The impact between inbound marketing and outbound demand generation is often debated among sales teams. As a small-to medium SaaS business, you might wonder what the best approach for your company would be? What channel is going to deliver the highest quality B2B Leads and the most opportunities into the sales pipeline, in the shortest amount of time, while being cost effective? | StartUP MQL

First, let’s quickly review the difference between inbound marketing and outbound demand generation and the impact they can have.

Inbound marketing generates leads by engaging with your ideal audience and reaching them with useful content through organic and paid efforts, such as search engines (SEO or SEM), knowledge base videos or paid video ads, article or blog post, and even paid placement by placing banner ads on social media platforms like LinkedIn or Facebook.

Outbound demand generation curates leads through proactive, direct communication initiated by an SDR or sales rep. This approach is highly targeted, offers a wider reach into many verticals and allows you to focus your efforts on your buyer personas. Outbound demand generation or outbound lead generation is usually done in the form of cold calls, email marketing campaigns, and by sending InMails to contacts in LinkedIn.

Personally, I’ve worked on the ground floor with many SaaS startups as the Head of Marketing and Demand Generation, and historically outbound marketing generated more qualified leads, leads converted into customers faster, and resulted in higher revenue streams than inbound marketing.

There any many variables to consider on how an inbound marketing strategy will perform, for an example; If someone on your team has to manually create and issue login credentials before a user can gain access your SaaS product, then you are creating an unnecessary barrier to entry and your audience may reject creating an account at all. This could potentially cost you tens-of-thousands of marketing dollars. I’ve witnessed this exact scenario with a SaaS startup I was consulting, however, after convincing them to enable Self Signup and to give their users immediate access to the platform their lead conversions went up by 46%.

Outbound Marketing Helps Navigate and Prioritize Content Marketing For Targeted B2B Lead Generation

Outbound sales are a great way to get in touch with an audience that you've carefully curated and know will benefit from your SaaS product or service. Because these targeted approaches work more quickly, they're often used in conjunction with other marketing strategies such as email campaigns so information can be delivered right when it's needed most!

Content marketing is an effective inbound strategy that can be used to attract potential customers and leads through free content. Content marketing is an excellent long-term strategy that can form the foundation for your entire lead generation strategy. You can use articles, blogs posts and other online content to build relationships with potential customers over time so they'll come back when they need your services the most!

When you're looking for quick wins with content marketing, it's important not to overlook outbound sales conversations. By understanding your customers' common search phrases for products and services they need you can curate specific content that will resonate and provide them marketing content through blog posts, published articles or even whitepapers.

Click here for additional tips on how to improve your content marketing to generate B2B leads.

Outbound Marketing Increases Organic Web Traffic and B2B Lead Generation

Outbound marketing is a great way to increase organic traffic back to your site and increase brand awareness. You're probably placing a link back to your site in each marketing email you send, well, each time your link is clicked your search engine rankings improve with Google, because Google registers the click as an organic click back to your site.

We often see customers interact with a brand on average seven times before taking an action. However, it's important to note the "rule of seven" also says outbound sales efforts are effective at converting prospects who have engaged with your company in some way--perhaps even just through links in email or social media posts!

Outbound Marketing Helps Specify Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) for Successful Account Based Marketing (ABM) and B2B Lead Generation

The ideal customer profile (ICP) specifies the types of companies you want to sell to, and the benefit of speaking directly with the potential customer is that you can learn about their needs and desires.You can use this opportunity to learn about the products and services they are most interested in.

Defining your ICP will give you a better idea of who the ideal customer is for each product or service. Use the following metrics to better help you outline details of your target company:

Years in business

Revenue

Location

Industry

Number of Employees

Target Customers (B2B or B2C)

Once you’ve specified your target ICP, use this information to steer your inbound marketing strategy.

Outbound Marketing Helps Structure The Customer’s Buyers Journey

You can also learn more about your buyer's persona by looking at their outbound interactions. While your ICP are the companies you want to sell to, your buyer’s persona specifies individuals in each company responsible for purchasing your SaaS product or service.

Outbound marketing resources (BDR) can ask questions to ascertain who within an organization makes buying decisions and what that process looks like. The sales team benefits by knowing details about the buyer’s journey before they even start the sales dialog, so make sure to collect and share the following information:

Where they have looked for SaaS services or products like yours.

The key terms they searched when discovering your SaaS services or products.

What information they require before making a buying decision.

Outbound Marketing Helps Identifying Information Gaps

When businesses are able to identify their Ideal Customer Profile and understand the buyer's journey, they often experience resistance with their lead generation efforts. The outbound marketing team BDRs can help by asking current or potential customers specific questions that identify the exact parts of the sales process that are not resonating with them and this should provide the insights required to make positive changes to the sales process.

Inbound marketing does not always allow two-way communication between the sales team and prospects, and therefore you may not discover the reasons why a potential customer did not purchase your product or service. The outbound marketing team an alleviate this problem by filling in the necessary information gap that the inbound marketing team was not able to collect.

Outbound Marketing Increases Retargeting Ads For Increased B2B Leads

Retargeting ads enables your company to display targeted ads to users who visited your website or app, but did not convert into a signup, customer, or lead. Your outbound marketing efforts will drive users who have a need for your product or service to your website, in most cases this will be their first interaction with your website and discovering your company. If a user does not convert into a customer or lead the first time they visit your site, then retargeting ads will keep your brand and products at the forefront.

It has been proven that retargeting ads are 10+% more successful at driving clicks back to your site then traditional PPC ads. The efforts you put into email marketing should drive the majority of your website's traffic, so setting up retargeting ads will increase your brands awareness, traffic back to your website and improve your overall lead conversions.

Outbound Marketing Ultimately Improves SaaS Demand Generation and B2B Lead Generation | StartUP MQL

Is it time to reevaluate your marketing strategy? Have you considered the impact of inbound vs. outbound demand generation channels on sales performance and customer acquisition costs for your company? This is a question that many companies have, especially as they grow their business or are just starting off. If you're looking for guidance with this decision then reach out to StartUP MQL’s founder, Vas Edelen by emailing him at vas@startupmql.com or schedule a call now! We would love to help answer any questions you may have about how to make sure each channel has its place in driving qualified leads into the pipeline, but also keeping cost-per-lead low so profit margins can flourish.