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How to Use Outbound Marketing to Build Your Business

Photo by Hello I’m Nik on Unsplash

Inbound marketing is the standard way to reach your target audience these days. But its sibling, outbound marketing, is still an effective option.

In this post, we share with you how directly reaching out to customers can be a fantastic way to build your business.

What Is Outbound Marketing?

Even if you’re wondering what outbound marketing is, you actually already know what it is. It’s when you push a message out to the public. This could be through TV, print ads, cold emails, and billboards.

There’s debate about whether this type of marketing works or not. Most people would say no. However, that’s probably because they’re doing it wrong.

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Why Outbound Marketing Still Works

Inbound marketing has been effective for a while. However, there’s been a dip in inbound marketing success rates.

Social media and search engines—two of the biggest inbound marketing referrers—are sending less traffic to websites. Also, promoting content is not creating as many referrals as it once did.

It’s not that you shouldn’t use inbound marketing. You definitely should. You have to. But you also need to use outbound marketing.

Even though people cringe at the thought of outbound marketing, it works. Nobody likes sales calls, and it’s a waste of paper to send print ads to every address in town. But outbound marketing done well, specifically cold emailing, generates leads and converts strangers into customers.

We’ll look more at this in the next section.

How to Combine Inbound and Outbound Marketing Effectively

There are three outbound marketing methods that perform a lot better than the rest: cold emails, trade shows and other networking events, and advertisements.

Cold Emails

Cold emails are possibly the best outbound marketing tactic you can use. This is because they’re not annoying like sales calls are. Plus, you can better personalize them.

The first step is to generate solid leads. In other words, you want to reach out to people who would actually want to hear from you if they had heard of you.

A great way to find good leads is through LinkedIn Sales Navigator. It’s a premium account with features that help you find people who could be interested in buying what you’re selling.

You can use several filters for this form of outbound marketing. For example, you can sort by industry, job position, location, and more to find the right people to contact. Then, once you have your leads, you can put all of those LinkedIn profiles onto an organized list. Next, you can export their email addresses to start your cold email campaign.

Important Tips for Cold Emails

When you start cold emailing people, use these tips to make them as efficient as possible:

  • Research your leads: Don’t just assume every lead you’ve collected is in your target audience. You will have to become somewhat familiar with each person you’re emailing.
  • Include personal facts: This is why you do research on each person. You need to make each email personalized to the recipient, or else your cold email will go right to the trash.
  • Write a short and relevant subject line: The subject of your email will determine if your email gets opened or not. So make it short and ensure it means something to the recipient. Good examples are, “Quick question for you,” and, “What are your goals for this quarter?”
  • Nail the opening line: People can see the beginning of an email before they even open it. Try opening your email with something like, “I noticed you were interested in…” or “Congrats on the new job!”

Trade Shows

Going to trade shows and conferences is a super effective way to do outbound marketing. You might not think of networking as a form of marketing, but it is. It’s outbound marketing because you’re going “out” to potential customers to “market” yourself.

Plus, you never know you who you might meet.

“Trade shows and events still deliver great leads, especially when combined with inbound methods,” says Darren Leishman of Spitfire Inbound. “We use events to attract new, interested customers and engage with prospects on a one-to-one basis.”

So don’t overlook trade shows when you’re planning your outbound marketing efforts. Also, always make sure you have business cards on you.

Search Ads and Social Media Ads

SEO is a great method for growing your inbound traffic over a long period of time. But if you need some short-term traffic, you can buy advertisements that appear in search results. This is an especially good idea if you have just started using SEO and content marketing because it helps give your site traffic a little boost at the beginning.

This also works with social media ads. As Referral Rock’s Jay Kang says, ads on both social media and search results are effective.

“We use some of [the keywords an article isn’t ranking well for] to create titles for both search ads and social media ads,” he says. “This helps with ranking for the keywords as well as targeting user intent.”

Conclusion

So don’t abandon your inbound marketing efforts, but do reach out directly to your target audience. Learn to be effective with outbound marketing, too.