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Outbound Marketing for Mortgage Professionals and how to get the most from a limited budget.

October 6, 2022

Outbound Marketing - What Is It?

Outbound marketing is often called interruption marketing, and for a good reason. This style of marketing pushes your marketing message directly out to your clients and customers and tries to grab their attention wherever they might be.

Outbound marketing is an old technique, but technology has opened up new channels for outbound marketing that can bring immediate, measurable results and help you target your audience with more accuracy.

Offline advertising

With modern online advertising platforms, offline advertising can seem a bit out dated, but as online advertising channels become more popular, offline advertising is becoming less expensive and therefore an option you should consider. As well, it can still be a great way to get your brand and business in front of a large and targeted audience.

Some of the offline marketing channels you might consider include:

• TV advertising
• Radio advertising
• Outdoor display ads (think billboards, benches etc.)
• Print advertising
• Direct mailers
• Branded promotional items (i.e. swag)
• Trade show exhibitor space

While these channels can make it hard to target a specific audience, with a bit of research you can at least narrow your audience down. For television, radio or print advertising, make sure you get audience demographics.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Pay-per-click marketing is, as it sounds, online advertising that charges you for each click on your ad. The way the amount you pay per click is determined will depend on the platform, but most come down to a strategy of bidding for keywords.

Search Engine Marketing or 'SEM' For Short

Search engine marketing (SEM) is paid marketing through ads that appear at the top of search results pages. When you do a Google search these are typically at the top of the search results page.

Social Media Paid Marketing

Social media paid marketing works on many of the same principles as other pay-per-click marketing. The strength of social media marketing is the ability to target very specific audience demographics with your ads such as within Facebook or Instagram.

As with organic social media marketing, paid social media marketing comes down to knowing what platforms your audience is most likely to engage with, and the kind of content that gets the most engagement on each platform.

Each social media platform offers different ad formats, but for most of them the basics of a good ad remain the same: use a nice eye catchy image, use video whenever possible, show people using your product or service, create a unique and appealing headline, lead with your benefits and provide a clear call to action.

Display Advertising

Display advertising is closer to traditional advertising than a channel like Google Ads. You've certainly seen display ads before, lurking down the margins of webpages, at the top below the site's header image or running along the bottom.

The downside of display advertising, of course, is that it can seem obtrusive and annoying. It also has a much lower clickthrough and conversion rate than Google Ads.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is still an incredibly effective tool. It drives better acquisition and retention than just about any other marketing activity. It also delivers an incredible Retrun On Investment (ROI).

Building an email list

One of the benefits of email marketing compared to other forms of outbound marketing is that, assuming you're complying with anti-spam regulations, your emails are marketing to an audience that's already asked to receive your marketing materials.

If you're a startup, that means you'll be building your email list from scratch. And that means you need to offer people something of value in exchange for their email address. Consider offering downloadable guides and resources relating to your industry in exchange for email signups.

Writing an email that gets clicks

Whether or not you segment your list, your email marketing success hinges on creating an email that people want to open and click on.

The first hurdle after your email lands in a customer's inbox is getting them to open it in the first place. This means crafting an enticing subject line that piques their curiosity.

Landing Pages

Much of your marketing will rely on the strength of your landing pages . A landing page is the page users are directed to when they click through from an ad or email. The more you customize landing pages to your specific marketing channels, the better they'll perform.

A good landing page starts with a good headline. Your headline is the place to put forward your unique service proposition. What sets your company apart? How will interacting with your brand make your customers' lives better or easier?

Measuring the ROI of outbound marketing

Measuring the ROI of outbound marketing tends to be much easier than measuring the ROI of inbound marketing. For digital channels, you'll be able to see how many people clicked on your ads, and which of those ended in conversions.

If the focus of your marketing campaign is conversions, you'll be able to set up your Google Analytics and your Google Ads dashboard to track conversions through SEM, social media marketing and display advertising. You can also use Google Analytics to track your email campaigns (this is a cinch if your campaigns lead to dedicated landing pages).

Pros of outbound marketing

• Easy to measure ROI
• Immediate results

Cons of outbound marketing

• Expensive
• Ads have a limited lifespan

Conclusion

Successful marketing requires both reaching out to customers and enticing them to come to you. It also requires you to engage with multiple channels so there can be quite a bit of trial and error involved depending on your business, geographics location and more.

If you have any questions or need more help with your marketing efforts, please feel free to contact our team as we'd be more than happy to assist.