Outbound Advertising: Demand Gen Digital Marketing Strategy

Looking to generate demand for your products or services? One digital marketing tactic is to use outbound advertising in your digital marketing strategy. Outbound advertising is a way to feed the top of your marketing funnel with pre-defined audience groups that, with a well-established digital advertising strategy, will build remarketing audiences to drive your target customers down your sales funnel. 

Outbound advertising builds brand awareness within your target audience by serving them a video, audio, images, or text ads on different websites, social media platforms and mobile apps and helps to jumpstart your conversion funnel. 

What is an Outbound Advertising Campaign? 

In an outbound ad campaign, advertisers target specific audiences that meet a company’s converting personas. In this way, outbound advertising pushes a company’s message out to potential customers. By pushing your brand in front of your target audience, you are initiating contact with a potential customer, for example with a text or video ad. When the potential customer views the ad, they can click through and visit your website immediately, or it may take another ad view to get them to visit your website. 

What is Inbound Advertising 

Outbound advertising is the opposite of inbound advertising when a consumer comes to a brand or company looking for something. They may want to learn more about a product or service you offer after reading one of your blogs. In this way, the customer initiates the contact.

Search engine marketing (SEM) places ads directly on the search engine results page (SERP) and is usually serving ads to consumers with a high consumer intent, who are actively searching for your products or services already. SEM marketing is mainly used as a bottom of the funnel (BOFU) tactic.

Where do Outbound Advertisements Appear? 

There are a variety of channels that are available to serve targeted ads for outbound advertising. These channels include video, audio, display, native advertising, digital PR and paid social. The people who see your ads may not have as much intent for your product as someone actively searching, but they will fit your target audience profile and therefore have a higher chance to convert later.

What Stage Is Outbound Advertising Best for in the Buyer Journey?

Outbound advertising can reach people throughout the buyer journey, but is best used for the beginning of their journey. The goal is to generate demand for your product or service, which can create buyer intent after your target audience is served your ads. With time, this buyer intent can lead to people searching for your brand or product, leading to higher search traffic and higher conversions as they move through the buyer’s journey.

Outbound Ads on Video, Audio, Display and Native Advertising

Video, display and native advertising puts your brand on thousands of websites or apps of all sizes from broad highly-trafficked websites and apps to niche. Your brand can be positioned near related content in front of interested audiences. Outbound advertising is a prospecting strategy for awareness-building, upper funnel touch points; therefore, it’s important to set KPIs that reflect upper-funnel activities.

Outbound advertising increases brand awareness and brand consideration as well as creates purchase intent. Outbound advertising can also be used to reengage with customers who recently interacted with your website or digital content with different types of ad formats and is achievable within any budget compared to TV, radio, print or OOH advertising. 

What Outbound Tactics Are Best For My Goals?

To build brand awareness and create demand: New business / product launches where the primary goal is to increase awareness of your brand or product. KPIs:  impressions, customer engagement, reach, and frequency but not on clicks.

To influence consideration from newly emerging and existing demand in the market: Use this objective when you want to differentiate yourself from other businesses with a similar product. You need to educate your customer on your product and show them your unique selling points. Targeting: retargeting your customers and audience targeting.

To drive action and create purchase intent: Use this objective when you want your customers to perform an action on your website, such as make a purchase, fill in a contact form, download a document, or go to a particular page. These types of campaigns can use very specific targeting, programmatic audience profiling, conversion tracking and remarketing functionality to optimize performance.

How Do I Get Started?

A successful advertising campaign takes a well defined strategy, while implementing proper tracking that aligns with your business goals. The experienced team at Kinetic is here to help launch marketing strategies to meet your business needs. Contact us today to get the ball rolling!