Outbound marketing is a less common yet useful tool in the world of traffic generation. It is often discounted due to inbound marketing being a more broad and, more importantly, automatic approach. This begs the following questions: What is outbound marketing, what are the benefits, and what methods come under outbound marketing?

What is outbound marketing?

Outbound marketing is the direct outreach to potential customers or clients with the intent of generating interest in a product. The approach is targetted, and often requires a large amount of lead generation prior.

What are the benefits?

Inbound marketing content only attracts clients a very small amount of the time, while outbound marketing targets individuals who are likely to use your service.

Another benefit is that this strategy is only enhanced by the use of inbound marketing. By using inbound marketing methods to generate leads using email/mobile sign-ups, you can actively use both in an effective cycle.

Examples of outbound marketing

Outbound marketing strategies are quite limited. Due to this, the few strategies that do exist are common and make effective use of contact methods. 

Email marketing – Perhaps the most common strategy as everybody receives outbound email marketing attempts. Using inbound marketing to generate an email list of targets makes this an effective strategy.

Call-based marketing –  An effective method that uses inbound marketing or targetted calls to find potential customers, rather than mass-calling a list of numbers.

Text-based marketing – Text-based marketing is an effective way to reach out, with seemingly the lowest usage of outbound marketing strategies.

What’s bad about outbound marketing?

Put simply, the cost of outbound marketing is far too high to justify without a lead generation strategy. This is as the methods of outbound marketing that have been effective are now seen as invasive. As a result, if they aren’t automatically blocked, the potential customer would block the attempts themselves. This is why inbound marketing as a lead generation strategy is a “soft requirement”.