Does your company focus on inbound or outbound marketing techniques?

Are outbound marketing strategies still effective?

Many people think that outbound marketing techniques are getting less and less effective over time. When it comes to marketing measurement and optimization, there is always room for improvement.

In this article, I’ll show you how to do the outbound marketing the inbound way.

Question: Is this picture considered an example of OUTBOUND Marketing?

Definition: Outbound marketing (n) is the traditional form of marketing (TV Ads, Roadshow etc) where a company initiates the conversation and sends its message out to an audience. Outbound marketing is the opposite of inbound marketing, where the customers find you, mostly through various paid and natural search engine marketing efforts.

The answer to my question should be “yes” (Even a tree on the road can be a medium of outbound marketing.)

The publisher may be a good creative designer, but not a good marketer.

Some important marketing elements are missing in the ads.

#1 Call to Action

People might be interested when they read the ads, but there is no way to take action. The website URL below the tagline does not help as it is too small.

[Solution]: Put in a QR Code

Based on the statistics the Mobile Technology Fact Sheet from the Pew Research Internet Project,

As of January 2014:

• 90% of American adults have a cell phone
• 58% of American adults have a smartphone
• 32% of American adults own an e-reader
• 42% of American adults own a tablet computer

The QR Code makes it easy for viewers of advertisements to take action. Upon scanning it with their smartphones, the code will bring them to websites or landing pages where they can make a donation, or do whatever the advertisement is prompting them to.

However, do note that displaying the QR Code alone may not encourage people to take action – a call-to-action (CTA) sentence is needed too. For example, “scan here” explicitly directs people to do so.

However, there is still room to improve on the CTA. Kindly look at the picture below – we can have a Magic Word in the CTA sentence, “Scan here to donate NOW!”

Just imagine. If you were the one who passed by the tree, which CTA would influence you more?

#2 Sales Script

While the CTA will likely increase the percentage of people taking action, what if we want to spur them to (in this case) donate a higher amount than they originally intended to?

Let’s take a look at the ad again.

To get more engagement, we have to let people know what is the return/benefit from their kind action. We may put in another sentence, for example: “Donate more. We will produce more oxygen for your child.”

Sound better?

Exactly how much more is “more”, though? Many people will likely be wondering about this. We can make our Sales Script clearer like this:

The Next Question: How do we make the Outbound Marketing campaign measurable?

Remember the QR Code that we applied in the ads? The QR Code is generated to direct the users to your landing page. What should we do to the landing page URL to make it measurable?

Use a URL shortening service, for example, bit.ly, goo.gl, ow.ly.

Get a FREE account from one of the URL shortening services mentioned, and paste it into your landing page URL to generate the shortened URL. After that, use the shortened URL to create the QR code which you will then display on your ad.

The results of every marketing campaign and event have to be measurable so that we can enhance the process of organizing them to get bigger returns. By applying the QR Codes and URL shortening services, we can measure such results as seen above.

But the case discussed is just a single ad displayed at one location. How do we measure the results of an ad displayed in multiple locations?

I will talk about this in my next article. Watch this space or subscribe to our newsletter to get the notification immediately when the next article is posted.

Finally, feel free to share suggestions to improve the entire process of creating a marketing campaign.