Now, you’ll have to forgive me and my analogies throughout this blog, but hey, you’ve clicked on an article called “What the #!?% is marketing anyway!?”, so I guess I don’t have to worry about offending you too much, now do I?
You walk into a crowded room and shout at the top of your voice “Hello everyone, my name is (insert your name here) and I am really good in bed!”
That, my friends, is outbound marketing and it’s basically going out and trying to win new business via a more traditional or, as we like to call it, “interruption based” marketing technique.
If you have ever heard a sales person say, “if you throw enough mud at a wall some of it will stick”, they were most certainly talking about outbound marketing.
Now before you run outside with a couple of handfuls of mud, there are a few more things you need to know about good old outbound marketing techniques. There are two fundamental types, Indirect and Direct.
The “good in bed” approach I used before falls firmly in the indirect camp. It is the old fashioned, traditional mud-throwing technique in all of its great (but slightly outdated to say the least) glory.
Anyone who has ever run advertising in the press, tried leaflet drops or advertised on the TV or radio will tell you that the uptake can be very low.
Now you can and should focus your outbound marketing efforts into a certain area or demographic to try to maximise the results from your mud-throwing.
Advertising the latest set of tools to help you “re-bore your V8 for an extra 35 break” may not be best placed during children’s cartoon time, but in the advert break of a TV show like Top Gear will probably get you better uptake.
The Internet can help you track this uptake if you use voucher codes or custom landing pages for your adverts.
Do you need to track the uptake?? Urm, hello, of course you do! If you don’t, how are you going to find out if things are working or not?
This is where we get to… direct outbound marketing.
Before we start, I should point out a few subtle differences when compared to scenario one.
Firstly, this room is hosting a singles function and secondly, we are going to scan the room first to assess the crowd for some suitable candidates.
When we find them, we calmly walk over to the person/people that we feel we are most in tune with and say, “Hi, my name is < insert your name here > and I am really, REALLY good in bed.”
The subtle differences from last time make a huge difference to our overall approach. With direct marketing you get fewer funny looks and you are also being much more strategic.
This time, we have made sure that the target audience is full of potential prospects. We have also taken a bit of time to analyse the market and have been more selective as to our target audience.
With direct marketing, good data is as important as looking like Brad Pitt in the dating scene. With out it, you may still get lucky, but it really is a lot more effective with it!
So, what kinds of direct marketing techniques work well?
Targeted e-marketing can be very effective, as can targeted telesales. Now if you put them both together, you are basically turning yourself into Brad Pitt and George Clooney all rolled into one. In short, you are much more likely to succeed!
Targeted direct mail can work quite well these days. I think so much time has gone by with everything being digital that you can once again get people excited by actually sending them something real that they can hold.
If you do try this approach, make it relevant and also trackable. Perhaps you can guide the recipient back to a targeted landing page on your website.
Remember, with all of your marketing it is essential to track success, analyse what works and doesn’t work and then improve on it. That is why modern day chat up lines have moved on from, “do you come here often” to… well, perhaps you can leave a comment with a few of your favourites!
That’s it for this time. In the next article we will be talking about the more modern technique of inbound marketing. In the meantime if you are wondering why I used examples like Brad Pitt and George Clooney in my dating examples, as opposed to Pamela Anderson or Jessica Alba… my wife proofreads these articles, what do you think I am, crazy?!
