5 Outbound Lead Generation Strategies That You Must Try

Before you can actually hop on and execute any marketing tactics that you have in mind, you would need to generate leads first.

Generating leads for your business can be a tough, but necessary task. With so many options out there, it's important to know what kind of lead generation tactics are the most effective. This article covers everything you need to know about outbound lead generation.

What Is Outbound Lead Generation?

When you think of lead generation, what do you envision? Do you picture a guy in a suit standing on a street corner waving his arms and handing out flyers to passers-by? While this kind of marketing still happens (and it's pretty effective), there are other ways to generate leads that don't require as much effort. It's all about the process: outbound lead generation is when your company takes an outside-in approach and targets potential customers in order to gain new business.

That means, it’s a process where you go out to find prospects and for you to generate interest in those people on what you have to offer.

It is also known as the “interruption marketing” whereby you interrupt people in their daily routines with your offers and promotions.

Outbound vs Inbound Lead Generation

Outbound lead generation is the more traditional form of generating leads. This method involves cold calling, leaving messages on answering machines, sending direct mail, etc. Outbound lead generation campaigns are typically requiring more effort and your time because they require a lot of human interaction to execute.

You would need to hustle your way to get leads for your business. Constant cold calling or emailing potential leads every single day. Make follow up calls or emails to leads with the hope of landing a customer.

Inbound lead generation takes place when you have an audience that is already interested in your product or service. By creating content at the right time on the right mediums, you can attract prospects who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer.

With fresh contents on your website or magazine ads or even social media posts, and with the right contents and right offers, people would be delighted with it and want to know more that they will come to you. Hence, inbound. If your brand truly has captured the confidence of people in your niche, then inbound lead generation fits well in this situation.  

So, which one is better?

Having both of them would fit well for any business. Usually, if you’re just started, outbound lead generation would be required to really market and promote your brand to people that knows nothing about it. Once you’ve established your brand for yourself and to other people in your niche, then inbound lead generation could take over.

Outbound Lead Generation Strategies

1. Cold Emailing

Cold emailing is an effective way to build relationships with potential clients, but it can also be a difficult and time-consuming process. It's vital to create a memorable introduction that will make your prospect wants to read the rest of your message. Here are some tips for crafting emails that achieve maximum effectiveness.

#1: Build relationship (Don't be spammy)

You want to start with a proper introduction and build relationship with your leads. It should sound like you want to connect with them in a “human” level (that personal touch) and not straight up offering them your products (this would’ve seen as spammy).

#2: Be specific

The second tip is to be specific about what you are offering. Don't just say something like, "I have an offer for you." Be clear about what you can offer and how it will benefit them especially if it’s solving a certain problem in their life. They’ll be more than happy to hear about it if it would really make their life easier.

Here are some email outreach tools that you can use for the purpose.

2. Cold Calling

Cold calling is the practice of initiating a telephone call to a prospective customer with the purpose of making an appointment for sales calls or obtaining information. The goal of cold calling is to get in contact with decision makers and influencers, rather than simply leaving messages on answering machines. It's important not only to make these calls quickly but also within a very narrow window of time (usually 2-3 hours) before business hours resume and the opportunity is lost. Here are some tips for cold calling leads effectively.

#1: Practice makes perfect

It will be much better if you practice your cold call before actually doing it. Usually, people would have scripts written down to actually say what is needed to say to capture your prospect’s attention, but some might just follow the flow. Nevertheless, practicing forces you to become familiar with what is expected from the call itself and also the more that you are doing cold calls, the better it is for you.

#2: Always agree with them first

If your prospects disagree or started to reject you, it’s OK because that happens. How you deal with rejection is another thing. Always agree with them on any disagreement or opinions that they have, perhaps try and relate it to your experience, but then turn it around and provide a positive point possible from another perspective. Even, ask them what the ideal solution is if they hate your product that much. It gives the chance for you to understand their feedback for you to improve, and also show how professional you and your brand are in dealing such situation.

3. Web Popups

If you have a website for your business, you can make your website to be more interactive and engaging for your visitors and that is another outbound lead generation strategy. Equipped your website with widget such as floating bar, popups, exit intent, and many more, to capture the attention of your visitors. With this, people would interact and be provided with rich experience when they visit your website.

Some of the websites that provides such widgets are listed here.

4. Networking

Networking is also another method of outbound lead generation. This is where you can position your brand, products, and services in front of many influential people inside the same niche. From here, your brand will be known and high chances that people will talk about it to other people. Hence, the word-of-mouth marketing.

There are many types of networking groups out there for just about every industry. It's important to go with one that matches the kind of people you want to meet and how comfortable you are talking about yourself in professional situations.

There’s plentiful of networking groups that you can join. Here are some of them.

5. Content Syndication

Content syndication can also be another effective strategy to generate leads for your business. The idea is about getting your content in front of many others by syndicating with website or publishers that are well known and influential in their niche. By doing this, it can reach to many more people and most importantly, the right people.

The content creation itself might be inbound, but syndication of the content would be outbound.

Conclusion

In lead generation, there are outbound and inbound methods. As such, it would be crucial for any marketers or business owners to balance both to optimize their lead generation process. In fact, just by understanding this, you would get the idea of how it works and use what you have learned to assess your own lead generation tactics.