Knowing the most effective marketing methods to garner more attention for your business is key to scaling.
Too often, we run businesses that simply don't implement these marketing variants and don't know what they mean.
Today we want to define those for you and give you clarity around which method might be the right next step for you.
From our perspective, you'd implement both types of marketing for various reasons we're listing below.
Outbound marketing - or the method of drawing new interest and nurturing existing interest in your services or products via OUTBOUND MATERIALS (items you send) should be utilized for:
There are obviously many more reasons but these few can really improve the way a sales team operates when done correctly, especially if there is poor quality, or little process, currently in place. While this methodology does require financial output for your business, it can assist you with:
When done well, it will even out once your inbound strategies are profiting as far as expenses are concerned. We'll get more to this in a few.
Inbound strategies are typically the small business dream. We hope for leads to come by referrals and to accumulate a natural "line" of happily waiting customers. You build trust with customers based on the idea that they are going to come to you. At the very least, there customers are interested in topics surrounding your brand or know of your brand and need your assistance.
Typically this can be a great limiter on small businesses.
Knowing how to use inbound and outbound strategies better together can make a difference, but even starting with inbound marketing to improve your brand and enhance the customer/viewer experience can be huge.
Examples of these strategies can include:
Because inbound marketing can be a bit slower than outbound, we see this really as an effort to build your brand and surrounding tertiary materials while also nurturing leads. By giving more helpful content, you can inform your customers/viewers while also showing what it's like to work with you to increase interest and also help the wrong kinds of customers realize you may not be what they're looking for due to a variety of reasons.
Making sure to track your KPIs (key performance indicators) is crucial to assure that, regardless of the marketing output, you know how much you've earned for every dollar, or hour, expended.
You can identify a KPI by identifying the most valuable asset that a marketing strategy can bring to you. Many businesses can get stuck on leads. We typically track leads but then like to sync up with the internal sales strategy of a company to track a step further - did that lead become a sale? Then following that, you may even want to track what the ideal step is that a customer may follow after purchasing. Is it sharing with someone? Is it a second sale? A review?
Identifying these with your marketer before getting started can make a difference in your efforts.
Some outbound strategies require more financial investment than inbound due to bidding and ad spend. Still, if you're not the one writing the blogs, social posts, etc., it's easy to incur costs to hire quality writers and social media managers.
For small businesses, we always recommend starting by trying this out on your own until your business is at a point where you can afford to invest in a hire. Services like ours typically are cheaper than a hire and can run alongside your marketing team in-house for capacity or operate as a precursor to a team.
The way our company measures profit based on marketing is through the following equation.
[incoming tracked revenue] - [ad/marketing spend] - [management fees or retainers] = [profit revenue from ad spend]
It would then be up to your team to follow the further step of identifying whether your profit revenue brought in makes sense when paired with your overhead. As our team fights for lower and lower costs per conversion, your profit will increase and help you internally profit more and more after overhead.
Overall, using inbound/outbound simultaneously can expand your business many times over. We've even see the amount of money invested 15x'ed through a good marketing strategy after ALL OVERHEAD through our services.
Knowing where to start can be the most challenging part, and knowing further that even with experienced professionals, your efforts will require testing to find the proper methodology for your business. Most of our clients have some uniqueness worth considering in their marketing efforts.
That means you, too, will need to test, but having professionals in your corner will always lower your risk.
It's also important to know that pairing inbound with outbound is key to a holistic customer and viewer experience.
Pairing things like ads with social media and email nurture sequences, or blogs with emails and ads to make sure more people see them, or even blog writing and social media with a strong sales outbound approach to assure that people know they're going to connect to real individuals on the other line with your business - these are all great things to consider to grow your business at the speed you're ready for.
We hope this short blog offers you a few ideas that can give you more comfort around your growth efforts as a business but also know when it's time to handoff to someone else. We like to remind our customers that operating in their strengths is what got their business to where they are, so letting others do the same for them will keep them as owners out of efforts that may cause them to lose their focus on that which matters most - their quality as a service and team.
If you have questions or want to say hello, reach out to us at jon@animusdigital.co.
