Building Interest & Awareness
Outbound Marketing Definition: All of the actions your business takes in order to reach out to new audiences who haven’t heard of you (yet).
Why is Outbound Marketing Important?
Outbound marketing is designed to generate interest & awareness for your website and business both today and tomorrow. We see examples of this every day from consumer brands – TV commercials, Facebook ads, magazines, bus benches, billboards, mail outs, etc.
Every one of these tactics aim at the same goals:
- To increase awareness and familiarity with your brand (building trust)
- To generate interest – increase people browsing your social media, website, and storefront
- To keep you “top of mind” when the prospect enters a potential buying window
And alongside B2C tactics, we see the same goals served within B2B Outbound Marketing – trade shows, networking, sponsored events, prospecting and account-based marketing. Every business should be engaged in reaching new audiences outside of their existing circles, and Outbound Marketing is the key to this.
Tailored to Market
Depending on if you’re a B2B (Business selling to Business) or B2C (Business selling to Consumer) company, your tactics will vary quite a bit. Much of this is due to the logistics of the audience size and purchase size. Small audiences and large purchases (like a fleet of trucks) will mean you can spend a lot on winning over a select number of people, whereas large audiences with small purchases (like chewing gum) mean you can target large volumes, but the cost-per-impression has to be pennies. Depending on your product and target market, this will give you a strong indication of where you can develop new Outbound Marketing tactics.
- B2C (or large-audience + small-purchase) would typically tap into:
- Online display ads
- TV & radio
- Influencers & social media
- Magazines
- Mass mail outs
- Public Relations (PR) campaigns
- Signage & billboards
- Etc.
- B2B (or small-audience + large-purchase) would typically tap into:
- Networking & events
- Speaking opportunities
- Direct mail campaigns (to targeted people)
- Trade shows
- Industry magazines & news sources
- Prospecting and Account-Based Marketing
- Etc.
Regardless of which avenues you pursue, make sure your tactics have been planned around your product, and that it’s tailored to your audience.
How Do You Measure Success?
The most contentious discussion with outbound marketing is how you’re measuring its success. While businesses yearn to measure this through sales and leads, this approach fails to factor in the place of Outbound Marketing within the customer journey. Outbound campaigns are designed to reach those in your target market who have never heard of you, may not be shopping right now, but are still worth an introduction to your brand. So what do you measure?
Interest & Awareness
The most effective way to measure the success of your outbound marketing is by counting how many viewers (who match your target market) see your brand and simply take the next step. For online ads this means measuring impressions and clicks per dollar spent, as well as click-through-rate (CTR). Impressions and clicks per dollar spent will be a great comparison of the ROI of the avenue you’ve chosen (eg. Facebook vs. Google display ads); CTR will be a great measure of the quality of the ad and the targeting (higher CTR is usually an indication of a great ad and great audience targeting). Offline you can still approximate the number of impressions/views, but you’ll want to spend time considering how to measure “taking the next step”. QR codes, custom campaign URLs, and custom phone numbers (not your normal phone line) are common ways to give viewers a measurable next step.
This is why outbound measurements are contentious – no matter how much your boss wants to measure outbound marketing via customers and leads, this is not the purpose (or the place) to push for this metric. If you try and squeeze sales out of your “first impression” marketing, you’ll break trust, annoy your market, and the stats will reflect this. But if you can convince your team to plant seeds instead of digging for food, your long game will reap a rich harvest, and your Outbound Marketing will boost the ROI of your Inbound and Customer Experience efforts.
So let’s take a look at the whole picture again:
- Outbound Marketing (this article)
- Inbound Marketing (read this one next)
- Customer Experience Marketing
