What is Telemarketing?

In theory, marketing can be broken up into two distinct categories: inbound marketing and outbound marketing. Before we dive into telemarketing, let’s take a brief look into the differences between the two.

What is Outbound Marketing?

Outbound marketing, also referred to as “interruption” or “push” marketing, uses tactics that get a message to a large number of people in an effort to make a sale. Print/TV/radio advertising, social media advertising, cold calling, direct mail, email blasts and other methods are sent to a large audience of people (many, or most, of whom may not even be looking for the marketer’s product). It’s a one-way conversation that typically focuses on the product and reasons why the audience should buy it.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is about using marketing to bring potential customers to you, rather than having your marketing efforts fight for their attention. Sharing is caring and inbound marketing is about creating and sharing content with the entire world. By creating content specifically designed to appeal to your customers, inbound attracts qualified prospects to your business and keeps them coming back for more.

Rather than sending out general messages to an uninterested audience, inbound marketing allows you to attract your best prospects – and those who are actively looking online for solutions. When they get to your site, those prospects find help, guidance, and education directly related to the searching they’re doing online.

What is Telemarketing?

Telemarketing is the art of selling and marketing a product over the phone. Telemarketing is done to aware customers about a product/service and educating them. But yes, eventually to make them buy that product/service.

Telemarketing is a very common form of marketing companies use to connect with potential customers of their products or services. Historically, telemarketing consisted of companies making telephone calls to existing or potential customers. With new technology, telemarketing has expanded to include video conferencing calls as well, although those are typically conducted with existing customers. Telemarketing is often used to try to sell a product or service, but it can also take the form of surveys or information gathering. For instance, political campaigns use telemarketing heavily prior to elections to inquire about voting preferences.

There are several similar terms to telemarketing, such as cold calling or inside sales. Sometimes they can be used interchangeably, however there are subtle differences:

Cold calling refers to a technique of contacting potential customers over the phone in order to convince them to buy something. What makes cold calling different is that this activity strictly refers to contacting new customers who have neither showed interest nor bought anything from your company yet.

Inside sales is a process of remote sales, when sales reps solicit customers online or over the phone. This selling activity requires building a relationship with a potential client and leading them through the whole sales funnel.

There are many industries that rely heavily on telemarketing, such as:

• Cable and Internet services
• Home security systems
• Financial services
• Vacation and timeshare
• Charitable organizations