When it comes to devising a marketing strategy for your B2B organisation, you’ve probably considered outbound marketing. This is simply the process of reaching out to potential customers, whether they want you to reach out to them or not, and promoting your product or service to them. Some common outbound marketing techniques include cold calling, mail adverts, digital adverts on websites, getting sponsorship deals or having adverts shown on TV. In this article I’ll take a look at what the disadvantages of outbound marketing are which should help you decide if it’s right for you.
Acquiring leads can be more expensive
The amount of money it takes to acquire a single lead is more when that lead is acquired through outbound marketing than when it is acquired through inbound marketing. In fact, according to HubSpot, when you acquire a lead through inbound marketing, it’s on average 61% less costly than acquiring a lead through outbound marketing.
Outbound marketing campaigns are more disliked
When it comes to devising an effective outbound marketing campaign, it’s important not to have a campaign that’s too aggressive. The reason is that many people dislike having a company or business’s promotional efforts forced upon them – in fact, if your outbound marketing campaign is too intrusive, it may have the opposite of its intended effect and may end up putting people off. In other words, it’s important not to overdo it.
Customers aren’t as easily attracted
People are becoming savvier; they want to find things for themselves and not be distracted by ads. In fact, less than 10% of internet clicks are generated through outbound marketing, whereas over 90% (according to WordStream) are generated through inbound marketing. People prefer to discover things themselves; they like discovering things for themselves, rather than having things forced upon them.
Ads are being avoided
One of the key disadvantages of outbound marketing is that people these days tend to pay less attention to this sort of thing, and less attention to adverts in general. People are avoiding adverts more and more, whether it’s by unsubscribing to email lists, blocking cold calls, avoiding websites that have too many adverts, fast forwarding television ads or not opening post or emails.
It’s expensive
Generally speaking, outbound marketing is quite expensive and it’s definitely more costly than inbound marketing. To run an effective outbound marketing campaign, you have to invest in your promotional material and then invest in distributing it. Even once you’ve paid for all this, there’s no guarantee your target audience will respond to your ad in the way you want them to. You don’t want to end up like Ernest Shackleton who ended up
running massive debts
in his attempts to market himself.
Difficulty getting feedback
Outbound marketing mostly consists of a one-way communication system in that you’re aiming promotional material at your potential customers but there are no real opportunities to engage with your target audience. When conducting an outbound marketing campaign, if you want to find out how people are responding to your ads, you have to organise focus groups and carry out surveys, which can take time and cost money.
The points I’ve listed here are some of the disadvantages associated with outbound marketing. It can still be an effective marketing technique for B2B companies, but more and more companies are investing in inbound marketing because they find it more cost-effective.
