before purchasing products or services we research a lot about the businesses providing them. Then, we choose one out of them. I’m sure you like this.
What if somebody is telling you that these businesses are providing the best services and products, and you should buy from them? Would you like to go with them on the basis of what they are saying?
I hope not!
Most of you will first research those brands, then you will go with one of the best out of those brands.
But, is the first process isn’t worthy, well we can’t say that! Every strategy has pros and cons so as outbound marketing!
Have you ever heard about outbound marketing?
After going through this blog, you can yourself decide in what ways it can help your businesses and whether should you incorporate this strategy into your brand.
Let’s get started with what is outbound marketing!
What is Outbound Marketing?
On the basis of the discussion so far, you must’ve gotten a clue about what outbound marketing is. Outbound Marketing is when businesses proactively start communications with their target audience and attract them to get interested in the products or services they’re selling.
In outbound marketing, the companies make the first initial contact with the target audience without waiting for their consumers to come to the brands.
For E.g. you must’ve gotten a call in your lifetime from an unknown number. This type of person first greets you and without knowing whether you want to talk to them or not, they start telling about their services or products. This is a type of outbound marketing that is called cold calling.
I think you have a clear understanding now of what outbound marketing stands for. Outbound marketing is often considered as a traditional form of marketing, but it’s not just that. It is evolving with the latest digital world and is still a viable option in moving leads through sales funnels.
Outbound marketing strategy is the combination of different marketing strategies and tactics to simultaneously target a large amount of target audience. This combination of strategies and tactics is initiated by the brands in the first place to make the first contact with the masses. It is mostly done to spread brand awareness and drive traffic along with generating leads at scale.
Some of the outbound marketing examples are; cold calling, cold emailing, advertising etc.
It is a push marketing strategy in which we are pushing our brand messages to the target audiences. Let’s discuss in what ways we can promote our brands in front of the masses with the outbound marketing strategy.
Different Types of Outbound Marketing Channels
As we’ve discussed outbound marketing is the combination of different marketing tactics and we use those marketing tactics to market our products and services. The techniques are following;
- Social Media Advertising
- Social Media Post Boosting
- Cold Calling
- Direct Mail
- Email Blasting
- Email Newsletters
- Cold Email Marketing
- Search Engine Marketing/ PPC Advertising/ Paid Promotions
- Content Syndication
- Events
- Tradeshows
- Television Ads
- Radio Ads
- Video Ads
- Print Ads (Newspapers, Pamphlets)
There are three terms elaborated in traditional advertising; above the line, below the line and through the line. These methods are being used for targeting the masses and conveying the brand messages to them, but these are not so refined.
Above-the-line advertising (ATL) is more effective for TOFU (Top of the Funnel). And we all know that Tofu activities are just for spreading awareness about the brand. The most popular ATL advertising methods are radio, television, billboards, and print ads (such as newspapers, pamphlets, magazines etc).
Below-the-line advertising (BTL) is more effective for BOFU (Bottom of the Funnel). These types of advertising activities help in converting leads into transactions such as retargeting ads, search engine marketing (SEM), Social Media Advertising, Email Ads, and any types of Digital Advertising like FB, Pinterest, Twitter, Snapchat etc.
These are used because BTL tactics are used to target precisely on the basis of several factors such as interests, habits, demographics, psychographics etc. In simple words, targeting is completely based on customer personas.
Read more here on “How to create user personas?”
Through-the-line advertising (TTL) tactics are used for MOFu (Middle of the Funnel). These are the combination of ATL and BTL. The most famous example of this can be putting the ads on New York’s Time Square, where dynamic ads are put on a static board.
So, we’ve seen different types of outbound marketing channels now, let’s move forward and discuss the steps of creating a successful outbound marketing strategy.
How to create an outbound marketing strategy?
Creating a successful outbound marketing strategy needs time and knowledge about outbound marketing inside-out. It isn’t fixed but dynamic in approach, we may need to make amendments even while performing the marketing strategy. Let’s start it with knowing who are we selling to;
Define Your Target Audience
Whatever the marketing strategy is, this is the initial step you must take. I would say this is the first general step we can take while performing any type of marketing strategy. Defining your target audience filter out the traffic and saves the marketing budget that you were going to waste.
You can make marketing personas of your potential customers. It’ll help in personalized targeting. Everybody wants personalized solutions to their problem, and it can only be possible if we have enough data from their names to needs, desires, and so on. Only then we can deliver our consumers’ personalized experience with the help of the incorporation of personalized marketing with outbound marketing. We can reach out to users through personalized advertising.
Market Research
Market Research is so much important, we should be updated with the things that are going on in the market. It helps us in knowing how big giants are attracting their visitors, what types of offers and services they are providing to their consumers, and what type of strategies are they using for marketing.
If we are aware of our competitors’ tactics and offers then we can design our tactics and offers uniquely to keep them incomparable and easily stand out from the crow and thrive on competition.
Design Valuable and Irresistible Offers
In the first step, defining our target audience, we designed consumer personas of our target audiences. Because of designing those marketing personas we now know the psychology, geography, and demography of our users. On the basis of their pain point, and goals we can design a so much valuable and irresistible offer for our target audience.
This way the conversion of the leads will become easier and we can stand out from our competitors.
Design Brand Style Guide and Keep your Brand Identity Consistent
Designing a brand style guide helps you in keeping brand voice, brand messaging, and brand identity consistent across the channels. Consistent brand identity makes you easily recognizable and increases revenue along with building Brand Loyalty.
This brand loyalty helps us in gaining brand advocates over time. So, read more on “How to create brand style guide”.
Create Personalized Targeted Brand Messaging in Storytelling Way
Every user wants a personalized experience. It makes them feel valued and they feel like they’ve been noticed and listened to by the brand. So, we should always create our brand messaging in a storytelling way. And give this messaging personalized touch with the help of the user personas. We can modify brand messaging according to different marketing user personas and make it personalized.
Choosing Your Channels
We’ve discussed already through which channels we can perform outbound marketing. You need to make sure which channels you are going to prefer based on your target audience. Choose the channels where your target audience lies.
This way, you can save resources, money, and time by filtering out the best marketing channels for your outbound marketing strategy.
Execute the Campaign
Execution is the key to the success of your marketing campaigns. Making plans will not help you in any area of your life but Executing them!
If you’ve performed all the remaining steps well, then I’m sure your outbound marketing campaign is going to be a success.
So, build everything we discussed in these above steps before starting outbound marketing. Once you’re done with it, you are good to go with the different outbound marketing channels we’ve discussed earlier!
Best Practices of Outbound Marketing Strategy
Sometimes we forgot important things but best practices help us in getting out of trouble and remembering everything in no time. Also when you’re reading about best practices it feels like you’re just reading about some fun facts. Let’s get to know what the best practices are for an outbound marketing strategy;
- Do your research before reaching out in cold calls and cold emails
- Personalize your outreach with the help of personalized marketing tactics
- Use LinkedIn for B2B and B2C lead generation
- Combine Digital and Direct Mail Marketing for getting success in Direct Mail
- Avoid unethical marketing tactics such as sending unsolicited bulk messages, buying email lists, not providing options for unsubscribing in email, sending messages even after unsubscribing etc.
- Introduce CRM to build healthier and happier relationships
- Build a Content Distribution Channel
- Don’t be too invasive in advertising
- Track the metrics and analyse insights
- Track ROI with every tactic and chose the best tactic to lead
We’ve discussed the best practices that’ll save you from taking the wrong decision while performing the outbound marketing Strategy. Now, let’s discuss what good outbound marketing can bring to our business.
Benefits of Outbound Marketing
Outbound marketing is evolving with the world, and so its benefits are increasing. The benefits an outbound marketing strategy can provide to its consumers are;
- Boosting Brand Awareness
- Scales Businesses
- Instant Results
- Targets Masses
- Labelled Advertising
- Easy Execution and Delivery
- High Recognition Value because of emotional impact
- Increase Quality of communication
- Enables eye-catching formulations
Don’t you want to get these benefits from outbound marketing? If yes, then stick to the blog until the end, and as soon as the blog finishes start building your own outbound marketing campaigns.
I’m not saying it hasn’t any cons but it is with every marketing strategy, we need to learn how not to get affected by the drawbacks. Some of the drawbacks of outbound marketing are;
It’s a little bit expensive but we can cut the cost by targeting on right channels and right users based on the user persona. Outbound is Invasive but we can use the frequency feature so that the users will not see our ads more than the defined times, and also keep the language storytelling and informational.
So, you can see yourself that we can come out of every defect with the right vision and values and incorporating an inbound marketing strategy with it will help businesses a lot because both of them are polar opposite to each other.
Let’s discuss further and know the differences between Inbound and Outbound Marketing!
Difference between Inbound and Outbound Marketing
As we’ve discussed outbound marketing is considered one of the forms of traditional advertising, but it’s evolving day by day.
Outbound Marketing and Inbound Marketing are directly polar opposites of each other. Nowadays inbound marketing is becoming more popular because it provides good results. But it can’t fulfil the place of outbound marketing that is why outbound marketing still uses 90% of any marketing budget.
Inbound Marketing uses pull methodology, by pulling customers in with interest while Outbound uses push methodology, by pushing products and services onto customers. In inbound marketing, customers come to the brands looking for their services or products attracted by valuable content. But in Outbound marketing brands goes to the customers to advertise their products and services.
Inbound Marketing is permissive in Nature, while outbound marketing is interruptive. Permissive means businesses can’t show users products and services without the users’ consent. And interruptive means whether a user is willing to know or not we are pitching them our products and services.
Inbound marketing provides two-way communication in which brands, as well as users, can communicate with each other frequently. While in Outbound marketing only brands communicate with the users, users can’t connect with the brands.
Inbound marketing is consumer driven means consumers have complete control over the sales funnel and can enter and exit at any step of the sales funnel. But outbound marketing is marketer-driven, which means it is controlled by the marketers, consumers only see what marketers want them to see, and can enter the sales funnel only through the provided methods by marketers.
Inbound Marketing Examples are valuable content, Ebooks, lead magnets, search engine optimization or SEO, social media posts, webinars, videos, graphics, website content, google ads, blog posts etc.
While outbound marketing examples are cold calling, direct mail, cold email marketing, email boosting, television ads, press releases, billboards etc.
Inbound Marketing and Outbound marketing are polar opposite to each other’s so they complement to each other. They both can work well only if they’re being performed together.
Then what is the future of outbound marketing?
The Future of Outbound Marketing: Making the Big shift towards Inbound Marketing
We can see the serious serge in Inbound Marketing strategy in the last few years, but it can’t bring you immediate leads. In addition, outbound marketing can bring you leads but nurture them you need to make use of inbound marketing tactics.
So outbound marketing efforts need to be complemented with inbound marketing efforts for better and immediate growth in the business.
Inbound Marketing is great for nurturing the leads but to let people know that your brand exists in the market you need outbound marketing because people can only search for whom they are aware of.
So, boost brand awareness through outbound marketing, generate leads, nurture them with inbound marketing with valuable and problem-solving content directed to their pain points and goals, and close the deal.
This way, you can create a successful marketing funnel coupling 2 marketing strategies. Always remember, you can’t market just market your products with just one marketing strategy. You should need to learn how to combine different marketing strategies.
Outbound marketing is still relevant, and keeps us at the forefront of customers’ minds, for recommendations, word-of-mouth marketing, and immediate lead generation. It is expensive. But when performed well it can bring good ROI as a complement to the inbound marketing strategy.
We’ve discussed that outbound marketing works well if it is working as a complement to inbound marketing. So, we need to make a big shift towards inbound marketing. Read more on “How to incorporate Inbound Marketing?”
Wrapping Up
I hope you’re clear about what outbound marketing is, and what inbound marketing is, and they can work well if they’re being performed together.
In Inbound marketing, customers visit the brand and keep looking for answers, whereas outbound brands go to the audiences to sell their products and services. But both are important in their places. They both are valuable and should be implemented.
The most effective outbound marketing strategy is cold email outreach with more than 30% engagement ratio, cold calling and direct mailing are second to it with above 15% engagement ratio, then search ads back it with more than 10% and social media ads with only 10%, and at last trade shows and events perform with less than 10% engagement ratio.
You can decide whichever suits you. But keep providing valuable content through inbound marketing channels to the consumers, like blog posts, EBooks, educational content through videos, and webinars for solving their queries.
I hope now you’re ready to start with an outbound marketing strategy.
Are you?
Of course, definitely!
Please let us know in the comment section how you are willing to start with an outbound marketing strategy.
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