Outbound vs. Inbound: What's Best?

Kasra Dash: So today we're going to be talking about outbound versus inbound leads. James, do you want to kick it off with outbound leads? James Dooley: Yes. Outbound leads are where you proactively reach out—cold emailing, cold calling, or direct messaging on LinkedIn. If you do this from your actual brand, you can end up getting a lot of one-star reviews, so you need to be very careful with outbound lead generation. It can work well, but it’s costly to get data, especially nowadays with GDPR. And you can annoy a lot of people. It’s like the old days of knocking on someone’s door selling double glazing and they tell you to go away. It’s not something we do at FatRank. We focus on inbound lead generation. I prefer inbound because customers search for your product or service and then inquire with you. There's no hard sell or confusion like, “I don’t even own a house — why are you selling me windows?” Inbound is just better. Do you want to expand on inbound lead generation? Kasra Dash: Inbound lead generation can be done across different platforms. Starting with Facebook ads — you mentioned earlier how someone might not even be a homeowner. On Facebook, you can target people who actually own a house. Already that’s better than outbound. We’re not hating on outbound; it works, but it’s a numbers game, and we’re not going door-to-door. With Facebook ads, people assume it’s interruptive marketing, but it’s not. Facebook’s pixel data has become incredibly accurate. If someone searches for a conservatory installation company on Google, the next time they load Facebook or Instagram, they’ll see ads for it. That’s inbound and in-market. Then there’s PPC — those top Google results where you pay per click. It can get expensive, especially in finance or law. You need negative keywords and you need to understand long-tail keywords. Last is SEO. You’ve got Google Business Profiles for local ranking and then organic website pages. GBP ranking depends on reviews, brand mentions, and directory citations. Organic rankings depend on topical authority and backlinks — also known as off-page SEO. James Dooley: If you're a business owner looking at inbound versus outbound, the biggest difference is conversion rates. Inbound converts far higher. At FatRank.com, we run an inbound lead generation service with two models: pay-per-lead and commission-based. Both are inbound. Fill out the form and check it out. In our opinion, inbound is just so much better than outbound lead generation.