What outbound marketing is and how to do it

Outbound marketing is the set of actions in which the company actively moves toward the customer, presenting its offer even to those who did not seek it out. It is the classic interruption marketing: the brand picks an audience, places its message in their path and tries to grab attention right there, on the spot.

This is the most traditional model of promotion. TV ads, billboards, sales calls and prospecting emails are all examples of outbound. The logic is to chase demand directly, instead of waiting for it to arrive.

That is why outbound is often contrasted with inbound marketing, in which the customer finds the company through content and search. While inbound pulls the audience in, outbound pushes the message out, and much of its result comes from paid traffic and active prospecting.

The outbound process usually follows a direct flow, from the target to the conversion:

• Defining the target audience: choosing who to talk to, based on the ideal customer profile and segmentation.
• Building a list or setting up media targeting: gathering contacts for prospecting or configuring the ad targeting.
• Active outreach: sending the message by call, email, ad or visit.
• Qualification: filtering who has real interest and turning contacts into actual leads.
• Conversion: guiding the qualified lead to the sale, often with the support of a sales team.

Because the initiative comes from the company, outbound tends to produce fast results: you can turn on the ad today and get contacts tomorrow. On the other hand, it closely follows the sales funnel and demands constant monitoring, because the flow stops paying off as soon as the budget or the prospecting stops.

Inbound and outbound are not enemies, but they start from opposite logics. One attracts, the other approaches. The table sums up the main differences:

A noticeable difference shows up in the budget. Because inbound leans on assets that keep paying off, it usually has a lower customer acquisition cost in the medium term, while outbound pays for each new contact. It is no coincidence that content marketing gained so much ground as a cheaper way to generate demand.

Outbound gathers quite varied channels, ranging from traditional offline to modern digital:

• Paid ads: display media, video, social networks and search ads that put the brand in front of the audience.
• Cold call: prospecting calls to contacts who do not yet know the company.
• Cold email: outreach emails sent to segmented lists.
• Direct mail and telemarketing: the most classic formats of active contact.
• Trade shows and events: physical presence to generate contacts and present products.

In digital, these channels almost always lead the audience to a clear call to action, like a form or a capture page, to turn the attention that was bought into a recorded contact. Without that well defined destination, the investment in active outreach is lost.

Outbound has clear strengths: it delivers speed, lets you aim at a specific audience and is predictable, since you can estimate how many contacts each dollar invested tends to bring. For launches and short term goals, that is valuable.

The limitations are also well known. The conversion rate of cold outreach is low: according to a survey by Cognism, the average success rate of a cold call is around 2.3%, which requires a lot of volume to produce results. Add to that the higher cost per contact and the fact that the flow ceases when the investment stops.

Even so, saying that outbound is dead is an overstatement. A study by RAIN Group, also cited by Cognism, points out that 82% of buyers accept, at least occasionally, a meeting with sellers who reach out to them actively. Done well and well targeted, outbound still opens doors that inbound alone would take months to reach.

In practice, the most efficient companies do not choose between one and the other, they combine both. The idea is to use outbound to generate demand in the short term and inbound to build a sustainable flow in the long term.

• Use outbound to accelerate: ads and prospecting bring contacts while the content is still gaining traction in search.
• Use inbound to lower costs: content and SEO reduce the cost per lead over time and nurture those who are not ready to buy yet.
• Let one feed the other: people who arrive from an ad can be nurtured with content, and people who arrive through content can receive a sales approach at the right moment.

The ideal balance varies according to the business, the ticket size and the maturity of the brand. What matters is to see outbound and inbound as complementary pieces of the same funnel, and not as rival strategies.