OUTBOUND MARKETING

“Every day do something that will inch you closer to a better tomorrow.” –Doug Firebaugh

When a business is started, one of the most critical needs is to let people know about the products and services so that more customers can get attracted. Of course, marketing is the method that is used to promote the brand among the audience and get recognized.

WHAT IS OUTBOUND MARKETING?

Initially, there was only one single type of marketing method, and that was of outbound marketing. This strategy includes actions that enable your sales team to approach your brand’s potential customers directly.

It is more of a Push Strategy instead of INBOUND MARKETING (Pull Strategy). Outbound marketing examples include more traditional forms of marketing and advertising such as TV commercials, radio ads, print advertisements (newspaper ads, magazine ads, flyers, brochures, catalogues, etc.), tradeshows, outbound sales calls (AKA “cold calls”), and email spam.

The outbound option is still something that can bring in great results.

DIFFERENT TYPES OF OUTBOUND MARKETING

1. TV/radio advertisements

2. Telemarketing/cold-calling

3. Email marketing

4. Trade shows

5. Newspaper advertising

6. Press releases

7. Direct mail (brochures, postcards, catalogues)

8. Branded marketing (newsletters, pens, key chains, even flash drives)

There was a time when outbound marketing strategies were the most efficient ways to reach out to a wide number of audiences with limited time. Today, with the rise of other marketing options, the demand for outbound marketing is reducing down. For this reason, outbound marketing options can be achieved at a much lower price now. Still, outbound ways of promotion is very popular and businesses are predominantly opting for them to promote and advertise their products and services.

WHAT’S THE PROBLEM WITH OUTBOUND MARKETING?

Outbound marketing constitutes the majority of marketing budgets for many businesses. It’s been around for ages and some even consider it a cost of doing business. Outbound marketing, though, presents a lot of difficulties, and tradition and past mistakes should never get in the way of adapting to changing marketing trends. Problems with outbound marketing include:

1. Difficulty in tracking return on investment (ROI)

2. Increasing blocking techniques (Do not call list, Spam filters, TiVo, etc)

3. High cost, low yield.

HOW TO RUN A SUCCESSFUL OUTBOUND MARKETING STRATEGY?

Recognize leads types and define goals

The first step is to know what are the leads types and define how much of each of them you need to achieve your sales goals.

To do that, we must start by creating a buyer persona profile for each one of these leads.

We’ll define the leads by their acquisition channel. Know them:

1. Seeds: they come to the company by word-of-mouth method. They don’t need a complex acquisition process, and they’re highly qualified;

2. Nets: they’re the leads brought to your company by Inbound Marketing. They’re relatively qualified;

3. Spears: they’re the Outbound Sales leads and may or may not be qualified.

Get a qualified sales team

Outbound Marketing strategies are common in SaaS — Software as a Service — startups.

These companies generally adopt an internal sales operation, which includes two types of sales professionals.

Companies realize that high-performance salespeople are sometimes unproductive because they need to split up into prospecting and closing processes.

That can be solved by hiring a professional for each stage.

We’ve listed the differences between these two types of salespeople:

1. hunters: prospect customers. They make the first contact with the prospect and schedule a meeting;

2. closers: show the product, prepare the commercial proposal, the contract, and close the deal.

Know the prospect and sales techniques

While starting your strategy, it is important to use some techniques that ensure good results.

Cold mail and cold call

The purpose of a cold call is to prospect the customer that hasn’t made any purchase or contact with your business.

The cold calls can be mistaken by telemarketing, but there are some differences between them.

In cold calls, you need trained and prepared salespeople. In telemarketing, this is not always necessary. The metrics and KPIs can be different too.

One thing you should keep in mind is that some countries have strict policies for commercial calls.

It’s worthy of mentioning that, despite the cons regarding the audience, cold calls can be really effective when well-planned and executed.

AIDA

When using methods such as AIDA, cold calls are more likely to generate good results.

Understand more about AIDA:

1. Awareness: you need to get the customers’ attention in the first few seconds of the call or on the email’s subject, showing that your company knows their problems.

2. Interests: the second step is to show how your company can solve the consumer problem.

3. Desire: your company needs to show the advantages the solution offers to make consumers interested in it.

4. Action: finally, you need to make the consumer decide for something, such as booking a meeting or buying your product.

Use qualified patterns and frameworks

The lead qualification matrix is a way to understand how fitted the leads are to your business and solutions that you sell.

There’s no sense in a list full of leads that won’t buy your products.

To know how hot is a lead, you have to consider the profile and the maturity axis.

Know what each one represents:

1. profile: it’s the main lead’s characteristics, such as annual billing, employee quantity, actuation market and other information that impacts their fit to your product;

2. maturity: it’s how much educated the leads are about their problems and if they understand how your product will help them.

Using this matrix, you can discard the leads that won’t buy from you. This way, you’ll better guide and follow up leads that need more education.

Make a lead follow up and forecast

To ensure the success of your Outbound Marketing strategy, you need to establish a monitoring and forecasting routine.

These practices are very important to keep potential customers on the radar. This way, you can identify and correct problems in the sales process.

Make sure your team is keeping the recommended frequency of tracking customers.

Also, ask professionals to explain their difficulties, achievements, and mistakes. That is important to improve your sales strategy.

Analyse the results

It’s essential to monitor the results of the Outbound Marketing actions for many reasons, but mainly to justify the maintenance operation and make adjustments.

To better understand the results, you need to define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

The main Outbound Marketing KPIs are listed below:

1. Lead Time (LT): how long it takes the lead to advance to the next stage of the funnel. That determines the size of the sales cycle;

2. Conversion Rate: the list of how many new leads became customers;

3. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): is the amount invested in new customers. This indicator determines the value of each customer;

4. Lifetime Value (LTV): is the total amount spent by a customer in your company;

5. Churn Rate: how many customers cancel the contract before the predicted time.

OUTBOUND MARKETING IN THE DIGITAL AGE

However, there is still very much a place for outbound marketing within an organization’s marketing mix. Inbound marketing is focused on qualifying leads and helping to build the relationship between consumer and organization, but without a way to make people aware of a particular brand or company, that relationship doesn’t exist.

It may be surprising, but one of the most effective outbound marketing channels today is LinkedIn’s InMail. Not only do 79% of B2B marketers view LinkedIn as a great source for lead generation, at least one company’s response rate for Sponsored InMail was eleven times higher than email.