Inbound Versus Outbound Marketing

There are two ways you can go about your marketing. You can passively attract customers to you, or you can aggressively pursue customers.

Inbound marketing enables your company to get attention from your audience organically without disrupting their activity. Outbound marketing gets your audience to pay attention to your products and services by disrupting their activity. Consider some of the advantages and differences between inbound and outbound marketing:

Campaign Elements Inbound Marketing Outbound Marketing
Cost to Acquire a New Customer Low High
Internet Clicks High Low
Fueled by Creativity and long effort Budget and repetition
Length of Campaign Extends into future Limited by budget
Number of Impressions Required to Compel the Audience to Buy Many Fewer
Persuasive Call to Action Weak Strong
Time to Close Sale Longer Shorter

 

There are many types of tactics within each marketing category. Here are some of the most popular tactics.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing helps customers to find you. It leads prospects or customers, satisfies their needs and desires and incites them to refer others to you.

Website SEO

SEO is an inbound marketing tactic. SEO helps your business passively draw visitors to your website. Although you need to periodically update the content on your website to optimize your search engine rankings, the results from prospective clients finding you can cover a long period of time, so you can earn a residual, though irregular return on your investment long after you’ve spent your dollars.

White Hat Holsters gained 400% in traffic to their website after they included SEO as part of their inbound marketing strategy. They used three to five keyword phrases to target per page that customers used in searches. Plus, they focused on placing these keywords above the fold. In addition to a 400% increase in traffic from a little more than 2,000 visits a week to 8,000 visits a week over eight months, they also earned a 100% increase in sales within one year.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Pay per click advertising is a form of search engine marketing. Advertisements appear in the search engine results page. The way it works is that searches associate your ad with a keyword or phrase related to your product or service. When an Internet user searches for that keyword, the search engine will show your advertisement on the search page. Your business pays when the user clicks on your ad that can link to your website. Pay-per-click ads can also show up on websites whose owners decide to give up space for the ads to appear on their sites.

Opt-in Email

Opt-in email is among the best types of inbound marketing. That’s because once you capture someone’s email address you now have a way to communicate with them directly to promote your products and services. You can have an opt-in email link or form on your website, blog or email. The key is to get your website, blog or email in front of as many people in your target audience as possible so they can opt-in to your email list.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a hot topic right now in the Internet marketing community. Content marketing can include blogs, website articles, case studies, white papers, newsletters, videos and more. Content marketing is a good tactic to share your expertise with your audience. By doing so, your company gains credibility that in turn can lead to new business.

Press Releases

Using press releases are also an inbound marketing tactic. Press releases provide your company with a way to communicate key company highlights into the universe of prospective customers. A reader of your press release who otherwise may not have known about your company could contact you. Plus, the media picks up on these press releases and adds parts of them to stories they write and publish. Stories about your company can appear in newspapers, trade journals, business magazines and other publications. In fact, a publisher could publish your story long after you released it in your press release. That extends the value press releases have as a long-term inbound marketing tactic for attracting customers to your company.

Outbound Marketing

Outbound marketing enables your company to initiate the communication with your audience. With outbound marketing, you send your message out to your target audience.

Advertising

Most types of advertising are forms of outbound marketing. These include tv, cable, radio, print, billboards, video and online banner, pop-up and display ads. With advertising you can create your message and choose the media to communicate it through. Of course, you’ll need to have the appropriate budget for the media and run the ad sufficient times to get the best results.

If anything, advertising is a very effective marketing tactic to raise awareness of your products and services. If you have a strong slogan you can create a memorable ad, which can lead to sales and development of loyal customers.

Direct Marketing

Direct marketing is the fastest and most measurable form of outbound marketing. For it to be effective you need to narrow your target audience to optimize the results. Plus, you need a strong and persuasive message.

Two common types of direct marketing include print letters and email letter blasts. They both can provide you with a strong return on investment compared to other forms of marketing, according to Harvard Business Review. Nonetheless, email is much less expensive than direct mail and can provide a slightly greater response rate for online sales than direct mail. One other advantage of email is that you can measure the number of people who see your letter, what links they clicked on and what parts of your messages work best.

Direct marketing, particularly email, can spur the reader to purchase your product instantly online. It can also compel them to visit your website to learn more about your products and services, or go to a retail store or communicate with people on social media–all of which can lead to a sale.

Social Media

Social media is catching on as one of the fastest forms of outbound marketing. Social media marketing is the process by which your company gains website traffic or attention through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media sites.7 The essence of social media is that a readers of your content share it with their networks. For example, your company can communicate an announcement of a new product and your readers share it with their friends, family and colleagues. Word of mouth advertising drives the traffic. The key is to have a message that is unique and appealing.

Tradeshows

Tradeshows are the ultimate form of face-to-face marketing. At tradeshows, your company can communicate about and promote select products and services. You can control your message. Plus, you can customize it according to the needs of the prospect who visits your booth.

Outbound Telemarketing

Outbound telemarketing involves a salesperson calling a prospect by telephone and selling a product or service. It is perhaps the most disruptive type of outbound marketing tactics there is. When the prospect answers their phone they do not normally expect to hear from a salesperson. This is why the best telemarketers have a great opening line that can engage the prospect from the beginning.

So What’s Your Marketing Strategy?

The best marketing strategy for your company involves how you can best reach and communicate with your target market. If you are a B2B company that sells industrial products, your strategy can be very different from a B2C company that sells shoes. A wise approach is to include both inbound and outbound marketing tactics. This way, you can attract some of your customers while pursuing the others.

                                           

Eric Wagner

While Eric now focuses on internet marketing, he also has a background in web development. He loves being among the first to find out about new tech—and better yet, being a part of making that tech succeed. Eric is known to be a good listener, seeking to understand how each individual sees the world. He is a harmonizer in group settings, cultivating unity while constructing the overall goal and strategy. When he’s not busy helping i7 clients dominate the online marketplace, Eric enjoys drone videography (he’s got a UAV pilot’s license), woodworking, community service, and all things outdoors.

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