Don’t be too pushy with your marketing messaging

While inbound marketing focusses on attracting, delighting and engaging customers – with the end goal of growing your businesses - outbound marketing is about pushing messaging out to your target audience.?

We are all used to having busy working day or relaxing evening interrupted by cold callers trying to ‘sell’ us something or having to delete numerous e-newsletters that simply don’t interest us.?

When it comes to outbound marketing, these are the more traditional marketing channels used.??

There’s a more scattergun approach – messaging is distributed far and wide, based on the belief that it’ll stick at some point with someone. ?

One of the most obvious outbound marketing examples is telemarketing, particularly when using a bought or ‘cold’ list of prospects. ?

Telemarketing to a bought list is, by its nature, getting in touch with prospects that haven’t been warmed up to your offering.??

You might get lucky and reach a contact who is aware of your business, but chances are you’ll be tackling a ‘needle in a haystack’ situation: you’ll have a long list of potential contacts, but just a few will be the right fit, ready to buy and receptive to the call. ?

Email marketing works in pretty much the same way, primarily with paid-for emails simply pushing out a message to a cold audience.??

It can be a scatter gun approach – as opposed to any inbound marketing strategy where the audience has already engaged with the business and has been attracted to its valued content.???

Out of home display advertising is another example of outbound marketing. Whether it’s billboards, digital screens or adverts on public transport, you’re displaying a message about your business to a wide audience (pushing that messaging outwards) – instead of attracting them to your business through the use of content. ?

But having said all that, there is still a place for outbound marketing – particularly when it comes to raising general brand awareness. ?

If you, however, are adopting a hybrid approach between inbound and outbound marketing be careful that one doesn’t disrupt the other. Make sure you’re not grouping warm, engaged inbound contacts into top-level, outbound communications – that will disrupt their journey, seem cold and in juxtaposition with the journey they’re already on. You don’t want to alienate contacts that you’ve worked so hard to encourage a feeling of familiarity with. ?

Inbound marketing is a powerful strategy for many businesses, but it really benefits from a thorough approach – careful planning and mapping out of predicted ROI, a good balance with any outbound marketing and effective use of tools and resource to make the customer journey as streamlined as possible.