Outbound marketing is about initiating a conversation with the customers. It used to be all about cold calls, direct emails, and TV commercials. But nowadays, outbound marketing has become a lot more complicated since the advance of the digital world.
Outbound marketing now includes cold emailing and paid ads such as Google and Facebook Ads. Outbound marketing plays a significant role in driving success.
Outbound marketing was the only way to market your brand and product until the internet changed everything. The goal of this marketing approach is to build a relationship through targeted communication and engagement.
In outbound sales prospecting, companies compete for the customer’s attention by becoming more of a known brand or popular choices through different marketing strategies.
To successfully execute outbound marketing campaigns, it’s crucial to understand the potential challenges and how to overcome them. Familiarizing yourself with best practices and tips for outbound marketing can help you navigate these challenges more effectively.
Outbound marketing vs Inbound marketing
Inbound and outbound marketing are two distinct marketing strategies. Outbound marketing involves proactively reaching out to potential customers through traditional and mass media platforms.
In contrast, inbound marketing focuses on creating and distributing content to attract and engage customers. While outbound marketing may produce faster results, inbound marketing can help build greater trust and loyalty with customers.
The importance of outbound marketing
Outbound marketing is a valuable tool for connecting with a wide range of audiences and achieving awareness-based objectives.
It targets a large and diverse audience, including those who may not have heard of or shown interest in your brand before.
By using outbound marketing, you can quickly spread brand awareness and support your inbound marketing efforts.
The goal of outbound marketing is to actively build authentic relationships through targeted communications and engagement, positioning your company in the right place at the right time.
Common challenges of outbound marketing you can encounter
Most of the challenges of outbound marketing are associated with traditional outbound methods where little to no Internet-related tactics are used.
The challenges of traditional outbound marketing below will make you rethink your marketing strategy and want to speed up your process of going digital.
1. Difficult to track the return on investment (ROI)
Return on investment (a.k.a ROI) is a metric that shows how much you made per investment and whether or not you’re profitable. For example, if you spent $100 for ads and got a client who purchased a $50 product. Then, your ROI is less than 50% and this means you’re losing money.
It doesn’t look or sound complicated to calculate correct ROIs, however, sometimes, it’s very tricky to get an accurate ROI, especially for traditional outbound marketing strategies such as cold calling, direct mail, or TV commercials.
If you’re calculating the wrong ROIs, there’s a big chance that your business is losing money without even knowing.
The challenge of getting accurate ROIs is one of the biggest hurdles of outbound marketing because it can be very damaging, especially when the executives are also busy with other complex tasks and have no time to dig deeper into how their marketing efforts are doing.
2. High cost and low yield
Having a big budget for outbound marketing campaigns is a big challenge for small businesses. The cost usually depends on the type of advertisement. Online methods are usually much cheaper than offline ads.
For the offline advertisement, you will end up spending more than you receive in return. It may also take longer to see the results.
Nowadays, offline marketing is losing ground to digital marketing since digital marketing presents more opportunities at lower costs. However, many companies are still struggling to go digital, especially in the traditional sector.
3. It can be a one-way communication system
There are no real opportunities to engage with your targeted audience if you put up advertising banners by the roads. Outbound marketing in this way is challenging for advertisers to track its performance and engage with their potential clients.
The most common way to know how people are responding to your traditional outbound marketing campaigns is by carrying out surveys. Organizing groups and surveys take time and cost you a lot of money.
You can say that some traditional outbound marketing strategies are a one-way street. Businesses only tell people what they want their targeted audience to know and leave the rest to them.
4. It’s not targeted
One of the main disadvantages of traditional outbound marketing is that it is not targeted. It makes this marketing approach less effective and more costly.
Finding a targeted audience and creating ads that target them specifically is crucial for being successful in this saturated business world. It’s much harder to do these in offline marketing compared to online marketing where these tasks can be done in less than an hour.
5. People pay less attention to the advertisements
According to a recent study, over 90% of Internet clicks are generated through inbound marketing, and only 10% are through outbound marketing. People are not interested in ads; they want to find things themselves.
One of the key challenges of outbound marketing is people tend to pay less and less attention to the advertisement, especially offline ones.
Imagine if it’s already this difficult to get your prospects to engage in online outbound marketing, getting their engagement in ways such as TV commercials and billboard ads will be a lot more challenging.
6. Finding the most qualified leads takes a lot of time
Generating qualified leads with outbound marketing whether online or not in general is a very time-consuming task. But it exists because it’s working.
It may not be working for some businesses but it is for others. The fact that most businesses rely on ads to make money and grow tells you how important today’s outbound marketing is.
Online ads actually can generate leads and sales very fast, but whether or not it’s an effective marketing strategy for your business depends on many factors including your niche, products, how well you set up ads and understand your audience, etc.
Strategies you can use to overcome challenges of outbound marketing
Everything that helps you make money will have some challenges. More than often, the more challenges that you overcome, the more money you’ll be able to generate.
We’ve listed out some of the most common ways to make your outbound marketing campaigns more effective.
1. Produce content that is useful and relevant
It is essential in any marketing campaign that you are providing value for your customers. You cannot expect them to promote your business without providing them with something they want.
You must create content that is useful and relevant to your customers, then try to get them in front of the right people at the right time to overcome the above-mentioned challenges of outbound marketing. An essential way to produce relevant content is to analyze your past strategies and campaigns’ performance metrics.
Additionally, incorporating compelling CTAs (Call-to-Actions) in your marketing campaigns can help increase your conversion rate. To create effective CTAs, make sure they are easily visible and stand out with vibrant colors and concise, compelling text.
CTAs should guide consumers to the next stage and appeal to their needs. Using social proof and offering incentives can also enhance their effectiveness.
2. You must segment your audience
If you want to provide the right information to the customers with your outbound marketing tactics, segment your audience. Make sure to reach the right audience at the right time.
Do your research on where your potential customers find information and how they consume it. This strategy will help with your marketing performance significantly.
For example, choosing the right ad platform and targeting your relevant ad content to the right groups of prospects will result in better results and lower costs.
3. Keeping things concise and clear
Whether you are creating ads or emails for outbound marketing, make sure to keep things concise since nobody wants to read walls of text about a new brand that is trying to sell.
Making it easy for the customers to understand your message is vital. Also, it’s important to pay attention to your content’s design and layout to make your message concise and appealing to the readers.
4. Only contact people who want to be contacted
We don’t like making and receiving cold calling, it’s extremely annoying when you’re contacted by a business that sells things irrelevant to what you’re interested in.
Make sure to contact only those who want to be contacted. You should only contact those who are recently engaged on your website and other marketing channels.
One thing to keep in mind is to contact those that have shown a significant amount of interest. Use your resources to draw in the customers, not scare them off.
5. Track the performance metrics and optimize your outbound marketing campaigns continuously
Closely monitoring your outbound marketing performance and optimizing your campaigns can lead to better results.
To achieve this, it’s important to select the right KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to measure and analyze your campaigns.
Setting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely) goals for your marketing campaigns can help you track your progress and make informed decisions.
By continuously optimizing your campaigns, you can gain a deeper understanding of your potential customers, thus creating more effective messaging for them and generating more sales.
