I’d like to start this post with a shocking and controversial claim: Outbound marketing is not dead. Nor, as some might assert, should it be.
When I hear everyone raving about inbound marketing and how it’s the only way to go these days, it makes me cringe.
I don’t know many small companies that can afford to spend money on creating endless content, hoping it eventually gets indexed by search engines, drives traffic to their site and generates leads. Personally, I don’t care to put my destiny 100% in the hands of search engines or social media sites. So what’s a marketer to do?
Balance, my friends, balance. Marketers must balance their outbound marketing efforts with their inbound efforts.
I recently spoke with Chris Osborn, VP of Marketing at BizLibrary in St. Louis, on this topic. He agreed with me, and went on to illustrate the process in an interesting way.
When you’re first starting out, your marketing efforts should be focused on outbound marketing strategies because you need leads/sales to stay in business. After all, without profit, nothing is possible. So, email and telemarketing might make up most of your marketing efforts in the beginning.
Over time, you replace your outbound marketing efforts with inbound marketing campaigns or content marketing and distribution strategies.
I love this model and kept it in mind when creating these five steps to help businesses rapidly drive revenue:
- Know thy customers
- Market to a larger targeted audience
- Qualify leads faster
- Close more sales
- Keep your existing customers
Let’s take a look at each one of these, shall we?
1. Know thy customer
Start with building out three basic personas based on your existing customers. Some people will tell you there are anywhere from 13-18 personas involved in any major purchase decision, but don’t listen. Focus your efforts on the three primary personas below:
- End user of your product or service (usually staff or managers)
- The end user’s boss or decision maker (usually a Director or VP)
- Financial authority (usually C-suite executive)
Be as relevant as possible and address each persona’s pain. For example, an end user may be mainly concerned with how easy your product is to use, while a decision maker may be more interested in how it will increase efficiencies or drive sales. The financial authority will likely be more interested in upfront costs or ROI.
Your message must resonate with each persona based on where they are in the sales cycle.
I like Michele Grieshaber’s sales cycle stages (he’s the CMO of Silicon Labs): Learn, Solve, Compare, Purchase – and I added Loyalty. By looking at the sales stages form a prospect’s perspective you’re able to market more effectively.
From top of the funnel down it looks like this:
Learn – I think I have a problem.
Solve – How do I solve that problem?
Compare – Am I solving the problem the right way?
Purchase – Help me make a purchase decision.
Loyalty – Show me you appreciate me as a customer.
2. Market to a larger targeted audience
To reach a larger audience, buy or acquire more contact data that matches the ideal customers in step one.
There is no shortage of data providers out there (i.e. Hoovers, DNB, Netprospex, Data.com, Zoominfo etc.), so find the one that’s right for you. It’s simple math — the more people you reach, the greater the chance you’ll find someone with a problem you can fix.
I like Social 123. These guys get their data from LinkedIn and it’s very powerful. Most business professionals have created LinkedIn profiles (400 million global contacts and 107 million in the US), so that’s a good place to start.
What I like best about their data is the ability to find contacts, including the email addresses of people who belong to particular LinkedIn groups. People who show interest in certain topics tend to outperform people who just have a matching demographic profile.
Once you have that data, email marketing is still one of the best ways to reach a lot of people quickly, but you need to be smart and careful about using it.
Remember the following:
- Relevance is key. That’s why personas are so important. Make sure you are providing your recipients with engaging and useful information.
- Create a secondary email domain for outbound email marketing instead of using your main domain. (Never mass email out of your main email domain)
- Segment your lists by industry, title, and/or persona.
- Ensure that your email template is responsive. Over 50% of emails are opened on mobile devices, so it’s imperative your email looks great and is easy to navigate on phones, tablets, or desktops.
3. Qualify leads faster
Make it faster and easier to qualify leads by using a marketing automation platform. Marketing automation helps you market to prospects, track their online behavior (email opens, click-throughs, web visits, downloads etc.), score that behavior and pass that information to a sales team to help prioritize their most precious commodity, their time.
Keep in mind that marketing automation can be a challenge to implement and costly if done incorrectly, so I suggest you hire an agency with marketing automation experience (ideally one that’s experienced with multiple platforms).
In my experience the statistics are clear, businesses who have an agency partner use more of the automation capabilities and generate higher ROIs than those who do not.
The other main reason for marketing automation is lead nurturing. Especially with businesses that sell a considered purchase with an extended sales cycle, marketing automation can help you stay connected with prospects over a long period of time.
This means they’ll remember you when they are ready to buy. Typically only 25% of the leads you generate today will buy in year one with 75% of your leads buying in year two or three. So if you are not doing lead nurturing 75% of your lead generation budget is being wasted.
4. Close more sales
While closing is primarily a function of your sales team, marketing needs to ensure that the leads that are being passed along are qualified, so salespeople aren’t wasting their time following up with people who are not interested. Additionally, the sales team needs to be educated on the messages that marketing is promoting.
Bottom line: marketing and sales need to be aligned to be successful.
All lead management, routing, and scoring discussions should include both sales and marketing. The teams should work together to create a service level agreement that defines what determines a qualified lead and how they will be handled.
For example, sales and marketing might agree to set lead scoring parameters in their marketing automation system as follows:
- 1 point for every webpage visit
- 5 points for downloading a white paper or case study
- 10 points for attending a webinar
- 25 points for filling out the contact us form
Sales would then follow up any leads passed with a lead score of 50 points or more within 12 hours, etc.
The idea is to market to more people/personas, be as relevant as possible, track their behavior, score that behavior and pass on the leads showing the most buying behavior. Easy peasy.
Just keep in mind you will be changing your behavioral lead scoring model over time. Marketing needs to ask sales if the leads they are sending are truly qualified or if they need to make adjustments.
5. Keep your existing customers
Anyone who has been in marketing knows that it costs more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one.
Prove to your customers that you appreciate their business by doing things like:
- Setting up loyalty programs
- Engaging with them on social media
- Continuing to send them emails to follow up with them, and send them resources, promotions or event invitations according to their interests.
- Making in-person visits to key accounts. This can have more impact if members of your executive team visit.
Bottom line: every customer lost impacts your revenue goals. Make customer appreciation and retention a priority.
So that’s it. By combining proven inbound and outbound marketing strategies and following these five steps, you’ll be sure to start seeing a measurable impact on your sales.
Shawn Elledge, founder of the Integrated Marketing Summit and Demandcon, has been dedicated to the continued education of business and marketing professionals since 2009. Shawn recently joined Roger West, a digital marketing agency headquartered in Tampa, to help clients rapidly drive revenue.
