An effective, balanced marketing strategy will read like a romance. The key players in this love story are inbound and outbound marketing. Although they accomplish different goals inbound and outbound marketing strategies and tactics are complementary. The strengths of one approach are often the weaknesses of the other approach and marrying them together will help you optimize your marketing efforts and results.
What Is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is about attracting prospects to your brand by creating and promoting marketing content that addresses a need or helps a potential customer solve a problem. The key to effective inbound marketing is to place the content you create in locations where your ideal customers are likely to find it when they have a need. The premise behind inbound marketing is that if you are offering your audience the right content, they will find you through search, social media and word of mouth. Inbound marketing includes blogging, content creation, search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), and social media engagement. Although inbound marketing is effective for prospects already searching for answers, it is only effective if it’s based on a client-focused marketing strategy.
What Is Outbound Marketing?
Outbound marketing targets a very specific audience and reaches out to them directly. With outbound tactics, your brand initiates the conversation instead of the customer. Examples of outbound marketing techniques include telemarketing, email campaigns, events and traditional advertising. Outbound strategies can definitely improve the effectiveness of a marketing program if they are centered around the target customers and tightly integrated with the inbound content strategy.
How To Integrate Inbound And Outbound
Consider integrating inbound and outbound in the following ways:
- Know who your ideal customer is and personalize your marketing communications
- Share customer preferences, responses, promotions and engagement history across all marketing channels. Learn from historical data.
- Offer the same promotions, offers, incentives and treatment to all customers across both inbound and outbound channels to safeguard your brand and provide continuity for your customer experience as well as develop trust in your brand
- Have inbound and outbound marketers share in planning to encourage consistency, develop best practices and share knowledge. If something is working really well in one channel the teams should be able to replicate that success across all channels.
- Ensure that all content and communications have consistent messaging whether it is an outbound communication or an inbound communication such as social media posts or website copy.
- Include insights into the level of engagement the prospect has had with your content when you hand off leads to your sales team. Inform them about how the lead was attracted, what messages they engaged with and took action upon, and what they were expecting from their action.
- Create talking points and educational materials your sales people can use to help potential customers along the buying journey or to follow up with people who have registered for content or events.
- Use outbound marketing in the form of advertising to promote content offers, and then have a nurturing plan for leads that are attracted through this channel.
Balance
In business-to-business marketing, there is a great deal of value in combining inbound and outbound marketing but they must be used strategically. Inbound is great because you have the ability to attract prospects to you cost-effectively. Targeted outbound marketing is also useful because it can help you qualify leads generated by inbound programs, reach target prospects that don’t yet realize they have a need, and reach more members of the buying community in general.
