Ever felt like B2B marketing is stuck in a wrestling match between two giants – Outbound and Inbound? You’re not wrong! But instead of just dryly explaining the difference, let’s get ready for a throwdown!
In the red corner, we have the marketing veteran – Outbound!
This old-school champ throws punches with TV commercials, trade shows, pop-up ads, and also more modern techniques like banner and display ads, cold email marketing, cold calling, and social media outreach (mostly LinkedIn), Outbound is all about grabbing your attention and saying, “Hey you! Yeah, you with a busy schedule! Try our product!” It’s like getting tackled by a salesperson – intense, but it can get your brand noticed by a wide audience.
In today’s oversaturated market, where each industry is awash with impressive competitors and a wide range of consumer offerings, outbound marketing is an extremely vital tool for early-stage B2B start-ups to capture the attention of their target audiences, increase their brand awareness, and grow.
How to win with B2B Outbound Marketing
Train like Rocky: Conduct thorough research
The beauty of outbound marketing is that you get to choose exactly who you’re pitching to, especially with more pinpointed activities like LinkedIn outreach, cold calling, and email marketing. However, this means that to have high outbound success rates, you need to be methodic in who you target. So, be sure to conduct thorough research on your target audience, where they spend time online, their challenges and pain points, and what they’re looking for in a product or service like yours.
Knockout punch: Personalize your messages and customize your content
Not only will conducting thorough research help you choose the right people to pitch to, but it also means you’ll be able to properly customize your messaging to appeal to them. Why? Because you will have taken the time to understand what makes them tick, what their pains are, and how your product solves that pain – and you will build your messaging to address exactly that.
A perfect example of this is account-based marketing (ABM), which is when companies pinpoint specific target audience members who are ideal potential customers and then conduct outreach to them with customized messaging. ABM is a key piece of outreach that can ensure high-quality leads are being educated about your brand and entering the pipeline.
Fight smart: Analyze & adjust to optimize target personas
The final thing you want to make sure you do is analyze your results as you conduct your outbound and use those insights to finetune your target audiences and personas. This is key because it can take time to pinpoint your perfect messaging, and it can’t be done without testing and analysis.
Unfortunately, some outbound results are slightly difficult to measure, but using A/B testing for activities like LinkedIn outreach messages and cold call scripts is a great way to overcome this. Remember – outbound marketing is an excellent way to bring in leads from a broader audience and target potential customers, so long as it is conducted with tact and attention.
Integrating your outbound tools with your CRM can facilitate this by enabling you to create clean databases, funnels, and movement from outbound to inbound campaigns.
But watch out, here comes Inbound, the challenger in the blue corner!
Inbound is the strategic mastermind, luring potential customers in with clever content like blog posts, social media, infographics, newsletters, polls, gated ebooks, and guides. It’s like setting up a gourmet cheese platter – you create valuable content that attracts people who are already interested in what you have to offer.
Unlike outbound, inbound marketing aims to gently, over longer periods, increase brand awareness, educate your audience about your solution, and nurture them into happy, paying customers. Inbound is a fantastic way to organically (and cheaply) target relevant audiences and increase your potential reach, but only when done correctly. Here are the best practices for inbound marketing:
How to win with B2B Inbound Marketing
Stay in the ring: be consistent
A major key factor to maintaining successful inbound marketing activities is to stay consistent. Publishing one blog post per year, one social media post every two months, and a poll when you feel like it is not going to give you the results you want.
Build a social media Gantt filled with engaging content that focuses on your target audience rather than your product, hire a content writer to craft a blog or two each month containing highly ranked SEO terms in your industry, and quickly create a monthly newsletter in HubSpot to share exciting news and industry trends with your audience.
You can choose a variety of inbound activities, but whatever you pick, make sure that 1) you’re consistent with it and 2) that it provides real value to your audience.
That’s another thing; don’t create content simply for the sake of checking something off your list – invest time and thought into it so that you really catch your audience’s attention.
Don’t fight blindfolded: invest in a good CRM
You’re gonna wanna have that, if you don’t already. A good CRM is going to take loads of tedious tasks off your plate when it comes to executing your inbound marketing tactics.
Marketing automation tools and CRMs like HubSpot, Salesforce Pardot, and others enable marketers to quickly build attractive, personalized marketing materials like newsletters, as well as keep track of incoming leads as they move through the funnel.
Know your enemy: well, actually your customer
A last key tip to executing a successful inbound marketing strategy is to know your customers well. Since inbound is all about drawing your target audience in, you need to know what their pains are and how your product solves them so that you can effectively grab their attention. This includes knowing your ideal customer profile (ICP) and target buyer personas, which means researching the following characteristics:
Title, Role, Motivations at work, Skillset, and Pain points
Once you figure these out, you need to wrap that information in a beautiful, creative bow and put it out for them to stumble upon.
So, what strategy wins?
Actually, it’s a champions’ combo!
Outbound marketing is great for early-stage businesses to build brand awareness. Inbound helps nurture those leads and turn them into loyal customers. The real champion is the B2B company that uses both strategically.
By using both inbound and outbound tactics, you can create a well-rounded B2B marketing strategy that gets you noticed, builds trust, and ultimately, converts leads into customers. Now that’s a match worth winning!
About SAGE Marketing
SAGE Marketing, a top global agency, empowers B2B Tech firms to achieve marketing objectives and accelerate growth. We offer CMO-as-a-Service, encompassing strategic planning, branding, digital marketing, content creation, and more. Our tailored approach ensures seamless integration and excellent execution, serving as a trusted in-house partner.
