Bound marketing You’ve probably read the headlines and seen the statistics from marketing experts about the virtues of inbound marketing. There’s no denying that inbound marketing can be effective in generating quality leads for your business. However, inbound marketing should be treated as a bound marketing complement to your other strategies, not a substitute! Even if you’re really good at it, inbound marketing only gives you a small window into your entire market, leaving the rest wide open to the competition. So, before you consider making a radical switch from outbound to inbound, ask yourself the following questions:
1. Is it that easy for prospects to find you?
To succeed with inbound, you’ll need to produce a significant amount of high-quality content that’s highly optimized for search. While this quality content can help build rich people database your brand and engage your customers, it can be costly and resource-intensive. And at this point, there’s no guarantee your prospects will find it!
>In fact, with every technology vendor trying to become a content publisher, it’s becoming increasingly difficult and hit-or-miss to get your content noticed.
If you really want to get some data on how many leads
Can realistically capture, start by determining how much content you can produce per week and compare it to vendors who have top organic rankings for the keywords you’re targeting. Are you producing as much content as they are? Can you do it? Remember, some keywords enables sharing the ecosystem changes will require a lot more effort to get you to page 1, especially if you’re competing with larger vendors and publishers who have entire editorial teams dedicated to creating content. Take TechTarget for example. We have over 1,000 editors, tenured journalists, and freelancers writing content every day just so we can drive thousands of inbound visitors to our sites. Competing with us—or other news publishers—on content volume is counterproductive. The solution: Redirect your efforts from quantity to quality of content and make sure you deliver something new and distinct that can be promoted as such.
Most importantly, instead of going
All-in on inbound, consider pushing your content to already targeted prospects and using third-party, diversified leads to complement your efforts. These are the same targets you’re trying to attract through inbound, so why not involve them in outbound marketing too? Not only will this china phone numbers help you generate quality leads faster, but it will also provide you with additional coverage in areas where you may be lacking in quantity content.
2. Are you attracting and identifying the right prospects through your site?
Even if you’re able to attract thousands of leads to your website, are they the right ones? Not always. In many cases, you’ll find false positives, partners or other vendors downloading your content to better understand your solutions without any investment intent or to gather competitive intelligence.
>And it’s not just about attracting the right people to your site; you also need to know who they are in a business context. Indeed, one of the most difficult aspects of inbound marketing is converting anonymous website visitors into leads. And with the average inbound conversion rate for B2B/Tech hovering around 3% (Source: WordStream), you’re going to waste a lot of time generating inbound traffic that will never convert into business. And even if you can convert the right person, there’s no guarantee it’s the right time! You don’t have time to waste chasing false positives…
Unlike inbound, outbound gives you more targeting control and the ability to reach known prospects from companies that are more likely to buy from you. This not only helps you focus your efforts on the right prospects, but it also eliminates wasted time sorting through—or worse, attacking—unqualified leads.
3. Are you effectively reaching entire purchasing teams?
Let’s say you’re successfully converting inbound visitors into leads. What do you do now? In order to convert them into customers. Relying on a single inbound source limits your visibility. Across the entire buyer’s journey and may not reveal the key decision makers who are involved in the final purchase.