Published by Jérémy Lebourgeois, 

Published by Jérémy Lebourgeois,

What if customers could directly come to us online without us doing any efforts to actually reach them ? Wouldn’t it be wonderful ? Sorry to break your day dreaming session but unfortunately, neither of the two options considered today are actually efforts free.

However, the two strategies do have considerable differences. Let’s have a look.

SEO may take quite some time to bring you results but when it does, you won’t want to change your acquisition canal. SEO brings you hot qualified leads ready to be converted. They are by far the easiest ones to close. 

Think about it, they are looking for your services or products online and end up on your website. It’s a rather straightforward approach, if someone is thirsty and sees a shop selling water, he’s very likely to buy.

It’s kind of what SEO does for your business but online.

However, there is a deterrent for investing in an SEO strategy. SEO is ever harder to manage with the increase of content online and competitors. You will need more quality backlinks and more quality content if you want to perform. 

We could say that the best day to invest in SEO was… 10 years ago. That’s why at HelpIn we’ve decided to delegate this to a French SEO agency. To keep up with the new SEO requirements and help us get an edge on our competition.

In all transparency, without their works you wouldn’t have found this article.

I tried to perform in search results by myself for months before accepting the fact that good content alone wasn’t enough. HelpIn’s website needed to be optimised on performance and structure. But above all, it needed netlinking ressources we simply didn’t have. 

Once optimisation and backlinks were done, HelpIn’s website started to rank and receive hot leads. It took a few months though to reach that point. 

Outbound marketing is very challenging. 

You will receive a lot more nos than yeses. A lot more closed doors than prospects ready to listen.

However, it allows you to reach potentiel clients who are not aware they have the problems you’re fixing with the solution you’re selling.

It’s a great way to make them realise about the problem they’re facing. But people rarely appreciate being told they’re doing something wrong. Nor do they like salesmen. They always feel like there is a catch.

So for B2B as B2C, you will need great copywriting skills and a very subtle strategy.

It’s not only about numbers. Yes, you need to contact lots of cold leads. But, fine tune your message in advance and if possible, warm up your prospects before actually offering them a call, an offer or a sample.

In my views, quality and well designed automated outbound is worth it for low ticket offers. Highly personalised outbound messages for high ticket offers. Depending on how much the thing you’re prospecting for is worth, you must adapt the quality of your outbound strategy. 

In my view, SEO wins.

Simply because, whatever you do to improve your ranking on search results actually has value. You’re creating an asset with your optimised website and the ranking it has online. 

A website you can then sell if you wish so.

Outbound marketing is much more random in the results it brings and the leads are a lot less qualified. 

I would suggest a hybrid approach. Focusing on SEO first, to get quality visibility online. Then, if needed for the growth of your business, you can use outbound marketing to reach potential customers who are not actively seeking and researching your services or products online.

Here’s to your marketing success !