The Secret to Inbound and Outbound Marketing Tactics

In today’s world, it can seem like there are so many different types of marketing strategies you could be employing. Inbound marketing, Outbound marketing, Content Marketing, Social Selling, Social Media… it can get pretty overwhelming! Today we’re going to explain the differences between inbound marketing and outbound marketing tactics, and even let you in on a little secret technique of ours.

What is Outbound Marketing?

Outbound marketing is really anything that you do that gets your message “out” to the public. This means you’re taking steps to reach prospective clients who aren’t looking for you; they may be your perfect customer, and they may have a dire need for your product, but they don’t know it yet!

So, you’ll use outbound marketing tactics to reach out and make first contact with these leads. Examples include cold emails and phone calls, advertising, and even events such as trade fairs.

In order for outbound marketing to work, the key is quantity. While you may be contacting loads of potential customers, only a small fraction of these contacts will convert into sales. This means you want to find as many contacts as possible; as I wrote in My Top 5 Sales Secrets, you gotta always be prospecting!

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing involves the content and messaging that you aim at inbound leads who are actively searching for your company, or products and services your company provides.

As any savvy marketer knows, you have to attract the customers who want your product or service even if they don’t know who you are yet. One way to attract these prospective clients is to blog about the type of content that interests them, employing the same keywords in your blog posts that your customers will be searching for. This way, they’re more likely to connect with your content since it’s relevant to what they’re trying to find.

For example: if you have pet store, you could write about cat food, dog food, how to take care of animals, etc. on your website and blog.

Besides this important SEO tactic, a few other types of marketing strategies for inbound lead generation are things like a strong social media presence, top notch web design, and great on-site content that’s informative, appealing, and actionable. Inbound marketing should cover every step of the inbound lead’s journey, from the time the search for a product to the time they’re ready to enter their payment information on your website.

Smart Outbound Marketing

Neither marketing strategy will work 100% all on its own – you cannot completely ignore outbound marketing nor ignore inbound marketing. The best marketing tactics will incorporate a little bit of both.

Now we’ll let you in on a little secret that we use at FindThatLead: we believe in a strategy that we like to call Smart Outbound Marketing. This is a set of marketing tactics involving outbound communications, but with smart targeting of your best leads. Hence, smart outbound marketing!

You could spend tons of resources plastering your message all over the place for any and all to see, hoping that the right customer will drift by and catch it. Or, you could set your goals more efficiently and focus your marketing efforts on those prospects whose profiles make it clear that they’re already interested in products like yours. It’s a combination of the two strategies; while these prospective clients didn’t specifically search for your business, you already know that they need you!

We recommend researching your leads first; find things like the company they work for and the title of their position. Then, lookup their email addresses on Linkedin with our FindThatLead plugin. When you contact your leads, you already know that they’re interested in products like yours and will be more interested to hear from you. A win-win!

Do you have any other ideas for Smart Marketing Actions? Have you tried our FindThatLead plugin? Give it a try and let us know!