, let’s think about outbound marketing.

After auditing ACME’s marketing budgets over the past five years, you learned that ACME invest almost 80% of it’s marketing budget into outbound marketing.

They typically attend 2 or 3 national tradeshows per year, they purchase almost a dozen print ads in trade publications per year, and they have a business development team that conducts cold calls each day. They’ve even invested into a few direct mail campaigns and TV commercials over the years.

Based on your past experience and research … outbound marketing (also known as interruption marketing) is harder to track and it’s less profitable than inbound marketing.

As a result, you have some legitimate concerns about the allocation of ACME’s marketing budget. Historically, 80% of the budget goes to outbound marketing initiatives and 20% of the budget goes to inbound marketing campaigns.

The data shows the sales cycle is at least 12-months on qualified outbound leads. And the customer acquisition cost is 3x the cost of inbound leads.

You and the Chief Revenue Officer agree that ACME needs to diversify it’s marketing spend and invest more into inbound than outbound.

The challenge you face is to figure out which outbound campaigns produced the most value, leads, and customers. This won’t be easy. Because it’s difficult to track outbound marketing return on investment (ROI) since the attribution model is often ambiguous.

How to Approach the Project:

, similar to your inbound approach, the first step of the outbound marketing planning process is to audit ACME’s existing outbound lead generation sources.

Essentially, you’ll need to conduct a deep dive into ACME’s CRM data to pull reports on past outbound activities.

Since CRM data is subject to accurate data input by ACME’s business development team, the reports you pull will likely be an approximation of outbound marketing results.

Another approach you can take is to interview your business development team.

Ask them open-ended questions about past trade show performance. Ask about response rates from magazine ads and direct mail campaigns. And ask about conversations they’ve had with prospects and conversion rates from cold sales calls.

Your business development team will provide you with a frontline perspective and valuable feedback from real-life prospect and customer interactions. So you should value their feedback.

How to Plan an Outbound Strategy:

, after you’ve collected and anlyzed all of ACME’s historical outbound marketing data and research … it’s time to research your competitors and target audience. This will be the last piece of the puzzle before you can plan an effective outbound strategy and budget.

First, we recommend that you contact the organizations that host trade shows in your industry. Why?!

Because they’ve likely collected more information about your target audience than anyone else. Tell them you’re planning an outbound marketing campaign and ask them if they can share industry research with you.

It may be advantageous for you to ask the appropriate person at the organization if you can pay them a consulting fee to help you create outbound marketing customer personas.

Next, we recommend that you explore the option to contract an experienced consultant in your industry to help you with competitor research. Often times, the perspective of an unbiased outside consultant can help you overcome curse of knowledge. And it can give you a clear-line-of-sight when it comes to understanding the big picture.

How to Get Started:

• 1. Use a tool like …
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Next Steps:

• 1. Analyze the data and prepare your case for an outbound marketing campaign
  2. Present your SWOT reports to your project stakeholders and have an open discussion about your findings
  3. Meet with your marketing teammates and ideate a content marketing strategy for your brand awareness campaign