In some posts already published here on our blog, we talked a bit about Inbound Marketing. Today, we're going to clarify how and why Outbound Marketing is also an important strategy for your business.
To do that, how about understanding Outbound Marketing?
An analogy that explains this strategy well is: outbound is fishing with a net, it's grabbing a megaphone to capture your audience's attention. Examples? Billboards and banners on websites, radio, TV, and even YouTube ads, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, etc.
Many think investing in this strategy is old-fashioned, but when used in the right way alongside Inbound, the gains can be huge.
Podemos dizer que existem dois tipos de Outbound, o tradicional e o 2.0. No tradicional, a direção da comunicação é unilateral, onde a empresa entra em contato com o público usando um veículo de mídia, como em um comercial de TV. Nele, você atinge um volume muito grande de pessoas, mas pouca personalização. O objetivo é gerar desejo e incentivar na tomada de decisão. Um exemplo fácil é um comercial de perfume do Antonio Banderas: o ator passa o perfume e, logo depois, está em uma lancha com modelos belíssimas.
With the arrival of the internet, the way marketing was done changed. Any company that works its SEO (Search Engine Optimization) well ends up ranking well and being found by its audience. What's more, this strategy is much cheaper than a TV commercial.
From there came the need to produce quality content to attract more people, and thus generate more sales. Because of this, Content Marketing became a passive way to bring more customers to the business.
Due to all this movement and the market's “update,” outbound started to be seen as the ugly duckling. While it needed several people and efforts involved to guarantee returns, inbound delivered returns with lower investment in personnel.
Aaron Ross, an engineer who took over managing Salesforce's sales team, revolutionized the company's results with Outbound 2.0. It follows this reasoning:
- A sales team is made up of salespeople with different profiles, some better at prospecting clients and others at closing deals;
- Experienced salespeople are usually terrible prospectors. Likewise, good prospectors struggle to keep up the prospecting pace once they reach a certain number of clients;
- When you have your salespeople handling each client throughout the entire buying journey, you're overloading your team and wasting your employees' skills;
- Besides, it makes no sense to waste your salespeople's time prospecting randomly if you have ways to find out who really has a fit to become a customer.
Ross's solution is quite simple. You just need to split your team into three levels:
- Business Intelligence (BI):specialists at finding companies with a fitting profile for your solution, they hand the prospector the contact of the decision-maker (smart lead);
- Hunters:responsible for prospecting new customers, they make the first contact with the lead and run the entire qualification process;
- Closers:responsible only for closing deals, they take qualified leads and turn them into customers.
This way, you gain scale and work with a team of specialists.
This strategy, implemented by Aaron, worked so well that it turned Salesforce into the giant it is today and made this new outbound approach a trend.
We've listed 5 advantages of outbound for your business:
- Faster ROI
Outbound can bring customers to your company in as little as a week, depending on your sales cycle. Therefore, the return on investment happens faster.
- Easily measurable
By properly analyzing your process data and following up on it, conversion rates tend to reach good levels, and you can better direct your strategies.
Also, since ROI is faster, you get a sample for analysis in much less time. As a result, you can make decisions based on both quantitative and qualitative data.
- Ease of finding professionals in the field
The traditional sales market has been around for a long time, and regardless of technical quality, there's no shortage of salespeople in the world.
- Speed to validate assumptions
If you reach out to a thousand leads in 1 month, you already have a large enough sample to validate whether your personas, messaging, and communication are on point.
- Contact assertiveness
In the new outbound, you objectively choose who you'll talk to. Personalized contact in sales increases the final conversion, since the buyer is talking directly with another person.
Do I have to choose between Inbound and Outbound?
No! They are not mutually exclusive. If your business fits the profile, you can combine both strategies to achieve impressive results.
Let's understand this?
Let's start from the red ocean and blue ocean analogy: if your business is in a highly competitive market, fighting for the top spot on Google, you're sailing the red ocean. If your business is new and ranking is relatively easy, your ship is in the blue ocean.
Companies in the red ocean run the risk of not getting good results with inbound, unless they've already been investing in it for a while. Those in the blue ocean, on the other hand, have a better chance of getting ahead with an inbound strategy, since the path is clear to build their authority.
Combining the strategies
Red ocean
Yes! Inbound can bring good results in a competitive scenario when aligned with outbound marketing, even though it doesn't have as much potential a priori.
While outbound handles revenue generation, inbound focuses on “stealing” the top spots on Google through SEO techniques, in the short term. As the inbound process scales up, the outbound team's efforts will need to be redirected toward closing strategic accounts.
Despite the evolution of inbound marketing, it's not smart to completely set aside outbound strategies. They're important from the start, increasing the speed of monetization and even bringing strategic companies into your customer base, boosting your standing in the market and making it easier to position yourself as a future trustworthy supplier for big brands.
And what if you combine both strategies? Creating more efficient training and shortening the sales cycle are some of the advantages.
Underestimating the secondary gains these strategies can offer can make your business lose money, involving unnecessary costs and failing to make the most of what you already do best.
Interested? Get in touch with us! We can help you. ?
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Sources: Rock content
