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How to Split Time Between Inbound and Outbound Marketing

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By Deanna Ritchie

For most B2B companies, it’s important to focus on both inbound marketing and outbound marketing.

These distinctive approaches are complementary in many ways, so if you use both efficiently, you can maximize your brand visibility and ultimately reach more people.

However, splitting your time and resources between these differentiated approaches can be a difficult balancing act to practice.

How do you split your time effectively between inbound and outbound marketing?

Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing for B2B Growth

First, let’s analyse the distinctive features of inbound and outbound marketing in a B2B context.

Inbound marketing is a set of different strategies all designed to naturally attract people to your business. These strategies work together synergistically, boosting the visibility of your brand, increasing the number of channels on which it appears, improving your reputation, and ultimately building consumer awareness and trust.

Among the most popular inbound marketing strategies are things like search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, and social media marketing. If you’re familiar with these strategies, you understand how effectively they support each other.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing strategies have unique advantages, including:

Cost-effective

Many marketers are drawn to the world of inbound marketing because it’s incredibly cost-effective. Producing content doesn’t cost much. Posting on social media doesn’t cost anything. And while you probably won’t see immediate results from these types of efforts, they have a permanent and accumulating effect; most of the assets you produce here are going to be indefinitely relevant and valuable to your brand, boosting its visibility and reputation for years to come. Overall, inbound marketing strategies are capable of attracting upwards of millions of people to your website for a relatively small amount of money.

Highly Scalable

People also appreciate how scalable inbound marketing is. Even if you work at a snail’s pace, producing only one new piece of content every week, as long as you’re consistent in your efforts, you’ll eventually have a gigantic archive of content to support your brand. And if you’re willing to spend a bit more money, you can accomplish a year’s worth of work in a week. Similarly, small startups and large enterprises alike can benefit from inbound marketing – as long as they know their niche.

Natural/Organic

Inbound marketing is also appealing to some because it’s a bit more natural and organic. Instead of calling a prospect and trying to convince them to buy a product they’ve never heard of before, you’ll be appealing to people who are already conducting organic searches for your type of product. It makes it much easier to build trust, establish rapport, and land sales – even if you can’t reach everyone this way.

Contextually Targeted

Most of your inbound marketing work is going to be contextually targeted. In other words, your materials are going to be relevant to the people seeing them. This isn’t necessarily the case with certain outbound marketing strategies like cold calling or cold emailing.

Tactically Diverse

Finally, inbound marketing strategies are tactically diverse. SEO isn’t the same as social media, and neither of these strategies is the same as content marketing. You can use one, some, or all inbound marketing strategies together, based on your needs.

In contrast, outbound marketing is a set of different strategies, all designed to reach people in your target demographics and deliberately market or sell to them. These strategies are capable of reaching total strangers, attempting to persuade them by showcasing your unique value or overcoming their key objections.

Among the most popular outbound marketing strategies are things like cold calling, cold emailing, and targeted advertising. These strategies can be used individually or as part of a bigger, more comprehensive sales funnel, designed to generate B2B leads over time.

Outbound Marketing

Outbound marketing strategies also have unique advantages, including:

Fast

One of the most important drawbacks of inbound marketing is that it takes a long time to develop. But with outbound marketing, you can see results almost immediately. As long as you have a coherent strategy and a talented team of people to execute that strategy, tactics like cold calling can land you sales today.

Capable of Broader Reach

Inbound marketing benefits from being contextually relevant, but at the cost of alienating at least some other people. In contrast, outbound marketing is capable of a much broader reach. If you’re trying to grow your business, or simply reach as many people as possible, outbound marketing becomes a practical necessity.

Specifically Targeted

It’s possible to use inbound marketing materials to target groups of people based on past interest, search history, and other relevant details. But with outbound marketing, you can target people much more specifically. This is especially true if you cultivate your own lists and gather more data from your pool of prospects.

Easy to Analyse

The effectiveness of outbound marketing is surprisingly easy to measure and analyze. It provides you with a pool of data that’s much more concrete, numerical, and objective. You can figure out exactly how many of your sales calls result in sales, or calculate the difference between two different, contrasting emails. Equipped with more objective data from which you can form better conclusions, you can polish these strategies to perfection.

Tactically Diverse

Outbound marketing is home to a variety of strategies and tactics as well. Cold calling and cold emailing are just the beginning – you can also practice many forms of online advertising, attend tradeshows, send direct mail, and more.

Important Variables to Consider

When discussing the matter of balance between the time you spend on inbound versus outbound marketing, there are several important variables you need to consider. These include:

Budget: First, you’ll need to think about your budget. Outbound marketing can help your business out of the gate, but it’s also more expensive to start up. If you’re working with limited resources, inbound marketing could be a preferable alternative.

Timing: You’ll also need to think about your desired timing. If you simply want to build your company reputation over the course of years, inbound marketing is fine. But if you need to start generating sales, you’ll need to lean toward outbound marketing more.

Industry/competition: Certain industries preferentially choose inbound or outbound marketing, due to the needs of their customers or because of certain tactics that work especially well in this environment. Study your competitors to see what they’re doing.

Target demographics: Some people respond better to inbound marketing over outbound marketing, or vice versa. Consider the preferences and behavioural patterns of your target demographics when choosing how to balance your time.

Historical performance: If you’ve been practicing inbound and outbound marketing for some time, take a look at your historical performances. Whichever group of strategies has consistently performed better should get more of your time and attention (keeping in mind that inbound marketing takes time to build momentum).

Future plans: Finally, think about where you want your business to be in the future. If you don’t have much of an inbound marketing strategy in place, but you like the idea of having an inbound empire eventually, you should spend more time developing your inbound strategies.

Balancing Your Time Effectively

So how do you manage your time effectively?

We’ve established that inbound and outbound marketing are both important, for different reasons. Accordingly, you’ll need to spend at least some time and effort on both if you want your B2B business to succeed.

These are the time management and coordination strategies that can help you do it:

Focus efforts on developing a consistent philosophy.

Prioritizing time expenditure in marketing is much easier when you have a consistent marketing philosophy underlining both your inbound and outbound approaches. Are you aggressive? Or, are you passive? Are you more trustworthy or more available?

Appoint leaders in each department.

If your team is big enough to support this idea, appoint leaders in each department: a captain for your inbound marketing and a captain for your outbound marketing. These people can make it much easier for you to make decisions and balance resources, since they’ll be specialized experts in each field.

Prioritize permanent/evergreen assets.

In both areas, focus on creating permanent, evergreen assets that will continue providing value to your organization indefinitely. This way, you can practically guarantee that whatever time you spend will be a valuable investment.

Record and analyse data.

Always record and analyse data associated with these marketing strategies. If you’re just getting started, you won’t have any data to work with, so you’ll be relying on instincts and the advice of others to balance your time effectively. But once the objective data starts rolling in, you’ll have no more excuses; you’ll have numerical proof that you should be spending more of your time in one area over another.

Automate what you can.

In both inbound and outbound marketing, you should automate whatever you can. Automation spares you manual effort and greatly reduces the amount of time you need to spend. If employed at a large enough scale, it could dramatically reduce the hours demanded of you and allow you to balance your time more freely.

Trim the fat and optimize.

Be willing to trim the fat and optimize your efforts. The balance of your time expenditure isn’t going to matter much if the hours you’re spending aren’t generating results for your business – even if you’re dedicating those hours to the “better” of the two approaches.

Both inbound and outbound marketing are effective in helping B2B businesses promote themselves and find new customers. But splitting your time between these two fundamentally diverse strategy sets can be a headache.

With smarter prioritization and more effective time management, you can figure out the perfect balance between them.

This story originally appeared on Calendar

By Deanna Ritchie

Sourced from Entrepreneur

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When Inbound Isn’t Enough: 3 Questions to Determine Inbound and Outbound Marketing Balance

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By Courtney Dodge

By now you’ve probably read the headlines and seen the stats from HubSpot and others about the virtues of inbound. There’s no denying that inbound marketing can be effective in generating quality leads for your business. Even so, inbound marketing should be treated as an addition to your other marketing strategies – not a replacement. Even if you are really good at it, inbound marketing only opens a small window into your total addressable market, leaving the rest wide open for your competition. So before you consider abandoning outbound efforts for inbound – ask yourself these questions:

#1 – Is it easy for prospects to find you?

To be successful with inbound, you’ll have to produce a substantial amount of premium content that’s highly optimized for search. While quality content can help build your brand and drive inbound interest, it can be resource-intensive, expensive, and there are no guarantees that your prospects will find it. In fact, with every technology vendor trying to become a publisher, getting your content noticed is harder today than ever before.

If you want to truly understand how much demand you can realistically capture through inbound, start by mapping out how many content assets you can produce a week and compare it to vendors who have leading organic positions for keywords you’d like to own. Are you producing as much content as they are? Can you? Remember, certain keywords are going to require much more effort to make it to the first page, especially if you’re competing against larger vendors and publishers who have entire editorial teams dedicated to creating content. Take TechTarget for example. We have over 1,000 editors and freelancers writing content every day just so we can drive thousands of inbound visitors to our sites. Ultimately, competing with such brands for content volume is unproductive. Redirect your efforts from quantity to quality of content and ensure you’re delivering something new and distinct that can be promoted as such.

Instead of going “all-in” on inbound, consider pushing your content out to target prospects and leads to supplement your inbound efforts. These are the exact same people you’re trying to attract via inbound, so why not engage them with outbound marketing too? Not only will this help you generate quality leads faster, but it will also provide additional coverage in areas where you may lack inbound interest.

#2 – Are you attracting and identifying the right prospects through your site?

Even if you’re able to attract thousands of prospects to your website, are they the right ones? Not always. In many cases you’ll fin­­­d tire-kickers, partners, or other vendors downloading your content to better understand your solutions or gather competitive intelligence.

And it’s not just about getting the right people to your site; you’ll also have to know who they are. One of the most challenging parts of inbound marketing is converting anonymous website visitors into leads. And with the average inbound conversion rate for B2B/Tech hovering around 3% (WordStream), you’re going to burn a lot of time generating inbound interest that will never turn into deals. Even if you can convert the right person, there’s no guarantee it’s the right time; you don’t have the resources to waste on false positives.

Unlike inbound, outbound gives you control over who to target and the ability to reach known prospects from companies that are more likely to buy from you. This not only helps you focus your efforts on the right prospects but also eliminates wasted time sorting through (or even worse, selling to) unqualified inbound leads.

#3 – Are you effectively reaching entire buying teams?

Let’s say you’re successful at converting inbound visitors to leads. Now what? To turn them into customers, you’ll need to decide how to market or sell differently to every member of the buying team. Relying on an inbound-only lead source limits your visibility into the entire buyer’s journey and may not uncover key decision makers who are involved in the final purchase. This is critical today when an average of 6.8 people are involved in the buying process (CEB). To win deals, your sales team is going to have to know exactly who is on the buying team and what they’re researching – when they’re with you AND when they’re not.

Instead of relying exclusively on inbound, TechTarget can consolidate your efforts by making your inbound traffic more valuable and employ a strategic outbound approach. TechTarget’s Priority Engine includes Inbound Converter, which identifies accounts visiting your website and exposes active demand from those accounts directly within the platform, including members of the buying team and insights to help you better understand the topics and competitors the buying team is researching when they’re not with you. Overall, Priority Engine identifies the accounts that are most active and interested so you can target the right people at the right time.

By Courtney Dodge

Sourced from TechTarget20

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Modern tools & techniques to bolster top-funnel, 3rd-party demand gen

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Inbound marketing has dominated many brands’ strategies recently, but contributor Scott Vaughan explains how technological advances are enabling better outbound efforts.

The B2B marketing world is shifting, and that means we must look for new strategies and techniques to adapt to changing customer, selling and marketing requirements.

A generation of marketers has grown up on inbound-driven demand strategies and tools. You know the process: buy and drive traffic; put up a landing page on your website; get somebody to fill out a form; and then nurture, score and send to sales once they’re qualified. Things have progressed from our days as pure brand marketers, and this has been a solid way for marketing to contribute to revenue.

Digging deeper

As B2B marketing and sales organizations prioritize more precise ideal customer profile (ICP) targets and account-based marketing (ABM) strategies, traditional inbound marketing tactics alone aren’t generating the demand needed to hit increasing pipeline and revenue goals for many B2B teams.

We simply can’t expect all our target decision-makers to find our website and fill out a form. Nor can we keep buying “lists” to populate our expensive databases, especially in a permission-based marketing world. And we can’t direct endless amounts of precious budget at media to drive low-converting website traffic just to have sales and marketing resources chasing down unqualified “leads.”

“In today’s reality, it’s crazy to think all your target accounts are just going to show up to your website,” Jennifer Pockell-Dimas, CMO at Egnyte, told me when I spoke with her earlier this year. “With ABM and the precision that’s required, you must go where your prospects are.”

To meet today’s mandate, we need to get our content and messages in-market where our audiences (ICP and target-account decision-makers) are doing their research.

One marketing strategy that is being re-imagined, modernized and used more aggressively is third-party demand gen — top-funnel contacts generated by third-party channels or sources, rather than through your own website or landing pages or your own social profiles.

A few examples are:

  • Content syndication: Distributing your content (typically branded) to target audiences via third-party sites and social networks; purchasing leads on a cost-per-lead (CPL) basis.
  • Product- or service-review sites: Buying leads on a CPL basis from product-focused or crowd-sourced sites that capture contact info from individuals researching relevant products and/or services.
  • Shared-lead campaigns: Running lead gen campaigns with partner brands/channels where leads are captured on third-party landing pages and provided to multiple companies.
  • External webinars: Sponsoring webinars organized by a third party to acquire audiences and generate contacts that fit your ICP.

Many of these approaches may look familiar. The difference today is the modern techniques, tools and data that are providing smarter ways to generate more precise top-funnel, third-party demand that works in tandem with your inbound effort.

Here are a few ways marketers can modernize their top-funnel, third-party strategies, as well as the tools needed to make these strategies work.

Use tools to manage multiple providers and tap into fresh audiences with precise targeting

Many B2B marketing teams have applied a “set and forget it” mindset to third-party demand. You sign a contract with a provider, and you use the same providers every quarter or even sign an annual contract. This approach rarely works in the mid- to long-term because there’s no way to quickly vet low-performing partners nor adapt your plan as business needs dictate.

With today’s top-funnel automation and demand orchestration solutions, you can use tech to manage multiple providers at the same time, continually testing each to identify the sites, providers and programs that deliver the quality you need. And you can validate the data and fix any bad lead data before it hits your marketing automation or CRM systems.

With accurate data, you can route to the right nurture track or sales pro for immediate follow-up. These modern tools allow you to scale by using and measuring multiple top-funnel providers and sources at the same time.

Rescript the follow-up and follow-on process

One of the biggest mistakes when using third-party demand providers is the follow-up. It’s critical we don’t follow up on third-party leads with the proverbial, “I saw you downloaded x white paper, attended y webinar” or, worse, “are evaluating z solution.”

This is not engaging. It simply provides a sure-fire way to turn your prospect off — on the phone, via email or on chat. (By the way, the same applies for inbound leads.)

Rather, marketers report finding more success using a different approach that uses program data and taps into contact or account data in their MA or CRM systems. For example, you may adapt the follow-up script to something more conversational, such as: “It looks like you and your team may be doing some research around x; how is that going? …”

This approach drives a more meaningful dialogue and leads naturally to a discovery conversation about your prospective account and the buyer’s needs and pains. It will also quickly tell you if they fit your ICP.

From here, you can learn more about their initiatives and share additional educational content in the right context. This approach also allows you to qualify the buyer and the account for next steps, including sending the lead to sales with actionable information.

Apply intent data monitoring to identify and prioritize accounts in the market

Increasingly popular is the use of intent data monitoring with these top-funnel programs. These solutions allow you to prioritize and target those companies that are showing increased activity around a given topic across the web. An emerging group of martech and third-party media providers are monitoring their sites and the broader B2B web to understand which companies — in aggregate — are interacting with which content/subjects by topic. For example, if you sell cloud storage solutions, it’s valuable to see which companies are doing research on these solutions.

With a list of active companies — identified by domain — you now have a more targeted list to reach out to with top-funnel programs. You can then prioritize your outreach efforts, targeting the right personas and roles at these companies using your branded content. These techniques increase the effectiveness of your investment when working with third-party providers and sites.

Third-party demand generation is an effective top-funnel marketing strategy when done right. It requires planning, management and more precision, which in the past has caused some marketers to shy away from it. However, the recent advent of several key marketing techniques and technologies has helped with all this, making third-party demand gen far more efficient and effective than it was just five years ago, especially for today’s ICP and account-based approach.

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Scott Vaughan is CMO of Integrate, a marketing technology software provider automating top-of-funnel marketing for B2B marketers to enable demand marketing orchestration. Scott leads the company’s go-to-market and growth marketing strategy. He’s passionately focused on unlocking the potential of marketing, media, data and technology to drive business and customer value.

Sourced from MARTECH TODAY

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