We’ve talked about outbound marketing a lot. At this point, we hope you’re on board with it. Outbound marketing, when created for 21st-century consumers, is effective. It’s the creating part that’s hard, though.
If done without research or data, your outbound marketing strategy can be both broad and expensive. Read: you’re spending a lot of money on leads you don’t actually want.
That’s why it’s so important to put in the time upfront to develop an outbound marketing strategy that delivers qualified leads. If you’re struggling to build an outbound marketing strategy that pulls in more money than you spend, here are a few ways to turn it around. If you haven’t even begun your outbound marketing strategy, this will help you start off strong.
Here’s what you need to do to develop an outbound marketing strategy that delivers qualified leads:
1. Understand Your Audience
The first step to developing an outbound marketing strategy that delivers qualified leads is understanding who your qualified leads are. The thing about outbound marketing is that it usually costs money. You don’t want to spend on a campaign that’s not hitting the right audience.
Before you even think about building an outbound marketing strategy, you need to fully understand who you’re marketing to, and why. This is called developing your buyer personas. And in case you’re new to buyer personas, we’ve put together an entire step-by-step guide to creating your buyer personas to help you out.
No matter what your outbound strategy looks like, it’s important that you’ve started with clearly defined buyer personas. When you know your audience, you can better develop ad campaigns and outbound strategies that speak directly to them.
2. Set Goals for your Outbound Marketing Strategy
You also need to figure out your goals before you launch, or even build, your outbound marketing strategy.
What are you hoping to achieve with outbound marketing? If you’re reading this, my guess is that you want more qualified leads. In that case, how many qualified leads would you like to generate from this strategy? Where do you want those leads to go?
If you’re planning a specific ad campaign, what action do you want those leads to take? Like your Facebook Page? Convert on your content offer? Or are you launching a remarketing campaign that you’d like to end in a sale?
What you’d like to achieve with your outbound marketing strategy doesn’t matter so much as having a reason for your outbound marketing strategy. You shouldn’t be running ads just to run them — that’s a quick trip to an unsuccessful campaign.
Set your goals for your outbound marketing strategy, whether that’s to build brand awareness or draw in more of a certain type of lead, and then you can get started on building the strategy itself
3. Develop an Outbound Marketing Strategy Based on Data
What sets outbound marketing apart from inbound marketing is that you have a massive amount of data at your fingertips. Inbound marketing is exceptionally successful, but you don’t see results immediately, and some tactics can be tough to master.
This is why an outbound marketing strategy is such a great complement to a quality inbound marketing strategy — it gives you the data you need to make specific, targeted marketing efforts.
Use data to build your outbound marketing strategy. Here are a couple of examples of what I’m talking about:
- Know Your Keywords – If you’re working on paid search ads, it pays to know your keywords. What search queries are your target buyers putting in? And really look at the data. Don’t bid on a broad term with a massive cost per click if a long-tail keyword can deliver similar, or more qualified results.
- Get Good at Identifying and Setting Your Audiences – You’ve done a lot of work establishing your buyer personas. Put that research to use when you set audiences for your paid campaigns. Especially on social media advertising, this is where you want to spend the most time — if your ads aren’t hitting the right people, you’re spending money for nothing.
- Only Pay for the Leads You Want – If your paid outbound tactics aren’t delivering qualified leads, change them! Excluding certain audiences is a great way to optimize ads that consistently deliver leads who aren’t quite warm enough for your sales team. You can also adjust audiences, spend, and more on the fly. Give your ads some time to build, but if they’re not delivering the right results after a few weeks, don’t be afraid to make adjustments.
- Send Emails with Intention – We’ll talk about email marketing more, but make sure you’re using data to send emails with intention. When do your subscribers tend to open emails most? Is there certain content they prefer? Could you segment your email list to deliver more targeted, relevant emails? Use data to build your email marketing campaigns, and you’ll see higher open rates, click-throughs, and more leads coming in from that outbound marketing strategy.
Conclusion: The Most Successful Outbound Strategy is the One that Complements an Inbound Strategy
And finally, I’d like to leave you with a quick reminder. The most successful outbound marketing strategy is the one that complements an inbound strategy.
Inbound and outbound marketing go together like peanut butter and jelly. They each fill in the gaps of the other strategy. While they’re both strong ways to grow your business and pull in qualified leads in their own right, you’ll see the biggest success when you use them together.
A quality outbound marketing strategy takes a lot of work upfront, and quality maintenance to keep it going. Let us lighten the load. For more info about optimizing your outbound marketing strategy to pull in the right leads, or for help getting your paid ad campaigns off the ground, just drop us a line.
