Born from traditional advertising methods such as TV commercials or billboards, outbound lead generation has evolved over time and taken on digital forms. And despite the shift towards inbound marketing – and even demand generation – there’s still a very important place for outbound activities in B2B.
What is Outbound Marketing?
Outbound marketing describes any activity where you initiate contact with a prospect. From cold calling and advertising to sending direct mail or cold emails, outbound marketing is all about pushing out your marketing to a new audience in the hopes of finding more leads.
What is an Outbound Lead?
An outbound lead is a prospect that you’ve contacted through one of your outbound marketing tactics.
If they engage with your efforts, they could become a warm lead or a marketing qualified lead (MQL). And if you can qualify that they fit your ideal customer profile and have a potential need, they may even become a sales qualified lead (SQL) and enter the buying funnel.
What Are the Main Types of Outbound Lead Gen?
Since outbound lead generation is like knocking the door of your prospect to introduce yourself, each tactic begins with you reaching out to new people.
There are a range of outbound lead generation tactics you can use, but we’ve outline some of the most popular below.
Outbound Email Marketing
If you get your hands on some fresh email addresses, you can send information straight to their inbox using outbound email marketing. It’s popular because you can send the same email to thousands of prospects and reach huge volumes of people, but the response and conversion rates can be low.
Cold calling
Unlike other channels, cold calls can give you almost instant answers. This outbound lead gen tactic allows you to have 1:1 conversation, so you can truly personalize your messaging to the prospect.
This personalized interaction can also give you some very useful insights into what your prospect’s challenges and objections are, which you can then use to inform your next call.
LinkedIn Prospecting
There’s a huge amount of data on LinkedIn that’s perfect for outbound lead generation. Not only can you use it to find the potential decision makers of businesses that fit your ideal customer profile, but you can also extract useful data like contact details from it.
You can also send outreach messages through the platform itself or send up to 100 connection requests a week if you have a free profile. Just be mindful of your approach and don’t spam people, as your account can be restricted.
It’s a worthwhile tactic because, although it can take longer to develop relationships over LinkedIn, once you’ve established a connection it can remain for the duration of their career.
Social Selling
There are many reasons to post work-related content on social media, but outbound lead generation is perhaps the one that will have the biggest impact on your lead and revenue targets.
The key to successful social selling is to share valuable content that’s targeted to your audience’s needs and engage with your connections in meaningful ways. This helps you to build a strong social network and keep your brand at the front of your connections’ minds.
What Are the Benefits of Outbound Marketing and Lead Gen?
One of the most obvious benefits of outbound marketing is it allows you to approach businesses that fit your ideal customer profile. When you proactively contact a prospect, you can control the message and the way they’re introduced to your brand.
But there are other benefits to outbound lead gen, including:
- You get faster results. You might get plenty of no’s when you make cold calls, but you’ll also find the prospects that say yes much faster. Likewise, when you email thousands of people, the companies that are ready to consider you will identify themselves quicker than if you waited for them to fill out a contact form on your website.
- It’s scalable and predictable. When you know the average conversion rate for your outbound marketing, you can calculate how many email addresses or phone numbers you need to be able to contact to reach your targets.
- Conversations give valuable feedback. Live discussions give you real-time insights into the pain points or objections of prospects and let you pivot your messaging or marketing materials accordingly.
What Are the Challenges of Outbound Lead Gen?
Outbound lead generation also presents a few challenges that you need to consider. The most important is that you need to follow certain regulations when it comes to data, email marketing and telemarking. Fall foul of these rules and you’ll not only get a hefty fine but also damage your reputation.
Other outbound marketing challenges include:
- It can be more costly than inbound marketing, because you need to buy data, pay for advertising space, and staff entire outbound teams. If you don’t execute your outbound marketing strategy well, you can see poor ROIs.
- It may be perceived as spammy. Even if you follow all the rules, some people you reach out to simply won’t want to be contacted. You can counter this by making unsubscribe links obvious in emails and respecting a person’s wishes when they ask to be removed from your database.
- Campaigns can be short-lived. One-off activities, like direct mail campaigns, can generate a burst of interest but this naturally tails off after a short period of time. You need to plan regular campaigns to balance out this risk.
How Can You Get More Outbound Leads?
Measuring the effectiveness of your outbound marketing strategy will help you understand what’s working, what needs a slight tweak, and what needs to be reconsidered altogether.
Lead generation tools like Lead Forensics can help you see which of your activities reach prospects that actually convert into customers, so you can use this insight to refine your approach.
For example, SF Media used the platform to see which PPC keywords were most effective so they could streamline the search terms used in their campaigns. They also identified website challenges that were impacting conversions. By their fourth month using Lead Forensics, they increased online enquiries by 200%. Read the full case study here and schedule your own demo now.
