What Is Outbound Marketing? Definition, Types, Strategy, Best Practices, and Examples

What Is Outbound Marketing? Definition, Types, Strategy, Best Practices, and Examples

June 10, 2020


Often considered as a traditional form of marketing, outbound marketing is defined as a set of tactics initiated by a brand to connect with the maximum potential customers to drive brand awareness and generate leads at scale.”

In this article, we’ll cover the concept of outbound marketing, its types, examples, how it is different from inbound marketing, how to create an outbound marketing strategy, and five best practices to boost your outbound marketing efforts as we head towards 2020.

Table of Contents

What Is Outbound Marketing?

Outbound marketing consists of various marketing strategies and techniques that simultaneously target a large spectrum of people. Some of these include advertising (traditional and digital), cold emailing, cold calling, trade shows, and content syndication.

Outbound marketing is the polar opposite of inbound marketing (pull marketing), where prospects find you to seek solutions to their problems. Outbound marketing or push marketing tactics have gotten a bad rap with the evolution of inbound marketing due to its perceived intrusive nature.

The carpet-bombing approach used in outbound marketing is an effective technique to cover the maximum section of a target demographic, and perhaps that’s why outbound marketing is described as too aggressive.

Types of Outbound Marketing Channels

If you’re familiar with traditional media or advertising, you would have heard the terms above-the-line (ATL) and below-the-line (BTL). What do these terms mean and what are some outbound marketing avenues that you can utilize to widen your reach and drive sales? Here are seven outbound marketing channels to get you started:

1.Traditional Advertising

Also known as above-the-line (ATL) advertising, traditional advertising includes media such as television, radio, print (newspapers, magazines, etc.), and billboards. Traditional advertising methods help you convey the message to the masses but lack refined targeting capabilities. ATL advertising avenues are effective for top-of-the-funnel activities such as brand awareness campaigns.

Although a lot of skepticism surrounds the effectiveness of traditional advertising, they are still effective considering the number of users that watch TV shows, listen to the radio, or read a newspaper every day.

Bored Panda

Spotify Ran a Witty Billboard Ad Campaign in December 2017 to Highlight the Listening Habits of Spotify Users

2. Digital Advertising

The first digital ad that ran in 1994 wasn’t rich in targeting, but after 25 years, the digital advertising industry is as sophisticated as it gets. Here are a few types of digital ads just to give you an overview of how expansive the advertising landscape is:

  1. Search engine marketing (SEM)
  2. Display ads
  3. Social media ads
  4. Over-the-top (OTT) ads
  5. Email ads
  6. Native advertising
  7. Video ads

Digital ads enable you to target your audience based on various criteria such as their demographic, geographic, psychographic, behavioral characteristics, interests, and habits. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Advanced targeting methods like retargeting and custom audiences can help you connect with an even wider audience segment. Digital ads are a part of below-the-line (BTL) advertising due to their precise targeting nature.

Example of a Search Engine Marketing (SEM)/Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Ad

Example of a Search Engine Marketing (SEM)/Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Ad

3.Through-the-line (TTL) Advertising

In TTL advertising, the brand’s promotional mix consists of both – ATL and BTL ad types. For instance, a brand might run an awareness campaign across television, newspapers, and social media platforms. TTL can also include digital-out-of-home (DOOH) advertisingOpens a new window , an emerging advertising format that uses traditional outdoor media to display dynamic ads.

Burger King Worked With Vizeum, an Ad Agency to Run a DOOH Ad Campaign

Burger King Worked With Vizeum, an Ad Agency to Run a DOOH Ad Campaign

4. Cold Calling

Cold calling or telemarketing is known to be the most notorious form of communication. In cold calling, the salesperson makes calls to a database of people, who could be prospects, to gauge their interest and convert them into paying customers. The salesperson usually has no prior communication with the customer, hence the term cold calling. The next step of telemarketing is warm calling, where a prospect has expressed their interest in your offerings.

Cold calling is one of the most challenging marketing/sales methods to drive sales due to reasons like do not disturb (DND) service activation or recipients unwilling to participate in the call.

5. Email Marketing

Whether email marketingOpens a new window is an inbound or outbound marketing tactic has been a debatable topic, but any push tactic, whether the customer has agreed to receive it or not, can be categorized under outbound marketing since the sender initiates the communication.

Email marketing enables organizations to connect to a wide subscriber base to identify various opportunities. Here are nine types of emails you can send to your subscribers and customers:

  1. Welcome and onboarding email sequence
  2. Lead generation, nurturing, follow-up campaigns
  3. Weekly newsletters
  4. New product/feature launch
  5. Product feedback, survey
  6. Customer retention campaigns
  7. Upselling or cross-selling emails
  8. Cart abandonment emails
  9. Discounts, offers, or customer loyalty campaigns

We have excluded transactional emails from outbound marketing as their purpose is to keep the customer updated on their purchases, orders, product returns, etc.

Note: The combination of cold/warm calling and email marketing to generate sales is called inside sales.

6. Content Syndication

In content syndication, you publish your content on a third-party website. It could be a guest post, thought leadership piece, interview, or a rehash of an existing article from your website.

Sometimes content syndication can take place through brand collaborations as well, where you work with another brand to create a compelling content piece such as a downloadable guide.

Content discovery platforms are distant cousins of content syndication. Content discovery platforms are a part of native advertising that allow advertisers to place their content on third-party publishing websites. Since content discovery platforms require publishers to drive a minimum fixed monthly traffic (approximately 10 million page views per month) to be eligible to place native ad slots, advertisers prefer native ads to amplify the content reach.

Content Discovery Platforms

Content Discovery
Content Discovery Platforms Like Outbrain Place Your Content Ads on Third-Party Publishers to
Drive More Traffic

7. Events and Tradeshows

Events and tradeshows allow organizations to meet their prospects and customers face-to-face to generate leads, convert prospects, or retain existing customers. Corporations can organize their events such as Dreamforce by Salesforce or participate as a sponsor or attendee in conferences or events organized by a third-party.

The success of conference participation depends on pre-buzz activities, which consist of the activities mentioned above.

Learn More: What Is Native Advertising? Definition, Components, Benchmarks, & Best Practices with ExamplesOpens a new window

Inbound Vs. Outbound Marketing

Before we go any further, let’s settle this argument once and for all. Inbound marketing adopts a highly-targeted approach that seeks to inform and empower the brand’s audience, whereas outbound marketing tries to connect with as many people as possible from a niche. Since outbound marketing connects to a broad audience, its avenues tend to be expensive, which may not always be the case with inbound marketing.

While all these points seem to make inbound marketing an effective tactic, its success depends on how well-known your brand is. Pull marketing’s inward approach requires users to find you, which can be a challenge, especially in saturated markets. On the contrary, outbound marketing’s full-throttle approach ensures people have at least heard about you.

So, you can see that there’s no clear winner here. Rather than choosing one approach over the other, look at them as yin and yang. You need to pick the best of both worlds for your marketing success.

Learn More: What is Dynamic Content? Definition, Types, Strategy, Best Practices with ExamplesOpens a new window

How to Create an Outbound Marketing Strategy?

Creating an outbound marketing strategy requires an all-encompassing forethought considering the impact and irreversibility of mass media campaigns. In this section, we’ll understand how you can create an outbound marketing strategy for your organization.

Step 1: Know Your Offerings

The platforms used in outbound marketing to promote offerings differ vastly based on whether they’re B2B or B2C. B2C products can be promoted on mainstream media considering the size of the target audience, whereas B2B products need to choose more niche platforms such as industry publications.

Be clear about the goals you’re trying to accomplish through your outbound marketing campaigns. For example, if you’re trying to boost sales, you need to mention elements such as discount coupons or offers in your messaging and creatives to encourage users to make the purchase.

Step 2: Know Your Audience

Creating buyer persona samples will help you choose the right marketing avenues to promote your offerings. Even when using similar marketing channels, different offerings and audience will require a change in approach. Research the habits, content consumption preferences, etc. of your audience to pick the right platforms to market your offerings.

For example, a technology company looking to mass hire new employees will place billboards in the vicinity of tech parks, whereas a leading designer fashion brand will place a billboard in upbeat areas to promote the launch of their new store.

Step 3: Research Your Competitors

Outbound marketing thrives on competition. The marketing channels are saturated, and brands need to keep outdoing their competitors if they want to be noticed. Therefore, it is imperative to keep an eye on your competitors. See what they are doing (and what they’re missing out on) and find ways to stand out from them.

Ambush/guerrilla marketing is one of the most common tactics to outwit your competition. In ambush marketing, brands follow an unconventional way to get noticed and stand out, and this sometimes leads to brand wars. Consider the following example where Coca-Cola and Pepsi took a dig at each other by using the same creative.

An Example of Ambush Marketing
Image source: bMediaOpens a new window
An Example of Ambush Marketing, Where Coca-Cola and Pepsi Exchanged a Banter Using the Same Creative

Step 5: Create Campaign Messaging

Make a list of the key messages that you want to communicate to your audience. Unless it’s a newspaper ad or digital ad, don’t make your users sweat to understand what you’re trying to say.

The campaign messaging should ideally consist of the campaign name, headline, slogan, and hashtag. While it’s a challenge to make something go viral, using storytelling techniques that encourage audience participation can definitely drive engagement.

The messaging should subtly convey the value/benefit users will get from your offerings. It should also create emotion in viewers or be memorable enough for brand recall.

Nivea Night Cream Subtly Hints Its Main Feature by Placing the Product in the Shape of a Crescent Moon

Step 6: Choose Your Platforms

Your promotional mix should highlight the marketing channels where you want to run your campaign. It could be online, offline, or a mix of both. The budget should be allocated carefully to ensure that the campaign gets the necessary airtime across all media.

Once the platforms are shortlisted, you need to devise a strategy for each channel. For example, for social media ads, you need to plan the target audience, ad creatives, bidding, and so on. Similarly, for newspaper ads, you may have to work with an ad agency for the media buying process.

Learn More: Top 15 Digital Marketing Strategies for 2020Opens a new window

Top 5 Outbound Marketing Best Practices for 2020

Here are the top five outbound marketing best practices as you plan for 2020:

1. Avoid Shady Marketing Tactics

In the pursuit of quick wins, marketers often follow tactics that are shady and ineffective. Some of these examples are buying email lists, sending unsolicited bulk messages, not keeping an unsubscribe link in emails, etc. Not only are these tactics inconvenient for the recipient, but you may be fined heavily due to regulatory compliances such as GDPR.

Make sure you have explicitly obtained the user’s permission before you send them promotions via emails or text messages.

2. Use LinkedIn for Lead Generation

A common contention raised by marketers/salespeople is, “Is there a legitimate way to connect with an important prospect if we have no prior communication with them?” It’s a fair question, and the answer to this is to utilize LinkedIn’s features.

LinkedIn offers LinkedIn Premium and Sponsored features that allow you to send messages, called InMails to people that are not your connections. While Premium InMails are just like regular LinkedIn messages, Sponsored InMails are quite powerful and allow you to include a call-to-action.

An Example of LinkedIn Sponsored InMail

An Example of LinkedIn Sponsored InMail

3. Introduce an ROI-tracking Mechanism

Traditional marketing is referred to as the spray-and-pray approach due to the lack of a robust targeting and tracking mechanism. While that is somewhat true, there are ways to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. In fact, Claude Hopkins, an advertising pioneer, experimented with A/B testing as early as 1910. He would send ad variations to measure the impact of each ad on sales. Here is how you can do it as well:

  1. Create unique QR codes for offline media outlets to track the right source
  2. Offer a platform or ad specific discount or coupon codes
  3. Use net promoter surveys (NPS) to evaluate the effectiveness of different platforms

4. Implement a Full-stack CRM Application

One of the biggest issues faced by the sales department is keeping track of leads, prospects, and customers. While CRM software applications are capable of streamlining sales activities, most of them miss out on tracking phone calls. CRM applications such as Close are effective because these CRM solutions also offer a built-in call automation feature, enabling you to manage the complete inside sales process from a single interface.

5. Build an Outbound Content Distribution Channel

As we know, content syndication is an effective content distribution method. Marketers need to build an outbound content distribution workflow to support their content marketing initiatives. That means there should be a set process to follow every time new content is published. Here are some examples:

  1. Send an email to subscribers when a new content piece is published
  2. Answer relevant questions on various forums along with the link to the content piece
  3. Collaborate with brands and influencers in your niche to boost the content reach

Learn More: Top 20 Content Marketing Strategies For Your 2020 Plan

Parting ThoughtsStrategic outbound marketing forms a core part of the omnichannel marketing approach, and contrary to what anyone may say, outbound marketing is certainly not outdated. The bad reputation it gets is due to the shady approach, which has become normalized due to its overuse.

As we enter the next decade, outbound marketing will eventually adopt emerging technologies such as AR/VR to elevate the customer experience.

What outbound strategies are you planning to use in 2020? Let us know on TwitterOpens a new window , LinkedInOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window .

Indrajeet Deshpande
Indrajeet is a Marketing professional with 6+ years of experience in managing different facets of Digital Marketing. After working with SpiderG - a Pune based SaaS startup, he is now ready to work as a freelance marketer with different SaaS startups helping them with marketing strategy, plan and execution. His love for old-school hard rock and metal music culminated in taking up guitar and starting www.guitargabble.com. He is studying Stoic philosophy, experimenting with productive habits and documenting the progress. Get in touch if you are keen to know how you can implement pro-wrestling tactics in your marketing, community building and storytelling
Take me to Community
Do you still have questions? Head over to the Spiceworks Community to find answers.