Outbound marketing is one of the many ways you can increase your visibility online. It’s a form of marketing in which you’re proactively reaching out to people who might be interested in what you’re selling. It’s also a great way to grow your business as it can rapidly expand your reach and generate new leads that increase revenue. Despite packing some serious marketing muscle, outbound marketing is often overlooked. Some entrepreneurs and marketers aren’t even aware of its full potential. 

Inbound tactics may no longer be enough to grow your business. You’ll need to bring out the big guns and complement inbound efforts with outbound strategies. If you’re not sure about it, here are 4 ways you can use outbound marketing to grow your business.

Lead Generation

Inbound tactics take a while to grow a following. If you want to build awareness in a trice, you can’t wait on people. Outbound marketing means making the first move. By initiating the first interaction, you’re taking a proactive step in reaching out to potential leads. Doing so helps you create awareness about your business and generate interest in a product or service. Ultimately, using outbound marketing to generate leads helps you build your sales pipeline.

If you’re planning to make the first move (we strongly suggest that you do) be sure you have clear customer profiles and buyer personas, high-quality prospect lists, a consistent message, interesting content, data-driven workflow, reliable tools (emails, calls, LinkedIn), and a partner to help you run the campaign.

Get in Touch with Online Communities

Brands, especially the good ones, can bring people together by giving them a common interest. This convergence of people and interest is how online communities are born. 

Online communities such as forums, internet communities, and Facebook groups that are built around brands have been growing steadily, and it’s baffling to see marketers ignore this important platform. These communities are excellent places for genuine engagement and interactions with your target audience. But they aren’t just social hubs, online communities are also sources of rich insights and feedback that may be useful for the continuous improvement of your brand.

Online communities also help you expand your content’s reach by giving you a captive audience who’s ready to stop, watch, and listen to what you have to say. Publishing content in online communities gives you an audience who appreciates your message and are more likely to act on it.

Content, SEO, and Social Media Marketing

Wait! Aren’t these inbound? Yes they are, but then again the line between inbound and outbound is blurring more and more these days.

Using social media platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter can help you expand your network and establish business relationships, but be careful. Don’t use social media to sell. Instead, use it to make organic, meaningful conversations with prospects who can eventually become paying customers. In addition, you can also use social media to learn more about decision-makers, their interests, and their motivations.

You can also use social media with search. These two, when combined, result in a potent mix that drives traffic to your website while you wait for your SEO and content marketing efforts to deliver.

Good old-fashioned cold outreach

We can almost hear the collective protest of naysayers but regardless of their doom prophecies, cold calls and emails remain alive! Lack of imagination and appreciation for its effectiveness are the only things killing it.

If you’re doing cold outreach, make it fun! People are craving connections now more than ever. The last thing you want to be is boring and mechanical. If you’re sending out cold emails, make sure they come with attention-grabbing, head-turning headlines and content that’s worth their time. You run the potential risk of driving prospects away with a barrage of emails that have nothing in them except dull messaging. If you’re sliding into their emails, you’d better have something very very good to say. The last thing you want is to be in their spam or blocked email address list.

There’s also cold calling, which remains a necessary part of outbound strategy. Its importance, however, doesn’t guarantee that people won’t hang up on you. It’s a painful truth: we hate getting calls from telemarketers. But that’s the thing — it’s because marketers sound like marketers! Call to tell prospects something interesting, don’t call just because you want to sell. In a time when genuine focused interactions are limited by pandemic restrictions, the worst thing that you can do is sound like you’re only after your prospect’s money.

Inbound marketing may be the darling these days, but outbound marketing hasn’t lost its luster. Inbound marketing works better when supported by tried and proven outbound marketing tactics. It’s the one-two punch that delivers more leads and more profit for your business.