Outbound marketing or lead generation is used to directly contact ‘cold’ prospects through tactics such as direct mail, email, events and teleprospecting.

Depending on the size of your target audience, the spectrum of programs could vary from either a mass direct marketing program targeting small businesses with a volume sale type of solution or a high touch, account-based marketing program targeting enterprise accounts with a complex sale solution.

Despite the noise in the marketplace, most B2B marketers are looking to develop an optimal mix of outbound and inbound marketing, where each type of marketing works together to enhance results.

Today I want to highlight (not hype) some of the key benefits uniquely associated with outbound marketing. The first benefit, marketing ROI, provides an immediate payoff on outbound marketing while the remaining benefits pave the way to success for future marketing programs.

Marketing ROI – For most B2B organizations, especially those selling complex solutions, outbound marketing can deliver a sizable return on marketing investment (ROMI).

The higher costs of outbound marketing are affordable for organizations selling complex solutions that often start at $10,000 (or much more). By focusing on well-defined, high potential segments with large deal potential, just one close will pay for the outbound marketing program many times over.

Primary Market Research – What if you could define a vertical market segment comprised of 1,000 accounts in a region and be provided with a detailed report on that market? Unfortunately most technology analysts are unable to drill down to small-sized market segments in their research efforts.

By conducting an outbound marketing effort, you can profile segments in a precise way and use criteria that are meaningful to you. This insight gained is a bonus spin off from the core goal of generating qualified leads.

Market Segmentation – An outbound marketing program can provide very actionable information for B2B marketers to segment their markets and generate higher yield programs.

This information can be leveraged for trigger marketing and solution selling.

Accounts that are not converted to leads can be used for segmentation and are often profiled using the following criteria:

The challenge with inbound marketing is that you are profiling accounts that are not within your target market (as defined by size, industry and geography) and who maybe responding to an offer, rather than to your value proposition. This skews the results of the profiling.

Robust Database – A clean, well-profiled database provides the foundation for future marketing programs. Given that 20% of a list decays over a year, marketers are well-served if data can be cleaned as a by-product of outbound marketing efforts.

Less wastage on marketing to poor data and the cumulative impact of relevant messaging creates a compelling case for frequently touching key prospects through outbound marketing.

This database provides intelligence should a prospect respond through inbound or outbound marketing efforts.

What unique benefits do you associate with outbound marketing?

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