Inbound and outbound marketing seem like great rivals, at least on the face of it. While inbound marketing focuses on attracting prospects through valuable experiences, outbound marketing involves aggressively reaching out to customers to get their attention. With inbound marketing, the customer willingly looks for you, while outbound marketing requires you to initiate the conversation and promote your products.
Some companies prefer using inbound marketing, while others favor the more traditional outbound marketing. Whatever your preferences, it is worth noting that no strategy can flourish alone. Your team may need to try each one to find out what works and what doesn’t work.
In this post, we explain how inbound and outbound can work together. Keep reading to discover more!
Aligning your Inbound and Outbound Marketing Strategies
Many sales teams do not realize that combining the two above strategies is very much possible. Some marketers might know about this, but they don’t have the necessary experience to implement it.
Here, we explain how you can align inbound and outbound marketing to develop the ideal strategy for accelerated revenue growth.
Content Marketing and Tradeshows
Content marketing is one of the most effective inbound marketing strategies. It involves creating and distributing fresh, evergreen posts and blogs to capture the imagination of your readers and provide them with valuable solutions. The objective is to draw prospects to your website through your posts without being disruptive.
Tradeshows are a traditional form of outbound marketing tactic that proves effective even in this digital era. The reason tradeshows work is that they give you a chance to describe and demonstrate your products and services to potential clients in person.
There are so many ways you can combine content marketing with tradeshows. First, you can post great and insightful content online and end the post with an invitation to an upcoming tradeshow. Customers are likely to attend the event to learn more about the products they read online.
Email Marketing and Appointment Setting
Email marketing can be inbound, where customers sign up to receive your mails, or outbound, where you send emails to potential prospects, not on your contact list. Whatever option you choose, you can combine it with appointment setting.
As the name suggests, appointment setting is an outbound marketing strategy that involves meeting up with potential clients in person. It could be at an event organized by your business or an industry conference or seminar. By combining the two approaches, you can send emails to prospects to convince them to connect with you in person at their convenience. The benefit of this is that the client has to confirm attendance, so you don’t waste time and effort to go to the event.
Telemarketing and Marketing Automation
Telemarketing is an outbound strategy that entails calling your prospects directly to market your products. Many people consider this strategy intrusive and disruptive since you have to obtain the numbers of your leads from third-party data providers. To avoid the disruption, consider using telemarketing to support your automated marketing campaigns.
Marketing automation involves the use of software to automate repetitive marketing tasks. It works with CRM systems to generate leads and ensure that only customers who meet specific triggers receive promotional messages from your business. You can then follow up on these potential clients via telephone.
Inbound Emails and Cold Emails
As you already know by now, email marketing cuts across both ways, and it can either be inbound or outbound. Inbound emails go out to your subscribers, while cold emails target prospects who did not subscribe to your promotional newsletters.
Interestingly, you can combine the two to come up with a failproof email marketing tactic. Even better, you can go a step further and mix this tactic with content marketing. In any case, the objective of any marketing strategy is to provide customers with a valuable experience. You can achieve this by ensuring the content of your emails contains helpful information and solutions.
Benefits of Combining Inbound and Outbound Marketing
The benefits of combining inbound and outbound marketing are almost endless. They might be the exact opposite of each other, but none can flourish without the other. Both marketing strategies complement each other to deliver desirable results. You only need to know how to combine the two for a successful marketing campaign.
With that said, here are the top benefits:
- Reaches a wider audience
- Increases your chances of capturing your target
- Reduces the disruption associated with outbound marketing
- Creates a competitive edge for businesses
- Improves brand awareness with a soft proactive approach
What Next?
The goal of any business is to increase sales and grow revenue. Unfortunately, many companies fail on this front due to various reasons ranging from stiff competition from their rivals to poor or lack of marketing.
With the availability of several marketing strategies, your business does not have to stagnate. You can combine both inbound and outbound marketing techniques to reach more customers and accelerate your revenues.
Try this strategy today and see how it works. We bet you’ll notice a dramatic change in your revenue growth in the coming weeks!