As technology evolved, traditional outbound marketing methods have lost their impotence. However, this method of marketing is still admired by marketers, in fact to this day marketers still invest a considerable amount of their marketing budget in outbound marketing.
And as technology evolved the channels of outbound marketing also increased and some of the methods also evolved. So modern marketers should not completely disregard outbound marketing.
In this post, we’ll discuss all there is to outbound marketing, the types, the strategy, and the activities, and how you can use fuse your outbound marketing methods with inbound marketing.
Outbound marketing defined
Outbound marketing is a marketing method that targets a large group of people at the same in order to reach the message to as many people as possible in the target market.
When a normal person someone little to no knowledge about marketing thinks about marketing they usually mean outbound marketing because some of its activity includes traditional advertising such as print, television, radio, cold calling, direct mail, etc.
Why Outbound Marketing?
Outbound marketing allows you to reach a large number of prospects in a very short amount of time and if done correctly it gives the opportunity to stand out in the crowd which will convert into a large number of sales later on.
Outbound marketing lets you reach millions of prospects in a very short amount of time but the outcome depends on the amount of money you invest in it.
The downside of outbound marketing
As you already know in outbound you push your efforts are pushed toward your customers –
Is it for you?
Well if you’re just starting building awareness will most likely be at the top of your list and increasing your brand awareness outbound methods will be effective other than it also works best for B2B marketing or if someone is looking to generate a huge amount of leads in a short amount of time.
Outbound vs Inbound
The exact opposite of outbound marketing is considered inbound marketing. In the inbound method, marketers put their brands in places where customers are more likely to find them and reach them out, and the activities of content marketing, SEO, and blogging. Unlike outbound where you push efforts to the prospects, you “pull” them in the inbound method typically by providing value to the customers.
However, inbound & outbound methods should be seen as the opposite of each other and people should not think that one is good and another is not. In fact, effective marketing contains a mix of both inbound and outbound efforts, because at the beginning you need to outbound marketing for Brand awareness or lead generation, and moving forward you can utilize inbound methods and provide value to your customers.
How can you create an outbound marketing strategy?
As outbound marketing requires more spending than inbound you wanna create a plan before jumping into it.
In this section, we’ll discuss a 5-step process to come up with your outbound marketing strategy
Step-1 Set Your Goals
At this step, you wanna ask yourself some questions such as what are you trying to achieve through your outbound marketing campaign. Answering this question will help you define measure the success of your campaign and define the message you want to promote and through which you want to use later on.
Step-2 Select and understand your audience
At this step, you wanna research your audience, and get to know who they are, and their buying behaviors. Once you get a better understanding of your target audience you’ll be able to define the message and where to promote your message.
Step-3 Get to know your competitors
Businesses invest a huge chunk of their marketing budget on outbound marketing, that’s why the competition is also high. That’s you wanna understand your competitors so that you can learn more about what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, where they’re doing right, and where they’re doing it wrong so that you can improvise accordingly and do better.
Step-4 Define your message
At this stage, you wanna decide what message you want to use to communicate through your campaign. The question you wanna ask yourself here is that “What will your audience recall from this campaign?”
You wanna make sure your message is simple and short so that it becomes easier for your audience to understand and remember it. The massage, Slogan, hashtags, and taglines should be easily understandable, short, catchy, and attractive enough so that it acquires the potential to go viral.
Step-5 Decide which channel to promote
At this stage, you wanna decide which channel you want to use to promote your message. The question you wanna ask yourself here is that “where does my target audience hang out?” This will help you choose the channel where your target audience spends most of their time. For instance, your target audience may use social media a lot so social media might be a good place to advertise.
Some popular outbound marketing channels where you can measure your performance
Social Media
One of the most popular channels for outbound marketing nowadays is social media. Social media gives tons of metrics to work with so that you can measure your campaign’s performance. With social media, you can run paid advertising campaigns, can boost successful posts. It’s also cost-effective.
PPC
PPC also known as Pay-Per-Click advertising is another popular internet advertising channel where advertisers pay for the clicks they get from the campaign, and it gives a bunch of metrics to measure your performance. Other than you can fuse this outbound method with your inbound marketing efforts. For instance, You can promote content that provides value to your customer, you can promote content that’ll help your customers to move to the next step of the funnel, and create ads for targeted segments of the audience.
There are various forms of PPC which include search ads, display ads, and video ads.
Cold Calling
Cold calling is the only marketing approach that responded very negatively because no one appreciates a stranger calling them to make a sale. However, nowadays cold calling is a comeback.
Marketers have evolved the process turned into warm calling by researching their target audience and personalizing their message so that they can fit in and designing a neutral conversation that is not seen as sales.
Text blasting
Text blasting is in fact much more effective than cold calling because people would rather digest a text than get a call from a complete stranger and start talking with them about business. The downside of text blasting is that your message can be easily ignored but the advantage is that you can integrate your text blasting efforts with calling. Because you’ll be able to request to speak with your customers over a phone call and that phone wouldn’t be a cold call because your customers will already be expecting that call.
Email Blasting
If you have been collecting emails then you can use that to give out one-time or limited offers, and discounts that’ll help the leads to convert.
The above mentioned are the outbound methods that give enough metrics you can use to measure your marketing performance unlike the traditional outbound method like print, radio ads, and TV commercials where it’s harder to measure how you’re performing.
How much do you need to spend?
Outbound marketing is typically more expensive than inbound marketing and it’s also hard to measure your performance because you can’t possibly count how many people saw your ad on a billboard or how many people actually took the time to see the TV commercial on which you’ve to spend your money on. But using the channels that let’s measure your performance gives you more advantages over the traditional outbound marketing channels.
The problem with ONLY outbound marketing
It’ll cost you more if you only focus on outbound methods and some of the channels of outbound marketing makes it even harder for you to measure your efforts. Other than that outbound techniques such as ads, cold calling, text, and email blasts can potentially create annoyance, and people may start avoiding or they can even stretch further and block you or report you.
Fuse your Inbound efforts with Outbound
To solve all these problems you may want to fuse your inbound efforts along with outbound. For instance, if your business is in the fitness niche you can promote fitness tips in eBooks or blogs that’ll provide value to your customers.
This way you’re both “pushing” your efforts to your target audience and also pulling them towards you. You can use outbound tactics to increase brand awareness and then use inbound tactics to get your customers to the next stage of the funnel.
Last Note
Even though outbound marketing is slowly losing its popularity to Inbound but outbound marketing has been the norm for a very long time and doing right will still get you fruitful results. So rest assured that outbound is not going anywhere anytime soon and by fusing outbound tactics with inbound you can improvise your marketing efforts even further and get better results.
