If you’ve worked in marketing for any length of time then the chances are that you’ve heard of inbound and outbound marketing. The two different types of marketing rely on two totally different approaches and philosophies, but they’re not necessarily mutually exclusive.
In fact, many companies use both inbound and outbound marketing as part of an overall marketing approach that aims to reach different people with different messages at different touch points. They can also both be used to funnel people into a lead generation campaign and to turn them from strangers into qualified leads. But if you’re going to harness them both to their full potential then you’ll need to understand the difference between the two. That’s where we come in.
Outbound Marketing
Outbound marketing is the traditional form of marketing in which brands try to interrupt the consumer to get their message heard. Television advertisements, billboards, flyers, direct mail and radio advertisements all fall under this category, but so do more modern forms of advertisements such as banner advertising.
One of the problems with outbound marketing is that it’s typically more difficult to personalise it and to measure its effects. For many years it was the only real option that marketers had, but the rise of inbound marketing has provided an alternative so that outbound marketing techniques can now be used as and when they’ll be most effective instead of simply as the default.lt to consolidate all of that data and to draw overall conclusions.
Outbound marketing gets a lot of bad press and people are quick to flock to inbound channels, but the older style of marketing still has its place. In fact, one of the biggest mistakes that people make is to apply the old style methodology to new channels, treating blogging and social networking as just another place to serve up advertisements. It’s better to use outbound channels with the outbound methodology and to do the same when it comes to inbound.
Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is effectively the polar opposite of outbound marketing, and it relies on creating great content that people are actively looking to consume. For example, if you write a blog post that tells people how to do something and then they search for it and end up on your website, you’ve brought them in through inbound marketing. It relies on a mixture of content creation, search engine optimisation and good old-fashioned word of mouth.
One of the interesting things about inbound marketing is the focus it places on buyer personas, user journeys and personalised content. After all, there’s no point creating content that brings in just anyone because there’s no guarantee that they’ll even be interested in your product or service. Instead, you’ll need to figure out what these people are looking for so you can set about giving them what they want.
Just don’t forget to include calls-to-action. If you’re providing content for free then you’ll want to get something out of it in return, and calls-to-action are a great way to go about doing that. Believe it or not, if you tell people what you want them to do, they’ll do it – whether that’s making a purchase or whether it’s providing you with their email address.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.