In Between Bound marketing is here
Inbound marketing is a popular approach for lead generation in today's B2B marketplace, for good reason: inbound leads are highly qualified and much further through the sales cycle than most outbound leads. A strong inbound marketing campaign also allows your company to position itself as an expert long before your buyer contacts you.
Although inbound leads are valuable, this method is not mutually exclusive with outbound marketing. In fact, the most successful marketing campaigns often contain elements of both inbound and outbound strategies. Even the founders of HubSpot, the company that coined the term "inbound marketing," admit that they employ outbound strategies for their own sales and marketing efforts. To effectively blend inbound and outbound strategies, it's important to understand how outbound tactics can fit in with your existing marketing and how to use these tactics to amplify the effect of your inbound campaign.
In a white paper on transformative marketing strategies, Thomson Reuters says that "companies are combining inbound and outbound marketing…to reach a larger audience and gain additional advantages." The correct way to view outbound marketing efforts ais as a method of accelerating your inbound marketing efforts. To illustrate how the two styles work in tandem, Reuters uses the example of uploading an informational video to YouTube as an inbound strategy and then promoting it through social media and email newsletters as an outbound strategy. Other examples of integrating inbound and outbound marketing include:
The ways to combine outbound and inbound marketing are limited only by your creativity as a marketer and the needs of your target audience.
YesData: Integrating outbound and inbound through accuracy
To gain a healthy ROI on both inbound and outbound strategies, sales data must be accurate enough for you to identify which prospects fit best with your inbound buyer persona. A recent audit of the YesData database showed an accuracy rate of over 90% for contact email addresses and company names in our database.
Thanks to YesData's powerful search tool, you can receive targeted outbound leads that fit into the exact buyer persona that your inbound marketing campaign is based around. This helps you accelerate your inbound campaigns and get your content in front of more people who need it, exponentially increasing the effectiveness of your marketing.
Chuck Reynolds
Contributor