Is Outbound marketing useless in the digital era?

Don’t worry If you don’t know what outbound marketing is. It is classic, traditional and old-schooled marketing which you may see on TV and in newspapers many times a day. Along with outbound marketing, inbound marketing is often mentioned in the same context. Usually, inbound marketing refers to modern digital marketing. Appeared roughly ten years ago, inbound marketing now is considered a more effective and preferable type of marketing especially in the era of web and intelligent technologies. Many people think that classic outbound marketing should disappear in the nearest digital future. I strongly believe that outbound marketing could be useful and profitable for a long time, and I will support my point in the following analysis.

Let’s keep in mind that we aren’t talking about marketing means such as TV, newspapers, radio, smart-phones, or computer browser. We are talking about inbound and outbound methodology. Let me briefly describe these two types of marketing methodologies.

The outbound methodology generally refers to “cold” marketing when a lot of people get an unexpected message. This message is delivered to a certain audience with the highest probability to be addressed to the right people who are potentially interested in the consumed information. I mean if you sell cars most likely you will place a banner on a website about cars. Generally, outbound marketing is used in Display and Media advertising, press-release distribution, spam email campaigns, “cold” calls, etc. As you can see, outbound marketing deals with a “one-way” information delivery which is more expensive and less effective than inbound marketing.

On the other hand, inbound methodology refers to “hot” marketing. Such a methodology deals with interested or “hot” people. All materials and marketing messages are created to provide value for these people. The main differences from outbound marketing: engaged people should find your information on their own. The brightest examples are SEO, PPC advertising, content marketing, opt-in email marketing. There are three main components of an inbound strategy: attract, engage, and add value. 

Let’s consider the first component – attracting prospecting customers. To get prospective clients we need to create high-value content for the first. The next step is promoting this content via SEO and PPC channels or using an existed email database of prospects. 

Sounds easy? But this process is not so straightforward as it may seem at first sight. As we know, SEO techniques will not provide an immediate result. Usually, an article might get noticeable traffic from search engines in a half a year or later. That is why SEO is a part of a long term strategy. Several types of information could become outdated for such a time range. For instance, an article about the company’s important event, invention or significant changes in services couldn’t be delivered fast enough via the SEO channel. In contradiction to SEO, PPC advertising is able to deliver information immediately to potential customers. But there is one main requirement: people should search for such information in a specific search engine. So, if we are talking about a new product, service or event will not be the right decision to expect great results from PPC. In this case, an email campaign could help. But any email campaign will target the already existed prospects from your database. You will not be able to obtain new clients using classic opt-in email marketing. 

So, we can see there are several significant limitations for inbound marketing strategy:

• Long term period is needed to create and deliver information to the interested people
• Prospects should be familiar with certain products, services, or companies. 

 If we are talking about the highly competitive digital markets such as software development services, we must notice that expenses on PPC are extremely high: $20 - $60 per click. The number of effective positions in search engine results is limited to 5 which makes content creation and promotion long term and very expensive. In my opinion, in such a highly competitive environment outbound marketing strategy (or tactics) could be extremely useful.

As we observed previously, the weakest component of inbound marketing is prospect attracting. It might take a lot of time and money without any visible result. On the other hand, the main advantage of outbound marketing is the ability to get clients almost instantly. The main disadvantage is the relatively high costs of outbound marketing. So, we need to enhance inbound marketing with outbound tactics and find a way to reduce costs.

In contradiction to classic old school marketing, in the digital surrounding, we are able to choose an audience to whom we will deliver an advertising message. There are affinity audiences, similar or customer list audiences in Google Ads, Facebook Lookalike and Custom Audience on Facebook, tailored audiences on Twitter. Today we have numerous services and tools to find and research an appropriate targeted audience. So, we can target the right message to the right people at reduced costs. 

  Let me explain it and provide several examples.

First, we may target our banner or media advertising to the most appropriate audience. For instance, we may set up a remarketing audience with most engaged people with our content (product pages, blog articles, video). Then we may promote new content via banner ads on these audiences. Besides, Google Ads can help us to make our audience broader and to find new clients with Google Similar audiences. In its turn, Facebook has Lookalike audiences with the same functionality. So, we will be able to promote our content very fast at a reduced cost.

Moreover, we can study our audiences and find certain characteristics of our clients. In the B2B area, it could be a company profile related to a certain market. In the B2C area, it is known as a buyer persona. Using such a profile or persona description, we may find appropriate contact information and the best way of communication.

I have already mentioned custom software development. Nowadays numerous companies try to find new clients for this kind of service. If we know the main characteristics of our clients, we will find a list of potential clients using different web services. We will map they need, expectations, preferable communication channels. Such information along with prospect names, titles, LinkedIn accounts, emails, and phone numbers will become a powerful tool for sales managers to make their “cold” contacts more “hot”.

At the same time, we can send appropriate messages via LinkedIn Ads and Twitter Ads – the most effective tools in the B2B area to get prospects programmatically. In this case, sales managers would be contacted by already engaged clients.

To summarize all the above-mentioned thoughts, I would say that the integration of inbound and outbound tactics and activities into one sustainable marketing strategy will lead to much better results in sales at much fewer costs. Outbound activates provide useful methods and tools to attract new clients who will be engaged or re-engaged further and provided by additional value with all appropriate inbound methods and tools. 

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The story of appearing this article was told here. Finally, this article was enriched, rewritten, and published in a specially created blog under the title: How to Get Leads for IT Startups? 3 Effective Lead Generation Techniques for Software Development Companies.