Inbound and Outbound Marketing Strategies for Lead Generators
Like any type of business, lead generation requires a healthy combination of both inbound and outbound marketing strategies to ensure a prosperous journey for Affiliates. Before we dive into the tactical details, let’s first discuss the difference between inbound and outbound marketing when applied to lead generation.
What is Inbound Marketing?
In a nutshell, inbound marketing is an approach that focuses on reaching out to customers through strategies that are non-interruptive. In short, you make your service or product fit into the stories or lifestyles of others. This can be done seamlessly and tactfully through blog articles, social media posts, or general SEO. Inbound marketing is not aimed at fighting for your audience’s attention. Instead, its goal is to organically attract qualified customers and retain them through consistent nurturing and trust-building campaigns.
What is Outbound Marketing?
On the other hand, outbound marketing aims to interrupt your audience’s normal lifestyle in order to win their attention from other businesses. Rather than trying to fit your service into their stories, outbound marketing attempts to interrupt your audience’s daily lives and win them over to your side. It might not sound very seamless or pleasant, but in reality, we are more acquainted with outbound marketing than we are with inbound. How many times have you come across a sudden pop-up or an abrupt commercial that cuts into your show? Our guess is too many times to count. These strategies scream, “Pay attention to me!” and can be a bit pervasive when done incorrectly. When it’s done tactfully, however, outbound marketing strategies can be a great asset for businesses to have.
Why Both for Affiliates?
The reason why you need both inbound and outbound marketing tactics is because of the unique roles they play in the customer journey. Without interruption marketing, your chances of getting click-throughs and exposure decreases. Without constant follow-ups and trust-building campaigns, you won’t be able to retain the customers you earn for very long. When Affiliates use both inbound and outbound strategies to capture and engage their leads, the level of conversions tend to climb much higher. So, why use both? Use them because they are the most effective when paired together.
Inbound Marketing Strategies
Popular inbound strategies include SEO, email drip campaigns, thought leadership (content creation), social media, and viral marketing. SEO is perhaps one of the best ways to perform inbound marketing, so we’ll focus a bit on that. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, comprises of optimizing your website for easy findability on the top search engines. The process starts with you determining which keywords you would like your website to rank for, and then naturally include those keywords into your content. The next step is to test and speed up your website on all devices, since website speed and mobile-friendliness both weigh heavily on a website’s SEO score. As you consistently develop high quality content and pitch them to various websites, you will gradually earn yourself backlinks that will contribute to your overall SEO rankings. For more tips on SEO, check out the rest of our blog! As for email marketing, the very first step is to use incentives, such as gated content, to encourage your audience to sign up. Once you get ahold of their emails, send regular helpful tips and reminders to keep your audience engaged. Be careful to not overwhelm your audience with the amount of emails you send, but simply make sure that you’re on a consistent schedule with your newsletters. Conversions will happen naturally as people become more trusting of your platform.
Outbound Marketing Strategies
In contrast, popular outbound marketing strategies include interstitial pages, banner ads, forum participation, and pop-up ads. Let’s talk about interstitial pages. These are the pages that you see before the actual website page loads – kind of like a pop-up, but can be delivered as stand-alone web pages. These pages can often include short countdowns before the X option becomes available. Zero Parallel’s customizable forms can also be included on these interstitial pages to make it easier for your visitors to sign up. To get ahold of our optimized forms, banner ad templates, and other high-converting marketing resources, start by signing up with Zero Parallel here.
Conclusion
Whether you take a liking to one type of marketing more than the other, they both work better when coupled with their other halves. The nature of marketing is that it must follow the customer journey to the end in order for you to sustain a working relationship with your customers. Outbound marketing fulfills its duty when it gets new customers interested in your product through interruption, and inbound marketing succeeds when it fully wins over your audience and retains them through trust-building strategies.
