All-bound Marketing: The Smart Marketer’s Approach to B2B Growth

Traditional B2B marketing approaches often fail because they’re too siloed. Companies run ads without content support, create content without distribution strategy, or attempt outbound without proper targeting. The result? Wasted budget and missed opportunities.

All-bound marketing solves this problem by integrating multiple marketing channels into a cohesive system that generates qualified leads more efficiently. This approach combines the best of inbound, outbound, and content marketing to create a comprehensive growth engine.

What is all-bound marketing?

All-bound marketing integrates multiple marketing channels into a unified strategy that addresses the entire customer journey. Unlike traditional approaches that treat channels as separate entities, all-bound marketing creates synergy between them.

As Trevor Longino explains in his experimentation-led GTM framework: “When you tackle all-bound marketing as a complete picture, you make it easier because the big thing you have to solve as a business is how to generate marketing qualified leads.”

The approach recognizes a fundamental truth about modern B2B buying: it takes significantly more touchpoints to start a sales conversation today than in the past. “They taught when I was a wee stripling young lad, which is one of the years ago they used to teach you took seven touchpoints to start a sales conversation. Now it’s more like 30-50,” notes Longino.

This reality makes single-channel approaches increasingly ineffective. Inbound marketing alone “kind of trusts that if I just get enough chances at bat, one of them will be a home run.” Meanwhile, “outbound all by itself hardly ever works anymore.” The solution is integration.

The five pillars of all-bound marketing

All-bound marketing consists of five interconnected components:

1. Performance marketing: Targeted paid advertising that drives immediate action
2. Outbound marketing: Direct outreach to qualified prospects
3. Content marketing: Educational material that builds authority and trust
4. Organic social: Community building and relationship development
5. Promoted social content: Amplification of thought leadership to targeted audiences

The first two components are direct channels where marketers choose exactly who sees their message. The others are branded channels that build awareness and credibility. Together, they create a system greater than the sum of its parts.

Scaling outbound with AI qualification

Outbound marketing has traditionally been limited by two factors: data quality and manual prospecting. All-bound marketing addresses these limitations through AI-powered qualification.

Traditional outbound tools like LinkedIn automations, Apollo Marketing, or Uplead suffer from what Longino calls “bit rot” – outdated or inaccurate information. Additionally, job titles on platforms like LinkedIn can be misleading or non-standard. One example Longino shares is a CEO of a 250-person coffee roasting company who listed his job title as “Coffee Nerd” – making him invisible to standard CEO targeting.

Modern all-bound marketing uses AI tools to solve these problems:

1. Data enrichment: Tools like Clay connect with multiple data sources to build comprehensive prospect profiles
2. AI qualification: Integrations with Claude or OpenAI to analyze prospects and determine fit
3. Prioritization: Converting large lists of potential leads into smaller, highly-qualified segments

This approach dramatically improves efficiency. “When you run this at scale, you take what might be 800 leads and bring them down to 80. And for that, you’ll spend a cent a lead, a half cent per lead,” explains Longino. “Given that you have a limited number of times at bat every month to try and talk to somebody, I would way rather have 80 really good conversations than 150 pretty mediocre ones.”

The benefits extend beyond efficiency. When outreach is more targeted, response rates improve, which in turn improves sender reputation with email and social platforms. “If you’re only speaking to people who actually kind of want what you’re doing, your metrics will improve. And the email sending services and LinkedIn or whatever DM automation services you’re using, they’re going to see people are responding more to the outreach you’re doing. They will rate you as a better quality marketer.”

Content as air cover for outbound

Outbound marketing doesn’t exist in isolation within an all-bound strategy. It requires “air cover” from content marketing to be effective.

When prospects receive outreach, their typical response is to investigate the sender. “When someone sends a message out to me, if the message is any good, the first thing I do is click on their LinkedIn profile and see who they are,” Longino notes. Without content that establishes credibility, conversion rates suffer.

Longino shares a case study where he helped a company called Trolli improve their cold outreach performance by 22% through strategic content creation. The approach focused on efficiency rather than volume:

1. Identify one subject matter expert in the company each month
2. Schedule a one-hour recorded video call with that expert
3. Create a transcript of the conversation
4. Use AI to transform the transcript into various content formats
5. Extract video snippets for social media distribution

This system turns one hour of expert time into approximately 22 pieces of content across multiple channels each month, requiring about seven hours of marketing team time to produce. The efficiency makes it feasible even for lean marketing teams without dedicated content creators.

The content serves multiple purposes:

• Establishes thought leadership
• Builds trust with prospects
• Provides context for outbound messages
• Creates multiple touchpoints across channels

The promoted social content advantage

While most marketers focus on organic reach, all-bound marketing leverages what Longino calls “one of the best ways you can build scale into your marketing engine” – promoted social content.

This approach combines paid distribution with organic algorithms to maximize reach and engagement. Longino demonstrates this with his own YouTube strategy:

“I get about 20,000 views a month right now with 120 subs. That seems high. Well, what I’m doing is I am paying to put my YouTube shorts in front of people through YouTube ads targeted to folks who are searching for the search terms I care about, and who are subscribing to the YouTube channels that indicate that they’re in my market.”

The strategy creates a multiplier effect: “About half of my views come from YouTube promoted content, but another half comes from shorts feed. That’s because if somebody sees your YouTube short and they watch it all the way to the end, YouTube’s algorithm goes, ‘Oh, you like this content? I’ll show more organically.’ So for every view I pay for, I get a view for free.”

This approach focuses on vertical video formats (shorts) that align with modern consumption habits. “Everybody is stuck in the doom scroll loop these days. Wouldn’t it be nice to have something actually educational? And that speaks to a problem that you have right now in your feed?” Longino asks. “A lot of people are finding this is a really effective B2B tactic, is to get the executives who are on LinkedIn already to see a video that speaks to a pain they have right now, and they watch it and they begin to trust you a little bit more.”

The ROI can be substantial. Longino reports: “I only put $400 a month into my YouTube ads, and I make about 20 grand a month back. That’s pretty good ROI.”

The content creation system for all-bound marketing

Creating enough content to fuel an all-bound marketing strategy can seem daunting, especially for smaller teams. The solution is a systematic approach that maximizes efficiency.

The foundation is the monthly one-hour expert interview mentioned earlier. From this single source, the all-bound content system creates:

1. Long-form anchor content: 3-5 minute video answers to specific questions, published on YouTube and LinkedIn
2. Blog posts: Created from the transcript using AI assistance
3. Social posts: Shorter text excerpts for LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.
4. Vertical video snippets: 15-60 second clips optimized for shorts formats
5. Email content: Repurposed insights for nurture sequences

The system follows a weekly publishing cadence:

• Week 1: Publish anchor video #1 + related short-form content
• Week 2: Publish anchor video #2 + related short-form content
• Week 3: Publish anchor video #3 + related short-form content
• Week 4: Publish anchor video #4 + related short-form content

This approach ensures consistent presence across channels while maintaining thematic coherence. Each piece of content reinforces the others, creating multiple opportunities for prospects to engage.

The sequential promotion strategy

All-bound marketing doesn’t just create content – it strategically sequences promotion to build engagement over time. Longino demonstrates this with his YouTube strategy:

1. First, promote short-form videos to targeted audiences
2. Set up sequential targeting to show a second short to those who engaged with the first
3. Then target those who watched both shorts with longer-form content

This sequential approach builds on initial interest to drive deeper engagement. Longino shares remarkable results: “The bottom most video there is my channel trailer. If you go check out on my YouTube channel, you’ll see is a 15 minute and 19 second long trailer. And look at that circled number. The people who watch it all the way to the end. Nearly 76% of people get their nearly 76% of people watch a 15 minute pre-roll ad.”

The key is the sequential targeting: “The way I’ve set this up is when you see my promoted YouTube shorts and you see two of them, I have them set in sequence, first one, then the other, then you will be targeted to see my actual long form trailer. If you’ve seen two of my YouTube shorts, you see enough of my content to know I tend to say interesting things. And so as a result, you’ll stick around for 30 or 40 seconds of the pre-roll ad. And by then I’ve got my hook in you, and you’re going to want to know more, and you’re going to make it all the way through.”

Expanding your all-bound strategy

Once you’ve established a successful all-bound marketing engine for your initial minimum viable segment (MVS), there are four primary ways to expand:

1. Target adjacent segments: Apply your proven approach to similar but distinct customer groups
2. Expand to new channels: If you’ve mastered Meta, try YouTube or LinkedIn
3. Target different personas within your niche: Different decision-makers within the same companies
4. Move up or down market: Adjust your offer for different company sizes within your niche

Longino shares a case study of an HR tech company that reduced their cost per lead by 97% by creating a down-market offer for a much larger audience, which helped them raise a $70 million Series B round.

The key to successful expansion is maintaining the experimental mindset that built your initial success. “Do the exact same thing you did to build your first successful marketing engine, but go to the side and build another one,” advises Longino.

When to implement all-bound marketing

All-bound marketing isn’t the starting point for most B2B companies. It’s a scaling strategy that builds on initial success.

“I would note you don’t start with this because after all, if you don’t begin with minimum viable segments, you don’t know who your crowd is,” Longino explains. “Once you know who your crowd is and we’re ready for scale, that’s when all-bound marketing shows up. You can’t do this before. If you’re building up a go-to-market engine, it won’t perform as well because you won’t know who you want to talk to yet. Once you really understand who you’re talking to, that’s when this begins to sing.”

The progression typically follows this path:

1. Identify your minimum viable segment through customer research
2. Test initial channels to find what works for this segment
3. Establish baseline metrics for acquisition and conversion
4. Build the foundation of your marketing tech stack
5. Once you have product-market fit and channel fit, expand to all-bound

Implementing all-bound marketing: A practical framework

To implement an all-bound marketing strategy for your B2B company, follow this framework:

1. Audit your current channels

• Which channels are currently generating qualified leads?
• What’s your cost per lead and cost per acquisition by channel?
• Where do your best customers come from?

2. Establish your content foundation

• Identify 3-5 subject matter experts within your company
• Schedule monthly recording sessions
• Create your content production workflow
• Build a content calendar that aligns with sales priorities

3. Integrate outbound with content

• Ensure sales and marketing alignment on messaging
• Create segment-specific outreach sequences
• Implement AI-powered lead qualification
• Develop content specifically to support outbound efforts

4. Build your promotion strategy

• Identify primary and secondary channels for paid promotion
• Create sequential targeting rules
• Develop audience segments based on engagement
• Establish clear metrics for success

5. Measure and optimize

• Track cross-channel attribution
• Measure content engagement and conversion impact
• Test different content formats and promotion strategies
• Continuously refine targeting based on results

The all-bound advantage: Why integration matters

The power of all-bound marketing comes from integration. When channels work together, they create compounding effects:

1. Trust amplification: Content builds credibility that improves outbound response rates
2. Engagement escalation: Short-form content drives interest in longer-form material
3. Qualification efficiency: Engagement data improves targeting precision
4. Sales enablement: Content created for marketing doubles as sales collateral
5. Budget optimization: Channels support each other, reducing waste

This integration addresses the fundamental challenge of modern B2B marketing: the need for multiple touchpoints before conversion. By creating a coordinated system rather than isolated channels, all-bound marketing delivers more qualified leads at lower cost.

Conclusion: The future of B2B growth

All-bound marketing represents the evolution of B2B marketing from channel-specific tactics to integrated systems. By combining the targeting precision of outbound, the scale of paid media, and the trust-building power of content, it creates a growth engine greater than the sum of its parts.

The approach is particularly valuable in today’s fragmented media landscape, where prospects consume information across multiple platforms and require numerous touchpoints before making decisions. All-bound marketing meets prospects where they are with consistent, reinforcing messages that build familiarity and trust.

For B2B companies looking to scale beyond initial success, all-bound marketing provides a framework for sustainable growth. It transforms marketing from a collection of tactics into a cohesive system that consistently delivers qualified leads to sales.

The future belongs to companies that can create these integrated systems – combining human expertise with AI efficiency, paid reach with organic engagement, and direct outreach with thought leadership. All-bound marketing isn’t just another approach – it’s the evolution of B2B growth strategy.