As a B2B marketer, you are already aware of how outbound and inbound marketing work. But have you tried combining the two marketing powerhouses? Using a strategic and intelligent mix of outbound and inbound strategies enables you to make your B2B marketing more effective and improve your sales and marketing funnel.
What is Outbound Marketing?
Also known as push or interruption marketing, outbound marketing is a traditional marketing tactic. Outbound marketers reach out to an audience to make a sale or see if they’re interested in a brand or product. Initiating the conversation with prospects, outbound messages are sent to bring a brand or product to their attention, unlike inbound or pull marketing messages.
Typical outbound marketing activities include cold calling or emailing, radio/TV/print advertising, mass emailing, sending direct mail, and organizing seminar series or trade shows.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is the opposite of outbound marketing. It is used to draw in or magnetize target audiences toward a brand or product instead of pushing a brand or product onto them. It mainly involves attracting buyer personas or targeted prospects, engaging and building long-term relationships with them, and delighting them with a great experience and strong support before and after a purchase.
Some of the inbound marketing examples are social media marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing (eBooks, whitepapers, case studies, blogs, and how-to videos), inbound sales calling and emailing, and surveys and chatbots.
6 Ideas to Use Outbound and Inbound Marketing Together
Let’s see how you can combine outbound and inbound marketing strategies to achieve great marketing success, maximize your B2B outreach, and build more meaningful relationships.
1. Support your outbound tactics with inbound emails
Once the target audience responds to your outbound marketing, use inbound email marketing to increase engagement, build trust, and fuel their interest in your brand. For example, you can first make outbound calls about your event. Then after someone has engaged with you, you can send emails to your in-person event registrants to remind them about your event, tell them what they should expect, why they should attend, and inform them about discounts and giveaways for attendees.
After the event ends, you can send attendees a thank you email, ask for their feedback, send them a short survey, or give a recap of the event to those who did not attend. Inbound email is also a great way to nurture interested prospects or keep your products in front of them.
For example, you can send educational content like an eBook to prospects who have shown interest after an outbound call or responded to your display ad. Additionally, you can send them informational inbound emails that include content specific to their industry, address their problems, and show how you’re one of the solutions that can help them.
Be sure to use targeted email list segmentation, personalize your email messages, and use the right email marketing tools to gain a higher ROI. Segmented email campaigns increase revenue by over 760%.
2. Become more strategic with ABM and content marketing
Account-based marketing (ABM) is already is a highly targeted marketing strategy. Including content marketing in your ABM plan allows you to take a hyper-targeted marketing approach. Approximately 52% of B2B marketers said ABM was a tactic that perfectly complemented several marketing activities of their organization.
In ABM, you already know the specific, high-value accounts you need to target and where they are in their buyer’s journey. With relevant, customized, and value-added content, you can create a greater impact on your ABM-defined target accounts outbound efforts.
Create such content for each buyer’s journey stage of your targets while focusing on their unique needs, pain points, and expectations to take your ABM game to the next level. This will also help you convert targets into paying customers faster.
Combining ABM and content marketing also allows you to repurpose content to save time and resources. For example, you can create inbound marketing content that helps you reach a wider audience and is also detailed enough to attract the accounts you need to target in your ABM campaign.
You can also use your ABM content to strengthen your inbound content marketing strategy. For example, the personalized eBooks, case studies, and whitepapers you create to target specific accounts with ABM can be repurposed and added to your website to add more value to your online resources.
3. Use direct mail to increase your digital marketing success rate
Combining direct mail and digital marketing is a fantastic way to get the best of both worlds – online and offline marketing. With just 3% of online shoppers actually converting on average, direct mail can be a useful tool to close the 97% online conversion gap. Personalize your direct mail, include intelligent CTAs, perfectly time your sends, and measure the ROI to effectively use direct mail marketing to boost digital marketing performance.
Implement a data-first approach and use a lead scoring model to know exactly who you need to target with direct mail to support your digital marketing efforts. Use intent data to study the online behavior of your target audience, the content they consume, and if they are close to sales-ready. Install website visitor intelligence tools to know what type of visitors interact with your website, which pages they browse the most, and what types of CTA or ad draw them in.
Data intelligence is essential in direct mail marketing. Direct mail is expensive. You need to be sure that your efforts are directed toward the right people who can give you the business you’re expecting in return. That’s where accurate B2B data plays a key role.
4. Increase and drive back web traffic with SEO and retargeting
SEO is a commonly-used inbound digital marketing tactic to improve the quality and quantity of traffic to a website or web page. While you may use SEO to drive website traffic, visitors will likely bounce off your website without purchasing the first time they visit.
With retargeting, you can pull back your lost website visitors and push them to take action – for example, purchasing the product they clicked on but never bought. Use different retargeting channels like search retargeting, Google display ads, social ads (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn), display advertising units for mobile apps, geofencing advertising, email, and web push notifications. Cross-channel retargeting campaigns can give you a higher ROI and deeply complement your SEO strategy.
Retargeting ads should include compelling, interesting, and catchy texts or CTAs like “Read our latest ultimate and complete guide on…,” “The product you love is now at 20% off,” “We’ve added new features relevant to your market,” and “Complete your purchase now to get 10% discount.”
Paid search and display advertising are other forms of outbound marketing that not only help pull back visitors who have bounced off your website, but they can also find new visitors for you. They also make a great combination with SEO.
You may not be cold calling or emailing the same people you engage with on social media or whose social media responses and behavior you analyze. However, social media listening or monitoring can help add significant value to your cold outreach campaigns.
When you know what your target audience is looking for, what gets them engaged, how they interact with your brand, you’ll be well-equipped to reach your cold calling or emailing goals.
Furthermore, you can use the contact data collected through social media surveys to add new prospects to your cold call or email list. With that said, make sure your contact list is clean and updated. Data enrichment is the best way to ensure that.
6. Use outbound emailing and inbound calling to expedite lead generation
Outbound emailing and inbound calling are productive combinations that can yield great results. Combining the two helps you quickly generate leads, qualify, and convert them into customers.
Attract prospects who’re genuinely interested in your brand using data-driven outbound email marketing. Remember to segment your audience, personalize your email content, and use email sequences and automation to power your outbound emailing.
Once you get a response from interested prospects through outbound emailing or they start engaging with your brand, nurture them with inbound calling. Take the message that the prospect initially engaged with and expand on it. Sales reps can do this by answering specific questions of prospects, explaining how your solutions can add value to them, and asking them to take a free trial or schedule a demo.
Here are some important definitions
Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing B2B
Inbound marketing is a customer-centric approach that focuses on attracting and engaging potential customers through relevant and valuable content and experiences. Outbound marketing, on the other hand, is a more traditional approach that involves actively reaching out to potential customers through tactics such as cold calling and direct mail. In B2B (business-to-business) marketing, both inbound and outbound strategies can be effective, but inbound tends to be more popular due to its focus on building relationships and providing value to potential customers.
Account Based Marketing (ABM) vs Inbound Marketing
ABM (account-based marketing) is a targeted marketing approach that focuses on specific, high-value accounts. Inbound marketing, on the other hand, is a customer-centric approach that aims to attract and engage potential customers through relevant, valuable content. Both approaches can be effective in the right circumstances, and some companies choose to use a combination of both.
Outbound vs Inbound Email
Outbound email marketing involves sending marketing messages to a large list of recipients, often through email campaigns or newsletters. Inbound email marketing, on the other hand, involves receiving and responding to customer inquiries or comments through email. Outbound email is typically used to promote products or services to a large audience, while inbound email is focused on building relationships and providing customer support. Both approaches can be effective in the right circumstances, and some companies choose to use a combination of both.
Conclusion
Combining outbound and inbound marketing is a foolproof marketing approach. With these six ways to combine the two impactful marketing strategies, you can give your target audience a more well-rounded idea of your B2B company. Furthermore, your B2B brand can be well-positioned to have a two-way conversation with prospects or customers as outbound marketing pushes you closer to them, and inbound marketing pushes them closer to you.
Most outbound-inbound marketing combinations require accurate, clean, and relevant B2B data to function properly and bring about the best outcome. Data can either support or ruin your marketing plan depending on the quality and choice of data. Thanks to SalesIntel, your B2B company doesn’t need to hunt anymore for the contacts and companies you need for outbound, inbound, or combination marketing.
We have over 6+ million human-verified B2B contacts and a comprehensive B2B company database that’s complete with intent, firmographic, technographic, and more. Our contact and company data are 95% accurate and reverified every 90 days to maintain data hygiene. Schedule your request demo today and learn how you can accelerate your marketing plan and close deals faster.
