The Inbound Marketing Multiplier: How to Maximize Your Inbound Efforts

Are you using a mix of inbound and outbound marketing for your lead generation efforts? You should be.

Outbound marketing is any paid marketing – both online and offline – used to acquire new leads. It includes everything from trade shows to pay-per-click marketing and is critical to growing inbound marketing. Why? Well, when a new piece of content is launched, inbound marketing supports that content, for example, by sharing it in social media channels, making it faster and easier for your content to be found. The paid advertisement or site sponsorship of an outbound marketing campaign helps you further spread the word about the content, ultimately multiplying the number of new views you generate, which in turn will increase the number of shares, thus further increasing the number of potential customers viewing your content. I call this the Inbound Marketing Multiplier and it’s critical in getting the most out of your inbound marketing efforts.

In addition to generating more views, marketers can realize the following benefits through a combined inbound/outbound mix:

• Create Brand Recognition – and Business: The greater the number of outbound campaigns you execute in combination with inbound programs, the more likely that people will recognize and get to know your brand. The more they know and trust your brand, the more likely they will be to respond to your inbound marketing, and ultimately, become a customer.
• Make Prospects Speak your Language: When you run paid promotions, you choose the language used to describe your product or service. Prospects who repeatedly see these paid promotions are likely to pick up on the terms you use and plug those in when they are searching for a solution. As a result, you are more likely to appear high in the search engine results because you have optimized for these terms.
• Capture Your Target: Knowing and appealing to your target audience is one thing, reaching them is another. Let’s say your target market is Fortune 1000 companies. Through outbound marketing, you can target this group exclusively by purchasing lead-generation programs where you only pay for leads that satisfy your criteria. This makes your campaigns very efficient and keeps your database clear of names that will never purchase from you. In inbound marketing you can target specific groups in your content, but you can’t do anything to ensure that the content reaches and is consumed by your target audience.
• The Personal Touch: When you meet a prospect face-to-face, or even talk to them on the phone, you establish a relationship that can be far more powerful than one developed via any email or tweet. With outbound marketing you can build the one-on-one relationships that are not possible to develop with inbound marketing.

The bottom line is for companies to take advantage of all ways of reaching and connecting with prospective buyers by incorporating inbound marketing into a larger group of marketing tactics. Doing so will lead to much better overall results across all of your campaigns and complement the marketing strategies you already have in place.

Ready to start doing some marketing campaigns to promote your inbound marketing content? Check out this paper on How to Amplify Your Inbound Marketing Impact. Want to explore the marketing executive’s role in shaping a successful inbound marketing strategy? Check out the CMO Guide to Inbound Marketing.