A return to outbound marketing: targeting customers online

For a long time, outbound marketing was the industry standard. It included broadcasting an advertising message to the masses in the hopes that it would grab their attention and hold it long enough to deliver a pitch and pique the prospect's interest long enough to make him want to respond and eventually purchase your product. With the introduction of the internet (most notably Web 2.0), search engines and social media, however, the advertising agency has changed the formula for attracting prospects from outbound to inbound advertsing.

Inbound alters the traditional advertising formula from pitching to catching. It focuses on SEO optimization, keyword buying, blog mining and social presence and promotion, all intended to reach an interested audience without necessarily knowing who that might be. Some organizations, such as Hubspot, have turned this new trend into a platform for analyzing, measuring and managing everything everyone is saying about a company. While these strategies can certainly be effective, are they enough to justify the abandonment of outbound marketing altogether?

In the past, many online marketers may have argued that due to the fact that online audiences are largely anonymous on the web, even with the use of cookies and tracking pixels, it simply wasn't worth the ad spend to focus on outbound targets. This is because many agencies had a hard time targeting the right audience.

With IP Audience Zones, organizations once again have a way to effectively target online audiences, making outbound advertising a real possibility. IP Audience Zones helps marketers get a full view of the different people they're able to reach so they can form a comprehensive snapshot of what is available to them while targeting different locations, or audience zones.

This helps agencies become more balanced and less dependent on inbound marketing while opening options for outbound. One example of this was the Bacardi True Originals Facebook webisode campaign, in which the company released a series of webisodes meant to draw interest in their product from the public. Unfortunately, though the webisodes themselves had about 60,000 views, they translated into only about 1,000 "likes" and profits didn't rise as much as expected, according to Digital Buzz Blog. That's because they were only able to effectively reach out to a small percentage of their qualified audience using these inbound tactics. By combining inbound and outbound advertising strategies, companies can garner maximum gains from their advertising investments.

With Semcasting IP Audience Zones, the veil is being lifted over online audiences. By using predictive analyticsand publicly available data, audiences can be located by User Type and demographic attributes, while individual information and identity is still protected. Starting with existing customer data, Semcasting's IP Audience Zones system builds a qualified audience of individuals who look just like known customers and allows advertisers to reach the entire pool of online prospects without participating in invasive customer tracking through the use of cookies and pixels. Using nearly 600,000 User Types and 750 demographic variables, advertisers can correctly identify and size their potential audience. This means more prospects, and ultimately, more sales.