New Jersey Web Design Blog

It’s become quite vogue to characterize outbound marketing as “old school.” But as you pointed out, traditional marketing is far from being dead or ineffective.

It sounds good in theory to say the every business should utilize inbound marketing. But how would you advise someone who just opened his own carpet cleaning business? Build a website and hope people find it? Create a Facebook page or Twitter account and look for people to ‘like’ it or follow him? Blog about carpet cleaning? Honestly, how many homeowners would engage a carpet cleaning service on social media? Besides, it’s the cart before the horse.

The best strategy would be a combination of old school: Yellow Pages, direct mail and cold-calling. That’s what will get him customers right away. Once he’s built up a sufficient client base, then he can begin using social media to engage them, offer discounts and incentives, and generate marketing gravity.

I disagree when you say that for smaller businesses the cost for outbound marketing is too great to justify the expense. How much does cold-calling cost compared to paid search? (You’ll spend a lot less on the phone calls.) Certain keywords are becoming quite expensive and ROI is dropping because only large companies with huge marketing budgets can afford them.

Another thing that’s dropping is the cost of Yellow Page advertising (due to independent directories entering the market). In some markets you can buy display advertising for less than $1200 for the entire year.

As you stated, for some businesses, a combination of inbound and outbound marketing may be the best option. I owned my own web business, so you’d think I’d be singing along with the “outbound only” marketing tune. But my experience has shown me that those who preach that message usually have their own agenda – to sell their own inbound marketing services. And what better way to accomplish that than to disparage their “outbound” competition?

Tomasz,

I don’t disagree with most of what you said, except about cold-calling. They may convert less percentage-wise. But overall, it may very well produce a greater volume of sales.

If 100 people engage with Mr. Carpet Cleaner using SMM, and over a month’s time, and 75 percent of them convert, it’s still less customers than if he cold-called 1200 people in that same time period and “only” 20 percent of them convert. Do you see my point? With the average CTR at 2 percent, is Mr. Carpet Cleaner going to net over 200 new customers after a month-long AdWords campaign? I highly doubt it.

I run a department of B2B lead generators. In a good economy, our reps sell 20 to 25 percent of the appointments we book. Even though we’ve seen a slight dip in that since the economy tanked, it still represents an annual six-figure sales revenue. You’d be hard-pressed to convince me that any type of inbound marketing would produce the same results. And even if it did, we’d simply add it to our marketing mix, not replace it.

And BTW, “do not call” lists don’t apply to B2B calling, so we’re not restricted in that regard. And even when I called B2C in another job, there were enough consumers not on the DNC list to keep 10 of us busy all day long.

You may very well get upset when cold-called. But for every 3 people who get upset or simply say ‘no,’ one says ‘yes,’ because he has a need.

Is most cold-calling untargeted? Yes. But smart companies build a profile of their best customers and then specifically call (or mail) prospects who fit that profile, because they’re more likely to buy from them. Smart marketers have been using targeted outbound marketing for years.

As far as cost-per-lead being 60 percent cheaper? You’d have to show me some hard data on that. We get about a 700 percent return on our investment from our best lead generator.

Just because many business owners don’t track or don’t know how to track their ROI for outbound marketing doesn’t mean it’s impossible. (And shame on those who don’t.) I would argue that the ones who won’t or don’t track their outbound will also fail to track their inbound.