WHAT IS OUTBOUND MARKETING?

When most people think of marketing, they probably picture TV ads, billboards, and cold calling. All of those marketing methods fall under the umbrella of outbound marketing strategies. 

Though outbound marketing isn’t as popular as it once was, it’s still a valuable tool for reaching potential customers and driving brand awareness. In this article, we'll be diving into the world of outbound marketing, talking about what it is, and how it can work alongside your other marketing strategies to help you grow your business. 

Outbound Marketing Explained

Outbound marketing involves proactively reaching out to potential customers through different channels. Although these people have not yet indicated an interest in your business, you’re sharing your brand message with them in the hope that they will want to engage further. 

Outbound marketing efforts typically reach large, diverse audiences to spread the message. These include digital methods like email marketing and display ads as well as traditional advertising methods like TV ads and direct mail. 

Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing

Some people confuse inbound and outbound marketing since they’re both business promotion methods. Here’s an easy way to remember the difference: Outbound marketing is about contacting potential customers, while inbound marketing is about getting potential customers to contact you.

Blog posts, social media, e-books, and other types of content marketing are examples of inbound marketing strategies. Inbound marketing's benefits are similar to those of outbound marketing, such as increasing brand awareness and generating leads. The difference between the two strategies is how they provide these benefits. 



Types of Outbound Marketing Content

If you’re interested in outbound marketing, you can use many different types of content as part of that strategy. They include:

• Television ads
• Radio ads
• Cold calling
• Cold emails
• Press releases
• Trade shows
• Seminar series
• Email spams
• Media buys

Companies using an outbound marketing strategy will generally combine several types of content. For example, they might run television ads and attend trade shows to promote their products or services. 

You can also combine inbound and outbound marketing. Posting blogs optimized for search engines and sending cold emails promoting those blogs would be an example of combined inbound and outbound marketing. 

How Does It Work?

So, how exactly does outbound marketing create results for businesses?

Take cold calling as an example. When you use cold calling to promote your business, you contact people who didn’t ask for a call to tell them about your business. Known as interruption marketing, it takes the customer’s attention from whatever else they are doing and directs it to your business, at least momentarily. 

With this "spray and pray" method, you hope the person on the other line will hear about your business and become interested in the products or services you’re selling. However, since this person wasn’t already interested in your brand, chances are fairly low that a cold call will spark that interest. You need to contact a large group of people with outbound marketing to reach some customers in your target audience and produce results. 

Inbound marketing, by contrast, attracts potential customers who are already interested in the content you’re sharing. That’s part of why inbound marketing typically has a much higher conversion rate than outbound marketing. On average, inbound leads cost a business 61% less than each lead generated through outbound marketing. 

Pros and Cons of Outbound Marketing

As with any marketing strategy, outbound marketing has advantages and disadvantages. If you’re not sure whether outbound marketing is the right choice for your business, consider these factors.

Pros

Some of the advantages of using outbound marketing include:

• Reach a large audience: With outbound marketing, your brand message will appear in front of many people. Some of these people may already be customers, some may have heard of your brand before but never made a purchase, and most probably won’t be familiar with your brand. You’re casting a wide net and getting lots of exposure.
• Relatively simple to implement: Creating direct mail fliers or cold-calling potential customers may be easier for some small businesses than inbound marketing. Many outbound marketing methods don’t require any knowledge of digital tools. 
• Quicker results: Inbound marketing is about playing the long game and drawing customers to you, which means producing results can take a while. By contrast, outbound marketing can generate results immediately when audiences receive the brand message. 

Cons

Some of the disadvantages of outbound marketing include:

• Difficult to track: Unlike digital inbound marketing methods like social media and web content, outbound marketing can be challenging to track. If you don’t know how your outbound marketing campaigns directly affect your business, making the best decisions with your marketing spending is difficult. 
• Inefficient: To see results from outbound marketing, you need to cast a wide net and reach out to lots of customers. The majority of those customers typically won’t be interested in your message. You end up wasting time and money trying to reach these customers, hurting your results and the return on your investment. 

Find the Right Marketing Strategy for Your Brand

Optimize is here to help you find and implement the right marketing strategies for your business’s needs. Our team of experts can help you get the most out of your digital marketing efforts, whether you’re interested in inbound marketing, outbound marketing, or both. 

Schedule your free consultation today to learn more about how Optimize can enhance your marketing strategies.