What is Outbound Marketing for B2B companies?
Despite the current popularity of inbound marketing, most marketing strategies include some form of outbound marketing. Developing an approach to outbound marketing requires an understanding of when to use it, a defined budget, and how much time you plan to spend on outbound marketing tactics. Read on to learn more about outbound marketing and how to use it for your business.
What is Outbound Marketing?
Outbound marketing is defined as “a traditional form of marketing in which a company initiates contact with potential customers, or leads.” More specifically, outbound marketing consists of marketing or sales activities where a company reaches out to acquire leads versus leads coming to the company, as with inbound marketing. Outbound marketing tactics include advertising, cold outreach, direct mail, generic email blasts, and events.
Outbound marketing is typically viewed as more traditional marketing. However, successful companies combine outbound marketing techniques with an inbound strategy to develop a strong audience and create more leads.
Examples of Outbound Marketing
Advertising
One of the most popular forms of outbound marketing is advertising. Advertising encompasses anything where a company pays to place advertising material in front of their desired audience. Examples of advertising include:
Paid search advertising (also called Search Engine Marketing “SEM”)
Social media advertising
Sponsorships
Promoted content on blogs
Billboards/radio/television advertisements
Google/Bing ads
No matter what your marketing strategy is, having some sort of advertising approach in place can yield large results for your business. For example, according to PowerTraffick, small businesses earn an average of $3 in revenue for every $1.60 they spend on Google AdWords. When developing your advertising strategy, first determine where your target clients spend time, and then see if you can advertise through that channel.
Cold Outreach
Cold outreach is a method of contacting potential clients without having any previous contact. The most common outreach methods are email and cold calling. While cold outreach can help you generate leads, it is one of the most challenging and time consuming approaches. According to TopoHQ, “it takes an average of 18 calls to actually connect with a buyer” and “Only 24% of sales emails are opened.”
Direct Mailing
Surprisingly, direct mail accounts for a large percentage of advertising, with $38.5 billion in local advertising spend. Direct mailers are where a company sends marketing communications, such as coupons, newsletters, or information packets, to potential customers. This is especially popular for local businesses, such as grocery stores and retailers.
While many companies focus on their digital marketing approach, consumers see direct mail as a personal touch. In fact, 70% of consumers say direct mail is more personal than online interactions. Next time you’re writing an email newsletter, pause to see if it would be more personal to send out a physical piece of mail to connect with your customer.
Email Blasts
While email marketing can be used as an inbound marketing technique, it may also be considered outbound depending on how it is executed. Email is an outbound technique where the recipient didn’t explicitly sign up for the specific content you’re providing. For example, some companies purchase emails to add to their list of subscribers. Since those subscribers didn’t sign up for your email list, this is their first interaction with your company (and it’s unsolicited). In general, this approach has much lower ROI than inbound email marketing techniques, and in some cases, it might not be legal to send mass emails to individuals who didn’t sign up for your list. Be cautious if you use this approach.
Events/Tradeshows
Since most people attend events and tradeshows without a specific company in mind, this falls under outbound marketing. However, events and tradeshows are a great way to reach a large audience of potential clients all at once. Many companies use event marketing as a primary source of generating leads. In fact, Bizzabo claims, “the majority (85%) of leadership (Senior Managers, Executives, and Board Members) believe in-person events are critical to their company’s success.” This is even higher in the B2B space with 97% of B2B marketers believing that in-person events have a major impact on achieving business outcomes.
To tap into event marketing, you can host your own or attend other events. Conduct a search or ask your clients what events they attend, and reserve your spot. Many events allow companies to bid for a presentation spot, which can place you in front of an event larger audience.
Even if you don’t present, you can still benefit from the event. While there, you can speak directly to your potential clients and discuss their specific pain points. Make sure you collect emails to follow up after the event!
Outbound Marketing Challenges
High Cost
Each type of outbound marketing has it’s pros and cons, but most are more expensive than inbound techniques. For example, attending conferences can quickly cost thousands of dollars. Creating ads can also add up. However, if you set the budget ahead of time and choose your spending category carefully, you can benefit from outbound marketing.
Lower Engagement
If you read any advertising statistics, you’ll quickly see that outbound marketing click-through-rates and engagement are lower than for inbound techniques, such as blogging. The same is true for cold outreach. However, depending on your overall marketing strategy, relying on outbound techniques can help supplement your inbound marketing efforts.
How can B2B Companies use Outbound Marketing?
Outbound marketing techniques are useful for B2B companies. To get started, you should consider each of the following steps.
Step 1: Determine your goal
Before you do anything else, you must first determine your goal for any outbound marketing campaign. Common goals include increased traffic, more sales, increased consultations, brand awareness, etc. No matter what goal you choose, make sure you know why that goal is important. For example, it’s very easy to spend money to increase your traffic, but why do you want increased traffic and what do you want to happen once they visit your website? Without a plan around the desired action, you can easily waste money and achieve no real business results.
Questions to ask yourself:
What is the desired action I want my audience to take?
How will I track if they take the desired action?
Is the action clear to them (e.g. does my landing page have one clear goal)?
What is the value of my desired action?
Do I expect to earn sales from this action? If so, how much and how long will it take?
Step 2: Set your budget
Once you know your goals, it’s time to set your budget. As you can see in some of the questions above, it’s important to consider what the overall value of your outbound marketing is to your business. For example, if you plan to spend $1,000 on advertising and you know that 1 customer will bring in $5,000, then you have a decent ROI for that advertising (assuming you have the process in place to get that one customer). Work with your goals to determine how much you can expect from your efforts and how much you are willing to spend to achieve that.
Step 3: Choose your audience
If you don’t already have a clear audience in mind for your outbound marketing efforts, create a detailed profile of your target clients. You can do this by looking at your existing clients and highlighting what they have in common or different personas. If you’re hoping to reach a new audience, write down who they are, their goals, interests, pain points, fears, and why they would work with you.
Step 4: Select your channel
Once you know your audience, it’s time to select your marketing channel. You must first have your audience clearly defined in order to know what marketing channel will be most effective. For example, if you’re targeting marketing directors at Fortune 500 companies, you should know where they consume content and how you can advertise through those channels. It may be LinkedIn, Google Ads, or sponsored content on blogs or emails that they frequently read.
The bottom line: you must choose a channel that matches your target audience or you won’t achieve the best results.
Step 5: Monitor and refine
After steps 1-4, you’ll create your outbound marketing techniques, and the final step is to monitor their success. If you find that you aren’t achieving the goals you outlined in Step 1, then it’s time to evaluate to understand why and change your approach where needed.
Getting Started with Outbound Marketing
No matter what you offer and who you serve, developing a solid approach to outbound marketing can help you generate new clients for your business.