Breathe Life into Your Marketing

Outbound marketing is not dead. That’s right, those messages sent to an audience through TV, cold-calling, e-mails, direct mail and paid searches is alive and well!
Inbound marketing—regarded as the future of marketing—has grown leaps and bounds over the last few years. Marketers across the globe prioritize inbound marketing over outbound. The decline of outbound marketing is a response to a fundamental shift in consumer behavior. People are in control of what information they receive and how. In outbound marketing, the company is in control. Still, that doesn’t mean that we should be making funeral arrangements for outbound marketing strategies. Today’s B2B products and services have long, complex sales cycles and usually include multiple decision-makers which have made marketers realize that mass-marketing tactics with no thought to relevancy, timeliness or personalization just don’t work.

Online content through landing pages, SEO and social media aren’t always enough to build strong leads for your sales team. One shouldn’t rely solely on inbound strategies to build relationships and qualify leads. You can bridge the gap with thoughtful, targeted data-driven outbound marketing.

If your outbound strategies are customer-centric and tightly integrated with your inbound content strategy, you can see a significant improvement in your marketing.

78% of decision-makers have taken an appointment or attended an event that came from an email or cold call. –Source: DiscoverOrg

Now that you’ve created life-changing content for your website, blog and social media site and are preparing to embark on a new outbound marketing strategy for new lead generation, you have some tough questions to answer:

Do you understand what your top target segments are?
Can you clearly define your buyer persona(s)?
Do you have all the right tools?
Have you considered everything it takes to build a team?
Do your managers have the bandwidth to do everything it takes to lead a team?
Do the benefits outweigh the costs?

When you have all the answers and have dedicated time to review and identify new trends along the way, just remember that it doesn’t always mean that your targets will be jumping across the desk to pick up the phone. They may slowly come on board thanks to your best inbound marketing efforts. Through your outbound tactics, they have been driven to your website, read your content; downloaded your whitepaper, attended a webinar and you may have even followed-up with a phone call or e-mail.
Your market mix of inbound and outbound marketing strategies for solid business promotion is not possible without 100 percent understanding of the characteristics of each. Using these methods wrongly only results in frustration, resulting from wasting financial resources and opportunity cost.

It’s Not Cheap
Outbound marketing can be an expensive endeavor. The traditional (or old) way of telling people about your business or product is costly. TV commercials, newspaper ads and radio commercials are expensive and tend to make the most sense for advertisers with larger budgets. In outbound marketing, success is directly proportional to repetition. Repeated broadcasts can persuade people, but repetition shoots the budget through the roof.
It is fairly safe to say that outbound marketing is not as effective as inbound marketing. Some estimates suggest that the average American is exposed to 2,000 promotional activities a day. A CBS article suggested a number as high as 5,000. Although an accurate number is hard to find, as the information varies from study to study, one thing is clear: people are exposed to hundreds of promotional activities each day. With that number of messages, a resistance is built, and that only makes it harder to get one of the most important factors in marketing: attention.

The biggest downside for inbound marketing is its reach. You can’t target the entire nation with inbound marketing the same way you would with a TV commercial or printed ad. Simply said, nationwide coverage is not 100 percent effective with inbound marketing because you can only promote to a willing audience.

There is no marketing silver bullet
Every business is different. A variety of tactics is necessary to hit the right people in the right way. Your strategy is defined by how your users behave.

Some businesses rely mostly on inbound tactics to drive qualified leads, sprinkling in outbound tactics as needed. Larger, more established business built their companies ONLY using outbound marketing tactics, but are now exploring new methods.

As technologies develop and consumers expect more thoughtful, personalized communication, marketers (and company cultures) must adapt. Marketers will also continue to face increased ROI challenges as the consumer experience becomes more fragmented and competitive.

The right marketing mix begins with understanding the need. As a business owner or marketer, you know what keeps you up at night when it comes to marketing. If you’re like most, finding the best ROI is near the top.

According to a Hubspot Report, proving an ROI on marketing spend is considered the largest challenge by over 50 percent of both B2B and B2C marketers, regardless of company size. Similarly, securing budget is considered a top pain point for about a third of marketers.

To mitigate these issues, marketers will look toward tactics capable of both reporting and delivering ROI. The reasoning is simple: the better they can demonstrate the impact of their marketing investment, the more budget they will receive.

Does Company Size Influence the Approach?
The smaller the company, the more pervasive inbound marketing, while larger companies are likely to deploy a mixture of both. For businesses with less than 25 employees, inbound is used by a whopping 84 percent, versus just 13 percent for outbound. For companies with less than 200 employees, outbound marketing is deployed by 27 percent of companies, versus 71 percent for inbound. For companies with more than 200 employees, an equal amount of both inbound and outbound tactics are used.

Globally, we are just focused on converting contacts into customers, increasing the overall number of qualified leads generated and proving ROI.

No, outbound marketing is far from dead. The trick is, can you breathe life to the entire landscape of your marketing strategies? With inbound marketing, you can draw prospects to you through awareness and education. With outbound marketing, you can help qualify the leads generated by inbound programs and well as reach prospects who don’t yet know they have a need—and come full-circle by providing those prospects with inbound content for awareness and education. Just like you need to inhale and exhale, your marketing likely needs both inbound and outbound to survive.

It’s ultimately on each business to understand its customer journey and the channels that lead to success. Companies with a focus on ROI, regardless of size, should favor inbound tactics, while outbound tactics should be used cautiously and with a higher degree of accountability.

Sources:

http://www.stateofinbound.com/?utm_source=partner&utm_medium=cta&utm_campaign=partner-cta

Article originally appeared in Private Lender July/August 2016