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5 Best Outbound Marketing Tools for Manufacturers

by Marcee | Sep 17, 2019 | Email Marketing, Manufacturer Marketing, Outbound Marketing

With the rise of the digital world and inbound marketing, outbound marketing can get a bad rap. While it’s no longer the only way to reach potential customers, it’s still an important part of any marketing and growth strategy, alongside inbound marketing practices. This outbound marketing shouldn’t be limited to traditional media like radio and newspaper ads, though, but should instead incorporate modern outbound tools. Here are 5 of the best outbound marketing tools for manufacturers and B2Bs.

#1 Social Media

You might think that social media is irrelevant to manufacturers, that it’s just kids sending pictures to each other, rich people hawking fad diets and scam music festivals, and your out-of-touch aunt leaving odd comments on status updates.

But that’s not entirely the case. Social media has huge potential for manufacturers’ outbound marketing efforts.

How? Social media ads and their amazing targeting options.

All social media platforms have some form of advertising, and most have multiple: boosted posts, banner ads, native ads, even direct messaging ads. Not only do they offer all of these kinds of ads, they provide some of the best targeting options for running your ad campaigns.

This is because of the nature of social media profiles—users indicate their demographics, location, and interests in their profiles, likes, and other platform activity. All of that activity can be used to target the audiences who are your desired market.

You might still be thinking that as a manufacturer, you’re marketing to businesses, not people.

But, if you’ve been doing any inbound marketing, you know that even to market to businesses, you have to market to people. There are certain people at your ideal client company that are key decision-makers with regard to your product, whether that is a product designer, a sourcing specialist, or a purchasing associate. You can absolutely market to those people with social media.

For manufacturers or other B2Bs, we find that LinkedIn is one of the best outbound marketing tools available. LinkedIn has very specific targeting options for ad campaigns, down to the specific companies and job titles at those companies that you want to target.

If you want to know more about LinkedIn’s outbound marketing potential, we’ve written about it, a lot. Check out The Definitive LinkedIn Guide for B2Bs and LinkedIn Ads and B2B Marketing to get started.

#2 Google

If you know anything about the internet, you know that getting people to your site means showing up on Google. While appearing in the organic search results for the keywords you want to rank for requires a certain amount of inbound marketing savvy—lots of good content, SEO optimization, keyword research, and so on—Google is also an outbound marketing tool.

Like social media platforms, Google has advertisements. And like social media, Google is ubiquitous. If you run Google ads, they’re going to be seen. Plus, Google Ads also have great targeting options by keywords, location, and even audience behavior.

Google Ads include two distinct types of ads: search ads and display network ads. Search ads are native ads (i.e., ads that look like regular search results but are actually ads) that appear at the top of the results page on searches for specific keywords you select.

If you look at the first two or three results the next time you search on Google, you’ll see that they are actually ads, and are designated as such.

Display network ads are banner and sidebar ads that appear on Google sites and sites they partner with, like local news sites, weather.com, and a host of other national and local organizations’ websites. These too can be highly targeted.

#3 Inbound Marketing Software

Does this seem like a contradiction? Probably. But the thing is, inbound and outbound strategies should always be working together, and not only can your inbound and outbound strategies support each other, but your inbound marketing software can also help you with outbound marketing efforts.

This is one of the many reasons we use HubSpot, because there are so many great features of HubSpot’s inbound marketing software that work for outbound marketing.

How? There are a few key ways. All of the tools incorporated in your inbound marketing software such as lead management systems, prospect reports, and analytics can be used by your sales department to make sales calls and direct mail campaigns more effective. These tools can also help you see which of your marketing content is most effective and with whom it’s effective, so your outbound marketing efforts can be more targeted.

#4 Email

Again, this might seem like double-dipping, since email marketing is generally considered an inbound marketing practice. But, again, it can be both. You send emails out rather than waiting for them to come in, and in our book, that’s outbound marketing. Click To Tweet

This isn’t just an email newsletter—that’s staunchly an inbound marketing practice. We’re talking about targeted email campaigns that nurture leads and bring them into the sales cycle. Using a targeted email campaign, you can push your brand, product, or service to a specific audience that has a genuine need and use for what you’re offering.

Creating valuable and targeted messages for intuitively segmented leads can yield huge results, especially when your campaigns provide the right information at the right time, without spamming or overwhelming your leads. Using email marketing effectively can transform it from just an inbound technique to a cornerstone of your outbound strategy.

#5 An Outbound Marketing Agency

A tool is anything you use to achieve a desired end state or goal. When it comes to outbound marketing, a full-service marketing agency with years of experience is going to be the best outbound marketing tool at your disposal. Especially as a manufacturing company that may not have a dedicated marketing department or any existing marketing efforts that fall outside the umbrella of sales, a marketing agency can help you reach the growth goals you care about most.

You can do all your outbound marketing all yourself—and you can use a screwdriver to get a screw into a piece of wood… but wouldn’t you rather use a drill? Click To Tweet Hi, we’re the drill.

Manufacturers can seriously benefit from outbound marketing tools, especially as more and more of your target buyers trend online. For help developing an outbound marketing strategy that actually works, talk to Evenbound.

Social Media Marketing vs. Social Media Advertising

by Marcee | Aug 27, 2019 | Outbound Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Marketing

If you don’t know the difference between social media marketing and social media advertising, it’s okay to admit it. The distinction can be a bit confusing, especially if you’re new to the social media world or to digital marketing—especially since they’re sometimes used (carelessly) as interchangeable. There is a difference between social media marketing vs. social media advertising, and it pays to know that difference and to incorporate both into your overarching digital strategy.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing is a crucial facet of any digital marketing strategy today. It encompasses your business’s online profiles on social media platforms, along with the social media activity of those platforms: posting, liking, commenting, sharing, and so on.

Social media marketing begins with creating company pages or profiles on relevant social networks. The networks that you choose will depend on your industry; B2Bs will likely find LinkedIn to be the most relevant network, since they’re marketing to other business professionals, while home builders and developers might make use of platforms like Pinterest, Houzz, and Instagram to show off images of their homes and properties.

But it doesn’t end with just a page or profile. To effectively market using social media, interaction and engagement are key. Click To TweetYou need to interact with others on the platform by liking, commenting, and sharing their content, as well as by posting and sharing your own content. This will drive engagement, which is when others interact with your content—liking, commenting, sharing, and clicking.

What kind of content should you share and post?

Again, this depends on the platform and your industry. Industrial manufacturers may not have much luck posting photos of their products on Instagram. (Are the insides of factories usually very aesthetically pleasing? No.) But, they’ll have more success posting content about their processes, sharing their blog content, sharing relevant articles and news from industry publications, and posting infographics on LinkedIn.

Always be aware of the platform and its conventions when posting social content.

Twitter is great for sharing links, but because tweets are limited to 280 characters, it’s not the place for longform content.

Instagram is designed for sharing images, and while you can use an image to promote a piece of content, you can’t link from a post directly. You have to include the link in your bio, which might not be the most effective way to direct people to that link.

Why Do Social Media Marketing?

One of the major principles of inbound marketing is bringing your ideal customers to you. Since your ideal customers are using social media—everyone is—having a social media presence is a necessity if you want to draw in potential customers.

Social media helps create a community around your company, one that can result in sales.

Creating a community through social media marketing has some major benefits, like building brand awareness and helping to establish your industry reputation as an authority in your field. Also, it can establish your company as enjoyable to interact with, which can result in people converting to customers when they do need your company’s products or services.

What is Social Media Advertising?

Social media advertising (also known as paid social) involves running paid ads on various social media channels, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, etc. These can include banner ads as well as native ads and activities like boosting posts or like campaigns. Social media ads are often charged on a pay-per-click (PPC) or cost-per-impression basis.

You can use paid social to promote content, like a whitepaper or guide that your company or marketing agency has created. You can develop an ad around this content you’re offering, or boost the posts where you shared the content offer. This increases the reach of your content, which can lead to more website traffic and conversions of visitors to leads.

Why do Paid Social?

Targeting.

Promotional posts on social media don’t have a ton of reach on their own and aren’t likely to get a lot of organic engagement. Paid social allows you to specifically target audiences. This targeting is no joke, either. Depending on the platform, you can target audiences by criteria such as location, age, gender, search history, interests and activities, device use, even things like employer or job title.

Since you’re paying either by the number of clicks or impressions (views) your ad gets, you want to ensure that you’re getting the most for your social media ad budget. You do this through targeting, which ensures that only the most relevant people (aka, your ideal customers) see your ads. This makes paid social a high-ROI advertising strategy.

Additionally, the analytics that social media advertising platforms provide you can help better understand your audience and fine-tune your advertisements for better reach, engagement, and ROI.

Social Media Marketing vs. Social Media Advertising

Essentially, advertising is a form of marketing that uses advertisements, which are paid notices that appear on public platforms. Not all marketing is advertising, but all advertising is marketing.

When we talk about social media marketing vs. social media advertising, however, we’re generally making a distinction between paid and unpaid methods of marketing using social media. Social media advertising refers to the paid methods (like PPC ads) and social media marketing the unpaid methods (like your social media posts and shares). Click To Tweet

Which is Better? Social Media Marketing or Social Media Advertising?

If you’ve read this far, you probably already know what we’re going to say: you need both.

Social media marketing helps you build a community and foster relationships with current and potential customers—it’s a long game.
Social media advertising puts your name/products/services/links in front of people who are looking for what you offer right now.

Both of these strategies can generate leads and sales, and they aren’t mutually exclusive. Using social media for both its organic (unpaid) and paid methods of reaching your intended audience is simply the most effective use of the vast power of social media.

Marketing vs. advertising: that is the question. Click To TweetHowever, when you use both, you can optimize your results for the best possible outcome. Not sure you have the team to handle both advertising and marketing? Get in touch with Evenbound. We specialize in both inbound and outbound marketing and would love to help.

How to Use Google Ads: A Complete Guide

by Marcee | Aug 13, 2019 | Google Updates, Outbound Marketing, Pay Per Click

If you’re considering running any sort of PPC or other outbound marketing strategy, you need to be using Google Ads. It’s one of the best digital marketing tools available to any company and when used effectively, can yield huge results for boosting website traffic, generating leads, and making sales.

Here’s the complete guide on how to use Google Ads so that you can take advantage of one of the best advertising tools on the web.

What are Google Ads?

Search Ads

Search ads are a form of native advertising that appears on search engine result pages. When a user makes a query, search ads that are relevant to the keywords used in the query will appear at the top of the page as a sponsored result. These search ads look very similar to the organic search results that appear below them on the page.

Google Display Network

The Google Display Network is a network of sites from Youtube to Weather.com to your local news station’s website that partner with Google and host advertisements. Unlike paid search, these advertisements appear directly on sites in the GDN, in banners, sidebars, etc. Rather than appearing as search engine listings, they appear as clickable images, which you can design.

The Google Display Network allows you to target audiences for your ads based on location, the sites they’re visiting, their search history, and remarketing lists. Click To TweetThese types of ads can help you reach internet users who have not yet searched queries relating to your keywords.

Why Use Google Ads?

Google Ads has a lot of great features, including comprehensive and relatively easy to understand analytics so you can gauge the success of your campaigns, optimize future efforts, and measure marketing ROI. You can target very specific audiences and appear in searches for critical keywords, as well as selectively bid on cost-effective keywords and targeting options to maximize your marketing budget and ROI.

Not to mention, Google is the internet. Nearly all online searches in the US are performed using Google, and there are thousands and thousands of sites, local and national, in the Google Display Network. Google Ads will get your ads seen, no question.

How to Use Google Ads

Create a Google Ads Account

#1 Go to ads.google.com and select “Start now.”

#2 Select your main advertising goal.

#3 Enter your business name and website.

#4 Choose your geographic area.

#5 Enter your products and services.

Once you’ve entered all of this information, you’ll be ready to start your first campaign.

Create a Campaign

In Google Ads, a campaign is an overarching category containing ad groups. Ad groups are sets of keywords and associated ads.

Initial Setup

If you’re creating your first campaign immediately after entering your business information and creating your account, you’ll be taken right to creating your first campaign. If you’ve already created an account, log in to your account and click the + icon on the Campaigns page.

From there, you’ll need to select the network you want your ad to appear on (i.e., search network or display network). Note that you can have your campaign run on both the search and display networks at the same time, or just one of those networks. You’ll also need to set a goal for your campaign (sales, leads, or website traffic are the options Google provides) and name your campaign.

Then you’ll select the locations where you want your ads to be shown. This can be general, like the whole US, or more specific, like the region, state, or city. You’ll also want to select the languages your potential customers speak.

Bidding

Next, you’ll be prompted to choose a bidding strategy. Since Google Ads are pay-per-click (PPC) ads, each time someone clicks on your ad, you have to pay for that.

Bidding allows you to limit the amount you spend on your campaign for maximum ROI. The interface offers you many different bidding strategies depending on your campaign goals, including maximize clicks, maximize conversions, target page search location, target outranking share, target CPA, target ROAS, enhanced CPC, and manual CPC.

Then enter a daily budget for your campaign, based on how much you want to spend on that campaign.

Ad Extensions

You’ll then be prompted to enter start and end dates for your campaign, as well as ad extensions.

Ad extensions are extensions of your ad: they allow you to include additional information like an additional sitelink, more business information (like hours or storefront location), or a phone number.

Choose Keywords

Keywords are the key to effective Google Ads, and effective PPC ads in general. You’ll need to select keywords that are:

Relevant
Specific

The Google Ads platform has a keyword planner that can be useful in generating keywords. Under “Get keyword ideas” you can enter a related website or your product or service, and the keyword planner will suggest possible keywords.

If you’ve already been doing some digital marketing or updating your website, you may already have a keyword strategy in place and have some specific keywords, based on research, that you want to target.

Track and Review Metrics

In the Ads interface, select the tool icon in the top right corner, then select “Conversions.” Then select the + button, then select the type of conversion you want to track: website, app, phone calls, or imported from another system. From there you’ll define and categorize your goals, and add a global site tag and event tag to your landing page to track the conversions.

To review your ad performance, start at the Overview page. You can customize the line chart that appears to show you the data that is most interesting and relevant to you, such as clicks, conversions, conversion rates, and cost per conversion.

The tiles below the chart display useful information and data trends, such as which devices are accessing your campaigns, or your campaign activity today compared to the average number of clicks over the course of the campaign.

Google Adwords is a powerful tool when used properly. If you don’t have the team to manage it, a digital marketing agency can help.

What is Account Based Marketing (ABM)?

by Mackenzie | Jul 2, 2019 | B2B, Digital Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Outbound Marketing

B2Bs are always looking for new, better ways to market to their prospects. And it makes sense. As a B2B, the sales cycle is long. You’re marketing to multiple shareholders, and oftentimes, you don’t have as many prospects out there to market to in the first place. If you’ve been looking for a successful way to market that is trackable and proven to deliver results at a high rate of return, then you might be interested to hear about ABM or account-based marketing.

Here’s a look at what we’ll cover in this blog:
What is ABM?
Who Uses ABM?
How Does ABM Work?
What Are Some Benefits of ABM?
Can ABM Pair With Inbound Marketing?
How to Know if ABM is Right For You
What Do You Need to Make an ABM Campaign Work

What is ABM?

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a marketing strategy that focuses on targeting marketing efforts to specific accounts, rather than to an entire group of prospects or a specific industry. Click To Tweet

ABM is an outbound marketing strategy because you’re taking your content and your expertise and bringing it to an account you’ve identified as ideal, rather than having them come to you.

Account-based marketing is a highly targeted method of marketing that’s been proven to deliver quality ROI, especially for companies who don’t have as many prospects to begin with, and who are focused on increasing customer retention and upselling.

We love this analogy from the folks at Drift, who liken ABM to fishing with a spear, rather than a net. You’re only fishing for the biggest, best, and most attractive fish in the pond.

Who Uses ABM?

ABM has proven the most useful for B2B companies. As a whole, business-to-business companies, especially those in niche markets, tend to have fewer prospects, many of whom are larger, high-value corporations.

ABM offers B2B companies like this a better opportunity to engage and close those high-value prospects. By providing those clients with content and lead nurturing tactics that are tailored specifically to their company, and that touch multiple decision makers within that one account, you have the opportunity to shorten the sales cycle significantly, and close with just the very best clients in your industry.

How Does ABM Work?

Account-based marketing is similar to inbound marketing in many ways, except that it encourages that you seek out ideal accounts, rather than having those accounts find their way to your company organically.

Account-based marketing starts with an Ideal Customer Profile, which is similar to inbound marketing’s buyer personas. The Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) takes a look at specific accounts your company is already successfully working with and outlines what makes those accounts perfect for your company.

An ICP often talks not about a single decision maker’s pain points and challenges, but the goals of the account as a whole. It also details the unique internal structure of that ideal account, as well as the individual decision makers who must sign on before a sale can be closed.

In this way, account-based marketing is very closely aligned with sales goals.

The sales team knows which prospects are the best fit, and are most likely to convert to a sale. The ICP gives the sales team a chance to tell marketing exactly which types of accounts they love, and it gives the marketing team a very specific account to market to.

Unlike inbound marketing, where the goal is to draw in many prospects from a particular industry or target market, with ABM, your target market is often just one company. Click To Tweet

Your sales and marketing team will develop content that speaks directly to that company’s pain points and challenges, and will develop a campaign that’s directed towards that account’s decision makers.

This tactic of addressing the pain points of the five or six stakeholders in most B2B’s ideal accounts helps to close the deal with larger, high-value corporations who can benefit from your product or service, but who otherwise might take quite a long time to make a decision.

What Are Some Benefits of ABM?

Obviously, shortening the sales cycle and closing deals with your dream clients are some pretty great benefits. But ABM offers a few additional benefits that set it apart from other marketing strategies:

Clear ROI

The first, most attractive benefit to most B2B’s is account-based marketing’s ability to prove clear ROI. Where other marketing strategies can be difficult to quantify specifically, account-based marketing is fairly cut and dry.

Since you’re focusing your efforts on just one company, it’s easy to see how much time and effort you’re spending on this account, and it’s immediately visible what your return is when that account does close a deal with you.

Specific Tracking and Metrics

In a similar vein, account-based marketing offers very specific, measurable results. When you’re looking at each of your pushes to market to a specific account, you have a small, measurable set of data to analyze. It’s easy to see whether emails, ads, web content or events are helping you close the deal because you have such a small set of target accounts.

This information not only helps inform your future account-based marketing campaigns, but it can give you greater insight into your ideal customers as a whole. You might discover that the majority of your ideal accounts prefer email marketing and Linkedin advertising over search engine ads or organic content.

You can apply those findings to all of your other marketing campaigns in the future, whether they’re account-based marketing tactics or inbound marketing tactics, helping you optimize your efforts for the greatest returns.

Reduced Waste of Resources

Account-based marketing has also been called zero-waste marketing. Since the strategy is so targeted, your marketing team can focus and optimize their resources and tactics to just those specific accounts you’re hoping to close. In that way, none of their efforts are wasted. They’re spending time and resources only on potential clients and accounts that you know are quality leads.

Can ABM Pair With Inbound Marketing?

Yes, and in fact, we really recommend that you don’t use ABM without inbound marketing. Here’s why:

ABM does a really great job of shortening the sales cycle and closing on some of those dream clients you’ve always wanted to land. But, that’s all effort you’re focusing on just one company.

While ABM is effective, and a closed sales deal for that high-value corporation can help bring your company closer to your growth goals, it’s important to launch ABM campaigns alongside inbound marketing campaigns to make sure your prospects don’t feel like you’re just pushing your product or service at them constantly.

What’s more, inbound marketing helps you cast a slightly wider net, while still drawing in qualified leads.

It’s true that inbound marketing isn’t as targeted as ABM, but inbound marketing brings in qualified leads, rather than your sales and marketing teams having to go out and find them.

Running both inbound marketing and ABM together helps set up a system of safety nets.

If you’re having a slow quarter, ABM can help your team really zero in on a high-value prospect. If a deal with a high-value prospect falls through, your inbound marketing strategy has still been working for you to draw in qualified prospects that you can refocus your efforts on.

How Do You Know if ABM is Right For You?

Not sure if ABM is for you? Take a look at these questions:

Do you feel like there are a limited number of companies who can benefit from your product or service?
Does your company generate more revenue from upselling and retaining long-term clients than it does from bringing in new business?
Are you often marketing to companies and prospects where you need buy-in from several stakeholders:

If you answered yes to these questions, then you should give ABM a try! Account-based marketing is one of the most proven tactics to shorten the sales cycle and close deals for some of those ideal accounts you’ve been eyeing for a while now.

And if you think about it, it makes sense.

While your inbound marketing content is tailored to a specific industry or type of prospect, whether it’s through job title, company size, or pain point, it’s still somewhat general.

ABM content, however, is hyper-specific. That content is written directly for that account that you know is the perfect fit for your company.

And who doesn’t love content that’s written specifically for them? In today’s world of general, non-specific blogs that don’t always answer the questions you’re asking, the extremely personalized content that ABM uses is a breath of fresh air.

It shows those prospects that you’re dedicated to solving their problems and helping their company grow better. And content like that is what closes deals.

What Do You Need to Make an ABM Campaign Work?

If you’re thinking that an ABM campaign sounds right for your company, you’re probably wondering where to start. Even if your company is fully on board to start an ABM campaign, it’s not going to go very far if you don’t have these three integral components of a successful ABM campaign.

#1 Aligned Sales and Marketing Teams

ABM won’t work if your sales and marketing teams aren’t on the same page. Luckily, the nature of account-based marketing tends to bring the two teams together. Sales and marketing have historically been at odds.

Sales always wants better, more qualified leads. Marketing always wants to get the company in front of as many qualified prospects as possible. Account-based marketing solves this power struggle by bringing the sales team more closely into the marketing process.

The sales team starts by identifying the ideal account. They tell your marketing team who is the perfect account.

From there, your marketing team does what they do best, which is get to know how that account thinks — what their pain points are, what their challenges are, what their goals are, and who all they need to get on board before they can pass that prospect along to the sales team.

Account-based marketing encourages marketers to think a bit more like the sales team. Instead of focusing on just getting the best message out to the right people, the marketing team has to consider what information will contribute to closing this lead. They have to think more like your sales team, which helps bring those two teams a little closer.

That said, if your marketing team is on Mars and your sales team is on Jupiter, account-based marketing isn’t going to work for you right away. You have to have some alignment between the two teams before you can see any sort of forward progress.

#2 Clearly Outlined Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

When your sales and marketing teams are on the same page, you can define your ideal customer profile. Like we mentioned earlier, an ICP is similar to a buyer persona, except that instead of being centered on a person, it’s centered on a specific company or account.

Your ICP should identify what type of company you're working with, how many decision makers there are, and what each of those decision maker's biggest pain points and questions are about your product or service. Click To Tweet

It’s good to know that account-based marketing doesn’t just focus on new business, either. You can easily create account-based marketing campaigns that are centered on extending service with an existing company, upselling or even cross-selling.

Most B2Bs find that’s it’s more cost-effective to focus on customer retention than it is to constantly seek new business, and account-based marketing is a great way to do that.

#3 Specifically Targeted Content That Speaks to Your ICP

With an aligned sales and marketing team, and your ICP set in place, the last thing you need is content. Like we’ve said before, the key to successful account-based marketing is hyper-specific content.

When we say hyper-specific, we mean you’re creating content for that company, and each of its decision makers, specifically. The content you develop should answer questions those decision makers are asking and should speak (in no uncertain terms) to the unique situation and needs of that company.

While this might seem like a lot of effort for one company, you’re only making that effort for a company or account that you know is an ideal fit for your product or service. Account-based marketing is proven to deliver the highest return on investment of any marketing strategy, especially for B2Bs.

And let’s remember, all of that effort you put into an ABM campaign is highly targeted and optimized. Nothing you do in a proper ABM campaign is wasted effort, which is why your ROI is going to be so high when you close a deal.

Account-based marketing is a great marketing strategy, especially for B2Bs who struggle shortening the sales cycle, or who have a relatively small number of prospects. ABM helps you speak directly to those ideal prospects to grow your company strategically, and without wasting many resources.

Interested to see how ABM could work for you or your B2B? Let’s talk. We’d love to work as an extension of your team to target those ideal accounts and help your sales team close high-return deals.

3 Outbound Marketing Strategies That Actually Work

by Mackenzie | May 28, 2019 | Digital Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Lead Generation, Outbound Marketing

If you’re into digital marketing at all, you’ve probably heard that outbound marketing strategies are over. And in a lot of ways, they are. Today’s consumers don’t answer cold calls, they hate being sold to with scammy commercials, and they’ve set their email inboxes to automatically filter out promotional emails. Outbound marketing, in the old, Don Draper version of itself, no longer exists. And if it does exist, it very rarely works.

via GIPHY

But that doesn’t mean that all outbound marketing is done or totally ineffective. It just means that we marketers have to change the way we approach outbound marketing.

If you’ve read our blog before, you know we’re inbound marketing junkies. It’s a way of life, and we love it. Inbound marketing is absolutely the marketing tactic that speaks to today’s consumers, and we often use outbound marketing tactics to bolster our inbound marketing strategy.

When used with tact and purpose, 21st-century outbound marketing tactics are an excellent way to draw more leads into your inbound marketing flywheel.

Not quite sure about that? Let’s take a look at three specific outbound marketing strategies that will actually work to draw in new, qualified leads:

PPC and Paid Search

Pay-per-click and paid search advertising are amazing ways to draw in new traffic. We especially love them for our clients who are just setting up a new website. Since it takes time for Google to crawl and index new websites, paid search is a great workaround to draw in new, qualified leads immediately, until the organic rankings can catch up.

PPC is considered an outbound marketing tactic because you’re paying for it. Instead of letting consumers come to you, you’re pushing your message out to them.

However, unlike outbound marketing tactics of the past, paid search can be highly targeted to address only the consumers who are actually good fits for your product or service. We’ve written extensively about PPC, so I won’t dive into it too far in this blog.

If you want to learn more about PPC specifically, check out this page, or this blog about optimizing your PPC budget for targeted results.

For the purposes of this blog, all you really need to know is that by bidding on quality, long-tail keywords that are relevant to your product or service, you can put your company front and center on the search engine results pages your target buyers are looking for.

Paid search is a great way to get in front of the audience you want, pulling more of those qualified buyers into your inbound marketing flywheel. Click To Tweet

While it is an outbound marketing strategy, it’s not abrasive or in the consumer’s face. Instead, it offers a product or service that’s relevant to their search, and then it will bring them to your website, where you can use other inbound marketing tactics to further nurture your lead. It’s the perfect example of inbound and outbound marketing strategies working together to grow your company’s revenue.

Social Media Advertising

Don’t tell me you’ve never clicked on a Facebook or Instagram ad.

via GIPHY

Girl, same.

Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram are so good at delivering tailored, personalized content to their users, and social media advertising is one way to take advantage of those platforms.

When you have a clear picture of who your audience is, you can develop social media ads that speak exactly to your target buyer. Social media platforms have robust demographic and targeting features that allow you to ensure your selected audience is very specific and highly likely to have an interest in your product or service.

Remarketing ads are a great example of social media advertising as an outbound marketing strategy that actually delivers. They follow someone who has actually been on your site and who has interacted with your content and maybe even thought about downloading a content offer or making a purchase.

When that prospect navigates away before making a purchase or download, they become a candidate for your remarketing ad. Now, when that prospect heads to their social media page, they’ll see an ad for your product or your brand on their social media feed. This remarketing ad is the perfect way to keep your company top-of-mind and keep calling those prospects back to complete their action.

Remarketing and other forms of social media advertising are especially effective outbound marketing strategies because they’re not delivering your message to just any consumer. They’re directed at specific individuals who are likely to, or who already do have an interest in your product or service.

Targeted Email Workflows

Many people don’t consider email to be “outbound marketing”. But, if you’ve ever gotten an email from a bot or about 15 follow-up emails from an insurance company you didn’t reach out to first, you know that’s just not true.

There's a right way and a wrong way to do outbound email marketing. And the first rule is to only email people who want to be emailed. Click To Tweet

(Check out the Golden Rule of Email Workflows here.)

Targeted email workflows work best if you have obtained contact’s email addresses in a white-hat way. That means, they gave you their email address, whether through a subscribe button or by downloading a content offer.

Buying email address is not quality outbound marketing. It’s obnoxious, and it’s unlikely to deliver any kind of quality ROI.

From there, you can use targeted email workflows to nurture specific segments of your email list according to their pain points, challenges, and needs. You’re reaching out to a client, so it is an outbound marketing strategy, but you’re doing so with the prospect’s best interest at heart, which is why it will be effective.

Again, we won’t go too in-depth here, because we have a lot of other resources about email marketing. See: Amp up Your Email Marketing Strategy: Use Segmentation.

The key takeaway here is that when you use email workflows to genuinely nurture leads with content they care about, and that solves a problem of theirs, you’re using outbound marketing to keep drawing new prospects back into your flywheel.

Bottom line? Outbound marketing, or the process of marketing by reaching out to consumers, leads, and prospects, is still a viable way to market. When you use outbound marketing strategies with 21st-century consumers in mind, you can actually produce some significant results.

Want to learn more about how outbound marketing can deliver you quality leads, right now? Let’s chat.

Outbound marketing is tricky in a world of consumers who don’t want to be sold to. We can help. Digital marketing, both inbound and outbound, is our bread and butter, and we’d love to see how our tactics can work to grow your company!

Anatomy of a SERP (Search Engine Results Page)

by Mackenzie | Apr 23, 2019 | Business, Outbound Marketing, Pay Per Click, Search Engine Optimization

If you’ve ever used the internet, you’ve seen a SERP.

SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) are the pages that return a list of web pages in response to a query you enter into the search engine. You’ve seen them on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and even Ask Jeeves, if you’ve been on the internet for a while.

For the most part, we as consumers don’t give SERPs a second thought. They return the answers and the web pages we’re looking for — so we get on with our day. But as digital marketers, SERPs play a huge role in everything we do.

We need to know how SERPs work, so we can optimize our strategies to get on the first page as much a possible. So, whether you’re new to digital marketing, or are looking for some insight about ranking highly on SERPs, this blog will offer a complete breakdown of the anatomy of a SERP. We’ll tell you what everything is, how it got there, and what that means for you as a marketer. Let’s get started with a basic query anyone might type in:

Let’s say you entered “how to open a coconut” in Google’s search bar.

You’ll end up with a page like this after you hit the enter button. This is your SERP.

It’s a list of results a search engine has pulled together to offer you the best possible answer to your question. Let’s look a little closer at this particular page because it’s returned some interesting results.

The first thing you see on this SERP is the “snippet” Google has published at the very top of the page.

What is a Snippet?

A snippet is a piece of content that a search engine pulls off of a webpage in an attempt to answer the user’s query immediately.

Usually, a snippet comes from one of the first page SERP results. Let’s take a closer look at this snippet:

This is an example of excellent SEO at work. Food Network is obviously a huge platform with tons of ranking authority, but they’ve done a good job of optimizing for this specific query by titling their page “how to break down a coconut.”

Google recognizes that this page title is very similar to my query, and thus returns Food Network’s short, one paragraph answer in a snippet.

This is a big win for Food Network. A first-page ranking and a snippet callout will drive major traffic to their site, especially for a common search query like this one. (This specific query is searched about 14,800 times a month.)

Suggested Queries, or “People Also Ask”

Next up on the SERP, you’ll see Google’s suggested queries based on the one you just entered. If you’re not seeing the answers you wanted, you can choose one of those other questions, and the dropdown will offer up a different snippet.

These “people also ask” suggested query snippets are great places to get ideas for blog posts that will rank well, and they’re a wonderful place to rank. For example, HealthfulPursuit took advantage of the key phrase “opening a coconut in 7 simple steps.”

They rank highly for that specific key phrase, and since it’s a very targeted phrase — telling people how to open a coconut, step by step — they’re going to see qualified traffic. Any consumer who didn’t find enough information in the first snippet Google provided can scroll a little further down the page to find a perfect breakdown about opening a coconut.

Finally, you’ll see the rest of the results on the SERP. All of the videos and the suggested web pages displayed are organic results for this query.

You might notice something odd about this SERP. Can you guess what it is?

There aren’t any ads.

Why?

It’s likely that “how to open a coconut” is just too general a search term for any company to spend money on. It doesn’t signal any buyer intent and actually shows that the consumer probably already has a coconut. They just need help opening it. There’s little incentive for anyone to buy anything here unless you had a coconut-specific machete company, I guess.

Let’s look at the SERP for my query, “where to buy a coconut,” instead.

This is a search query with significantly more intent. I searched “where to buy a coconut”, which signals to Google that I might be interested in actually buying a coconut. So, this SERP looks much different than the previous query.

I’ve only included the top part of the first page on purpose, to call out: 1) the ads, and 2) the local search results.

Search Engine Ads

We’ve all seen Google Ads before. It’s not really a revelation, but it is important to see how ads show up in SERPs if you’re considering making paid advertising a part of your outbound marketing strategy.

The ads shown on this page are all display ads — they display an image of a product, and link over to the site where you can purchase the product. Advertisers have to pay to get this placement, but Google also plays a part by selecting only the ads it thinks are most relevant to this query to display. Click To Tweet

Why do you care?

Because this a perfect example of how search engine advertising works, and how you can do it well. Google Ads appear at the top of SERPs and display the products most relevant to the user’s query.

If you want to have ads that appear first on relevant pages like this, it’s important to consider the users’ intent when bidding on keywords, and make sure that every phrase you bid on is relevant to what you’re offering.

Local Search

The last component of SERPs I’m going to talk about today is local search. Though local search results do appear under ads, they tend to get the most clicks, no matter what.

They’re specifically relevant to each unique user. When I searched “where to buy coconuts” Google offered me results that were close to my immediate proximity.

It's important to remember that SERPs do a lot more than just find you the best answer to your question. They also try to populate results that are specific to you personally. Click To Tweet That means that every time someone searches “where to buy coconuts”, the results will be different based on their specific location.

This is important for you if you have a brick and mortar business that encourages foot traffic.

If you do, you should make sure you’ve claimed your business on search engines, and work hard to boost your website’s SEO so that you’re ranking well for local search results like these. The more Google associates you with your location, the more you’ll show up organically for relevant searches in your area. (Want to know more about local search? We got you.)

SERPs are an integral component of any digital marketing strategy. You need to know how they work, so you can leverage them for the best traffic, whether it’s from paid or organic search results. We hope this little guide gives you a bit more insight into the anatomy of a SERP. If you’ve still got questions, we’re here to help!

Leave us a message and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can. And if you’re looking for more digital marketing support, just let us know. We’d love to offer any advice or guidance you need to grow your business and your brand.