Inbound lead generation is all about getting prospects to your business on their own accord by welcoming them on websites, blogs, or through content and social media. Basically, it places a trail of information about your product and brand on certain platforms, which leads prospects to find a need for your services and take the right steps to approach you.
On the other hand, outbound lead generation takes your brand to a targeted audience through phone calls, emails, or events. In this case, you can pick and choose your ideal customers and then approach them directly. Outbound lead generation is when you focus your marketing and sales efforts to reach out to people that suit your ideal customer profile.
If you’re looking to grow, you should consider using outbound lead generation strategies to get in front of a crowd you know are perfect for your product or service.
Some outbound lead generation methods are easy to pick out, like cold calls, TV commercials, and internet pop-ups. Some other outbound methods include:
- Cold Emails
- Word of Mouth
- Events
- Paid Advertising
Cold Emails
You might have heard from other marketers that cold emails no longer work. But the truth is that it works fine; you just need to it relevant enough. According to a study, by personalizing an email and making it relevant when emailing key decision-makers, you can get up to a 45% open rate. It’s even said that cold emails are 40x more effective at getting new customers than Twitter or Facebook.
If your email list is highly relevant to your offer and the emails are personalized and genuine, you will definitely see better results. This is the main reason why cold emails should be your first outbound lead generation strategy to consider.
Word of Mouth
This way of marketing is done by sending a message through customer interactions. Usually, this type of communication is done informally between friends and family who happen to share their experiences with your company through regular conversation. Some businesses set up referral opportunities where if customers encourage their friends to sign up, they get a discount on their next purchase.
The people only get the discount once their friend has signed up and used the website to make a purchase. With this, there is more credibility as people are more likely to trust a brand that their friend or family vouches for.
Events
One of the best ways to promote your brand is to go with an event. Events for businesses range from sponsoring community baseball leagues to having afternoon lectures and even organizing small family days, parades, or picnics. These events pave the way for your business to connect to other businesses in your local area and gather email address information to use for follow-up campaigns.
However, don’t plan the event when your target audience won’t be able to attend. You should be aware of what other events are going on around the same time, so the events don’t overlap. With the current pandemic still going on, virtual events have grown a lot in the past year. This lets you get the same benefits of an event with much less cost involved.
Paid Advertising
Although paid advertising is tough to optimize properly, it is easy to implement. You can easily set up a campaign on your preferred ad network and start paying for traffic. Some of the best ad platforms that you can use are Facebook, Google, and Twitter, and if optimized correctly, they can send you tons of traffic to your website.
Through paid advertising, you can receive analytics and actionable insights that you can keep track of. When you’re selecting where to spend your ad budget, you need to choose the sites that are typically visited by your targeted audience. You also need to ensure that the ads you roll out are also are relevant to your audience.
To sum it up, there are plenty of effective outbound lead generation strategies that you can use. You need to weigh the ease of implementation against its effectiveness and decide what’s best for your business at that time. Use the best outbound lead generation strategies that make sense for your business and reel in the best-qualified opportunities.
