Outbound Marketing

Outbound marketing is a strategy that implies reaching out to potential customers directly using traditional marketing techniques like cold calling, TV ads, trade shows, seminars, radio ads, cold emailing, etc. This one-way communication boosts brand awareness, delivers the necessary message to a wide audience, and brings instant results.

In this article, we’ll explore the pros and cons of outbound marketing, make the difference between inbound and outbound marketing clear, and discover its channels and strategies. We’ll also provide you with effective tools and impressive examples.

The Advantages and Disadvantages

Outbound marketing, like any other marketing strategy, has its pros and cons you should be aware of before implementing it. In this section, we’ll unveil the most crucial ones to consider.

The pros of outbound marketing include:

• Wide reach. With outbound marketing, brands can deliver their promotional message to a diverse and broad audience in various locations. It benefits companies seeking to drive brand awareness and introduce new products.
• Brand recognition. By using outbound marketing channels like TV commercials, radio ads, billboards, and flyers, you can increase the exposure of your brand. It plays an essential part in establishing recognition and staying at the top of the minds of consumers. When people often see your products in TV ads, they will remember about them once they need such items.
• Brand awareness. When people see commercials, ads on YouTube and Google, and billboards on the street, they become aware of a brand and product. After that, they can explore more information about it and consider purchasing it in the future.
• Instant impact and immediate result. Billboards, newspapers, pay-per-click ads, cold emailing and calling, and social media ads deliver a straight-to-the-point message without any hidden senses. It allows companies to create an instant impact, deliver valuable information, and encourage prospects to act right now because of the time-sensitive information. For instance, flyers encourage people to visit stores on specific days to enjoy enticing offers.
• Easier to control. Marketers have complete control over the time, place, and way of delivering the advertising message. This way, brands reach the necessary location and demographics, ensuring campaigns’ effectiveness.

However, the strategy also carries its drawbacks, which you‘ll find below:

• Expensive. TV commercials, print advertising, and radio are pretty expensive. That's why a business needs to make significant investments. As a result, small businesses can’t afford it and instead choose other promotional strategies.
• Less targeted. Unlike inbound marketing, outbound marketing doesn’t offer a personalized approach to each potential customer. All prospective customers receive the same message without their preferences, needs, and challenges being considered. As a result, companies target a wide audience, but not all of them are interested. This means that marketers also spend money to reach people who will never buy these products.
• Interruptive in nature. Sometimes outbound marketing is considered an intrusive method because it helps a business initiate the first contact rather than wait for prospects to come by themselves. It leads to a negative perception of a specific company and negatively influences the level of engagement.
• Less flexible. Outbound channels, including TV commercials, radio, print ads, and billboards, are less adaptable to changes. Since these campaigns should be prepared in advance, it might be time-consuming and expensive to make some even slight alignments.

Now that you know the pros and cons of outbound marketing, it’s time to compare it with inbound marketing.

Inbound vs Outbound Marketing

To understand which marketing strategy suits your business purpose, it’s necessary to explore each in detail. In this section, we’ll discover the two marketing approaches and help you identify the perfect match.

Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that uses messaging based on prospects’ needs, preferences, and challenges. By providing personalized marketing experiences, it allows brands to boost engagement, conversions, and overall company growth. Website content, SEO, social media activity, blogs, podcasts, videos, webinars, and e-books allow brands to educate customers about their products and find perfect solutions for these clients. In short, the strategy aims to provide customers with the best experiences by sharing valuable content and making recommendations tailored to their needs.

Outbound marketing is a marketing strategy focusing on sharing the message to a wide audience and establishing brand awareness. The messages are usually straightforward, enabling businesses to reach their business goals faster without taking into account prospects' needs. Marketers usually use TV, radio, cold calling, cold emailing, and trade shows to reach a wide audience and convince them to purchase. To make it happen faster, companies might encourage the fear of missing out or a limited-time offer. This way, potential customers make faster buying decisions without thinking too much.

Simply put, inbound marketing is more customer-centric because it implies paying attention to customers' needs, identifying pain points, and driving interest. It encourages prospects to come to the brand by themselves. At the same time, outbound marketing helps establish initial contact, create exposure, reach wide audiences, and drive instant results. It focuses on the final result rather than on the quality of the content, alignment with customer needs, or their experiences.

Besides knowing the main characteristics of outbound marketing, you should also know the channels. In the next section, we’ll uncover the most popular ones businesses successfully use until today.

Businesses can reach potential customers using several marketing channels depending on their preferences and convenience. We‘ll review the main channels.

• Direct mail. Although this channel might seem outdated, it‘s still widely used by companies. With its help, marketers can reach their target audiences who don‘t use the internet. It‘s a great way to communicate the message to people who read newspapers and magazines. Direct mail helps establish awareness, deliver messages to a wide audience quickly, and bring new prospects to a brand.
• Cold calling. It’s a process that implies salespeople calling potential customers who have never interacted with a brand. Sales reps do everything possible to encourage interest and build relationships with these leads. They introduce the company, unveil its products, and offer enticing discounts for instant purchases.
• Cold emailing. It's a process of sending email campaigns to people who don’t know anything about your company and products. With its help, you can cost-effectively deliver your message, educate prospects about your brand, establish brand awareness, and generate leads.
• Billboards. People can see this large outdoor advertising in busy areas and alongside roads. Billboards target all people passing by, including pedestrians and drivers. They allow marketers to create extra exposure around a specific brand or its products. They are effective for product launches, sales promotions, special events, etc. The more people see these billboards, the more prospects businesses attain.
• TV advertising. Ads on TV are an effective yet expensive way of reaching a wide audience and establishing recognition. Although it doesn’t have a personalized approach, it delivers the message and encourages people to decide. With its help, marketers target specific demographics by displaying messages at a particular time.
• Ads on radio. Radio advertising carries the same benefits as TV advertising, yet it doesn’t depict the visual elements of a brand's product. That’s why it’s usually used by pharmaceutical companies to promote various types of medicine.
• Print ads. Brochures, posters, and flyers are perfect ways of drawing instant attention and awareness. By reaching a huge audience, a brand can effectively generate many prospects. People usually get them near stores or directly to their post boxes. Print ads help marketers advertise sales, huge discounts, product launches, special promotions, etc.
• Tradeshows. They carry several benefits for companies, including creating buzz around a new product, conducting competitive research, and expanding business outreach. Various exhibitions, tradeshows, and other events help businesses demonstrate their latest products and services, meet with industry partners, and communicate with potential clients.
• Search ads. This type of advertising helps display ads when potential customers search for specific products. They appear on top of the search results marked with “Sponsored.” When marketers use this type of advertising, they pay per click and can introduce their products to more people and make them look more relevant.

Now that you know the channels, it‘s time to delve into some effective outbound marketing strategies that will help you attain your business goals faster.

Outbound marketing is a proactive marketing strategy that uses traditional forms of promotion. In this section, we‘ll review them in detail so that you can implement them right.

1. Take advantage of pay-per-click advertising. Consider incorporating PPC advertising into your strategy to reach a wider audience and present your product to it. You can search for high-converting keywords related to your product through Google Keyword Planner. When users will look for similar products, Google will display your ad. For better engagement, it’s necessary to create an ad that communicates your unique selling proposition in short.
2. Send cold emails. Email marketing is still the number one technique for product promotion. People got used to receiving emails containing various offers, updates, and brand product launches daily. However, marketers often forget about cold emailing, which works too. When you initiate communication with prospects, you can reach as many potential customers as possible and get their responses. Yet, you should do your best to avoid looking like spam. For this purpose, it’s recommended to use a special service allowing personalization, segmentation, and A/B testing. These tools enable you to create highly targeted emails and drive interaction and interest.
3. Advertise on social media. People often use social media for various purposes, including shopping, looking for tips and tricks, ideas, entertainment, etc. It usually takes them around 2 hours and 23 minutes daily. This is the main reason for launching sponsored content on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and TikTok. It’ll help you boost reach and connect with new prospects. You’ll be able to increase your following and attain a targeted audience.
4. Incorporate affiliate marketing. You can assign third-party businesses to promote your product or service and get a commission. This approach is especially helpful when you engage in property-related industries when every sale matters, and finding new customers can be challenging because of the initial investments.
5. Run video ads on YouTube. YouTube is an amazing platform for reaching potential customers. You can run your video ad and see how it works with your target audience. It helps gain exposure and awareness and brings more traffic to your website.
6. Incorporate cold calling. With cold calling, you can directly reach prospects and pitch your offer. The main problem here is the leads’ objections. That’s why you should write an effective scenario and prepare your sales reps. Your sales team needs to be able to effectively handle objections and come up with a relevant solution, counterarguments, and a proper description of your product. These elements are essential for maintaining relationships with these prospects and successfully selling your products and services. You should also follow up with these leads to provide additional resources, materials, next steps, etc.
7. Send SMS with special offers. Being straightforward and concise when creating SMS about your sales can help you sell more. Once people receive an SMS, they usually check it quickly. If you deliver eye-catching messages containing enticing offers, discounts, and buy-get-one promos, you’ll encourage leads to explore your offers or buy from you. Everything depends on how relevant they are for a specific location, season, target audience, and time.
8. Use TV and radio. If you target specific demographics, you can take advantage of TV commercials and radio spots. They help you communicate your message based on people’s location. It can be local radio or national TV, depending on your target audience. By developing a strong promotional message, you can increase exposure and boost brand recognition. More prospects will trust your brand and consider purchasing your products.
9. Participate in industry events. Trade shows, conferences, and expos are excellent ways to arouse interest in your products. You’ll be able to expand your audience and showcase your brand and its products, unveil the details, and list the problems it helps solve.
10. Develop a referral program. It’s always a good idea to encourage loyal customers to refer their friends. This proactive approach allows you to reward existing customers and bring new qualified prospects into your company. It’s an excellent way to attract new clients without having to spend a lot of resources on advertising.
11. Promote your product in newspapers and magazines. Print ads still play an essential role in introducing a new brand and product, attracting new prospects, and generating interest. While some companies gain popularity thanks to their influencer marketing campaigns, others educate about their products in newspapers, flyers, magazines, etc.
12. Consider using space on billboards. This strategy is great for big companies with a good budget. Besides grabbing attention, these huge outdoor ads ensure continuous exposure, brand awareness, visibility, wider reach, recognition, and many other benefits. Even more, when businesses manage to do something extraordinary and out of the box to grasp attention, they can have more potential customers in a short time.

Now that you have a list of effective strategies that convert better, it’s time to figure out how to implement outbound marketing successfully.

How to incorporate it?

Although it might seem old school, outbound marketing is still relevant today. It allows you to proactively initiate first contact, introduce products, and stay on top of the minds of potential customers.

To successfully implement outbound marketing, you need to identify the most effective channels. When you do it, you should pay attention to your target audience’s demographics, preferences, needs, and challenges. After that, focus on structured planning and a creative approach for your marketing channels, especially if you decide to place your ads on billboards and TV. A unique and eye-catching ad will help you attract more potential customers.

If you prefer other channels like email campaigns, you should choose a good email marketing platform for better efficiency and performance. When selecting a service, you need to pay attention to the number of emails you can send, A/B testing, personalization and segmentation features, and many more. To successfully deliver email campaigns, consider cleaning your list, creating compelling subject lines, personalizing your message, and A/B testing several options. It’s much easier with a service like SendPulse because of its easy-to-use interface and ready-to-go templates.

Now that you know how to use outbound marketing effectively, let’s proceed to the tools that will help you ensure proper communication with potential clients.

When you are about to integrate outbound marketing strategies into your business, it’s worth considering efficiency. Special tools will help you achieve the necessary result in the shortest possible time. Let’s review 5 excellent platforms for different channels, including SMS outreach, paid media, social media outreach, and emailing.

SendPulse

SendPulse is a multichannel service that takes care of not only email quality but also your sender's reputation. It’s a multipurpose solution that enables you to add contact data to its CRM, verify email addresses, create professional email campaigns, set up a chatbot, and deliver SMS and messages through other channels as well.

Its user-friendly email marketing service allows you to create a unique branded template from scratch or choose from a vast library of templates. You can also segment your recipients into groups based on the message and deliver personalized emails that align with prospects’ needs. Before sending ready emails, you can use a built-in spam checker to avoid being blacklisted and improve email deliverability.

Below, you can see how to create an email campaign using a template in SendPulse.

Pricing:

• free plan: 15,000 emails, 500 subscribers, 3 sender email addresses, 1 domain, and 100 verifications with the email verifier;
• paid plan: unlimited number of emails, 500 subscribers, 100 sender email addresses, 3 domains, 100 verifications with the email verifier, and full A/B testing suite for $8 monthly if paid annually.

Sender

Sender is an all-in-one solution that ensures seamless communication between businesses and their potential customers. It offers multiple marketing tools, including SMS marketing, marketing automation, and email marketing services. These might be useful for different industries like retail, real estate, nonprofits, schools, restaurants, etc.

With the service’s segmentation feature, you can divide leads into groups based on similar characteristics and deliver relevant messages. It might cover location, age, preferences, etc. Moreover, personalization tags will help your SMS look closer to people. Later, you can seamlessly send SMS in bulk to connect with potential customers without much effort.

Below, you’ll see how to create an SMS campaign with Sender.

Pricing:

• free plan: provides access to email marketing but doesn’t offer SMS campaigns.
• paid plan: SMS campaigns, free SMS credits, and SMS automation for $16.67 monthly if paid annually.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social comes in handy for social media outreach when it comes to engagement. The platform empowers you with all the necessary tools to reach new people. With influencer campaign management, you can establish a brand presence and engage with new people who can become potential customers. When using Sprout Social, you can apply smart filters to analyze bloggers and opinion leaders and find those who resonate with the right audiences. As a result, you’ll be able to introduce your brand to people who can find it interesting.

One more valuable feature of Sprout Social is its employee advocacy. With its help, employees share brand content and promote products to new people. As a result, more audiences become aware of the company and turn into prospects.

You can also promote your brand by easily sharing valuable and entertaining content on your social media platforms. You can create funny or eye-catching Reels, and they will reach interested people. The main task here is to share content at the right time. This is easy with the service’s scheduling feature, which you can see below.

Pricing:

• Free plan: 30-day trial.
• Paid plan: From $199 per seat monthly (billed annually) for 5 social profiles, all-in-one social inbox, social content calendar, profiles, keywords and locations monitoring, and paid promotion tools to boost Facebook posts.

Mailjet

Mailjet is a platform that combines several marketing tools, including email marketing services. With its intuitive tools, you can generate more leads with your outbound strategy. You can engage in eCommerce, SaaS, healthcare, or any other industry to benefit from Mailjet.

The service offers all the necessary tools for successful email campaigns, including personalization, A/B testing, pre-built templates, email optimization, segmentation, and dynamic content. After creating email campaigns, you can use the Inbox Preview tool to find out whether your emails look good in Gmail, Apple Mail, and Outlook. After that, you can effectively deliver email campaigns and generate new subscribers.

Below, you can see the process of building an email with Mailjet.

Pricing:

• free plan: 6,000 emails, 1,500 contacts, APIs, SMTP relay, webhooks, and basic statistics;
• paid plan: 15,000 emails, unlimited contacts, 500 email previews, 500 email address validations, and segmentation for $15.30 monthly if paid annually.

Google Ads

Google Ads is an advertising service enabling businesses to display ads on Google. The platform offers a wide range of advertising, including search, display, video, shopping, app, and other types of advertising. It will come in handy when you want to reach people you have never communicated with and generate new prospects.

You can take advantage of PPC ads during your outbound campaign. It will help you reach people who look for similar products on Google. When they insert specific keywords related to your business, your ad will appear at the top of the search results page. Besides search advertising, the platform offers display ads allowing your brand to advertise on Google's Display Network. It covers a huge number of websites, apps, and YouTube. When being advertised in such a way, your ad is presented as an image or text, depending on your liking.

Below, you can see Google Ads’ dashboard for managing campaigns.

Pricing:

The pricing of advertising campaigns depends on the pricing model you decide to choose. If you are interested in PPC advertising, it will cost you around $0.10 to $50+ or more based on factors such as keyword competition, industry, and ad quality. The cost-per-impression model will cost you between $1 and $10 per thousand impressions. The price might vary depending on targeting, format, and the competition for space.

Now that you have the tools, it’s necessary to grab some inspiration from the examples and proceed to the real implementation.

Inspiring Outbound Marketing Examples

There are a lot of brands that successfully implement outbound techniques into their marketing strategy. Here, you’ll find some outstanding examples of effective planning and a creative approach.

Billboards: Hoka

Hoka’s digital billboard grabs the attention of people passing by and makes them discover the brand. Its bright colors and visible location help people see the billboard from afar. It reminds them of the brand and encourages them to visit the nearest stores for a new pair of Hoka.

TV ad: Old Spice

Many people will recognize the old but gold TV advertising from Old Spice. Launching several humorous commercials with Isaiah Mustafa helped this American brand of male grooming products grab customers’ eyes and gain a huge buzz around it. With this campaign, the company succeeded in revitalizing the brand and targeting younger men. These TV commercials’ humor and personality empowered the company and allowed it to become viral not only on TV but also on social media and YouTube.

Search ads: MailerLite

MailerLite proves that search ads are an effective way of reaching people by aligning with their needs. This email service platform targets potential customers based on their search inquiry and makes these people find the company and consider it for solving their problems.

Outbound marketing is an effective strategy if you implement it right. It targets a large audience and helps reach instant results related to brand awareness, recognition, and sales. Develop your strategy and identify the right tool to boost conversions.

Last Updated: 22.11.2024