Right now the whole world seems to be running for the hills into the digital sales and marketing inbound yonder, which is no surprise given the “possibilities” that lay ahead. However many are running blind, taking with them what they have always done into the same digital space which will lead to further confusion if their “other” sales and marketing strategies were or are still ineffective.
A new medium does not translate into success if your message and market just don’t match. What and where your market is and where it goes to look for sources of information will be important to where and how you should start marketing your products or services.
Putting all your eggs into one basket on-line will lead to more difficulty, while spreading your wings into other channels not only reduces your risk but also tells you more about your market and how it reacts.
Only recently I’ve been working with a company in the advanced manufacturing sector who had a basic website but no off-line marketing materials.
We focused first on getting the core message right and building that into existing off-line sales and marketing channels to see what impact it had. This also gave us some kind of starting reference point. The results were very interesting and it made a major difference which we confirmed by analysing the traffic to the existing website which was actually coming from search terms related to the companies name or directly to their web address.
Less traffic was actually coming form search relevant keyword terms for the product or services itself so if you had built a website expecting to capitalise on traffic you may have been disappointed. However there are opportunities to do some search relevant inbound marketing work but it will not be the only source of leads and customers.
This confirmed what we thought was happening in that most people had either asked somebody else, or had read something from a press release or some of our direct response style teaser marketing and went on-line to find out more using either the web address or by typing the companies name directly into a search engine.
This was import as it told us that relevant and effective outbound marketing was AS important and influential (if not more right now) as inbound marketing and analytics on the existing website helped to confirm that.
Not only that but we compared current letters which had received little to no response with the new teaser pieces and in just sending out a handful we had one potential customer tell us they wanted to pre-order 2 machines AND an invite to display the technology on this potential customers stand at a relevant industry exhibition all in an account which they had been struggling to connect and do business with.
So, outbound marketing is still as relevant as it always was. It’s not the medium that is the problem it’s the ineffectiveness of the strategies being employed. By combining the outbound and inbound worlds you get a much better idea of what is happening and why.
Written by Nic Windley, a Business Development Consultant, Marketing Consultant and Sales Consultant you’ve been reading post Is Outbound Marketing Still Effective ?
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