Outbound Marketing Matters: But It Doesn’t Have to Look How You Think
Over the past ten years or so, my team — and I’m guessing yours in one way or another — has gone through many changes. I’ve been involved for the past 4 years or so, I’ve seen a lot of them through.
We grew from a single solution offering to a full suite of data management tools and integrations. We “rebranded” from that single tool, to our umbrella business name on the forward-facing side.
We’ve seen our customer base change, from those looking for simple, low-cost solutions to major brands looking for complete process modification and improvement with deep, “complex” integrations.
We’ve also had a number of marketing initiatives and outlooks. To be honest, they all made sense at the time, and with the research and experience those leading the helm had. We’ve focused exclusively on inbound initatives, we dipped our feet into “growth hacking” outbound strategies, we’ve put an emphasis on referrals.
Something Worth Noting…
The thing with each of these, which may resonate with you or, which may not be similar to your team, is that we are small. We don’t have a deep sales or marketing team: we focus on doing what we do really well, and moving forward.
In some ways, this is advantageous. It’s easy to change paths and move in a new direction fairly quickly. But, when it comes to marketing, it also presents its own set of challenges. Because of this, it’s often felt like an “all or nothing” sort of thing.
We are going to focus exclusively on driving traffic to grow inbound leads.
Or…
We’re focusing on outbound: we’ve gotta reach those who don’t know they need us and wow them with what we can provide!
When this happens, though, we miss the fact that the best marketing strategies are a little bit of both. Just like other areas of business growth and development, an “all or nothing” mentality is usually limiting: we’ve found this to be true.
So…What’s a Small Team to Do?
If the best marketing strategies are a little bit of both, what do we do?
Our team spent a lot of time thinking about this. We do inbound best. Not only is our marketing team small, our sales team (together, we make up a growth team) is also minimal. Being able to focus well on both initiatives is hard.
So, we talked to others.
We learned that we could continue to push for inbound in house, as we were doing, but, that groups were available to take our messaging (that we crafted), and manage the outbound side of marketing for us. Instead of viewing it as stepping on toes, we see it as a valuable tool.
Suddenly, our messaging can go farther, and the leads that come to our sales team are pre-qualified in ways that our small team couldn’t manage single-handedly.
We’re early in the process, but, we are having conversations that — had we kept all initiatives in the house — we would have taken more time to achieve if we had achieved them at all.
It’s allowing us to focus in on who we are and has changed the way we handle our inbound initiatives, allowing us to become more streamlined than ever before.
It Can’t Be One or the Other
It’s taken some time, but our team has learned that our conversations become deeper and more meaningful, and our focus on forward motion becomes better than ever, when we all do what we do best, and what we’re passionate about. But, when that passion leaves out an important initative — like outbound marketing — we remain stagnant.
For us to see success, we must focus on both inbound and outbound, and that means getting help.
It also means moving quickly. Had we spent too much time getting lost in the details, we would have lost important traction. Instead, we took a “jump in and adjust as we go” outlook, which is an important benefit of maintaining a small/lean team; we can mobilize quickly.
We’ve adjusted our messaging, we’ve been honest in what leads make sense and what might be outside of our “realm.” We’ve figured out our verticals and have become more specific than ever before with them. But, we’ve learned along the way.
It might not look “traditional.” For some teams, it might feel awkward. But, working with an outside team has been a positive experience so far. We’re looking forward to learning more as we move forward.
What balance has your team found? How could outsourcing what falls outside your range of expertise change your dynamics for growth?
