Leads generation and filling the top of the company sales funnel is the main issue for outbound marketing. It might seem more effective and productive in sales management.
Meanwhile, a lot of innovative and successful businesses are actually embracing the strategies of inbound marketing.
So, what’s the difference between inbound and outbound? This post will define the variety with the benefits and drawbacks of each strategy.
Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is a strategy where you create content or social media tactics that spread brand awareness so people learn about you, might go to your website for information, show interest in your product, and potentially make a purchase. Inbound strategies allow you to involve an audience of people that you can qualify as a prospect of lead.
Outbound marketing uses tactics that get a message to a large number of people to make a sale. Print/TV/radio advertising, cold calling, direct mail, mass emails, and other methods are aimed at large audiences of people. It’s a one-way conversation that typically focuses on the product and the reasons why the audience should buy it. While some outbound strategies take lots of time and effort and may yield no leads.
In comparison, the main goal of inbound marketing is to inform the audience about relevant products or services, the main goal of outbound marketing is to sell as much and fast as possible.
What is Outbound Marketing?
Outbound marketing is a traditional method of marketing aiming to push messages out to potential customers. Outbound marketing includes activities such as exhibitions, seminars and workshops, and cold calling. It is costly and the ROI is much lower than inbound marketing.
Marketing managers push their messages out far and wide from email blasts to outsourced telemarketing hoping that it resonates with the target audience. All these methods are called “outbound marketing”.
But the tendency is that outbound marketing techniques are getting less and less effective over time for two reasons.
Firstly, the majority of us today are distracted with at least 2,000 outbound marketing interruptions per day and are figuring out more and more creative ways to block them out, including ad blocker browser extensions, caller ID, email spam filtering, and more.
Secondly, people are more likely to spend money to learn something new or shop online using search engines, blogs, and social media than go to a seminar in another city. It becomes easier to keep in touch with the target in the digital sphere on the Internet.
The Profits of Inbound Marketing and Outbound Marketing
There are several advantages to inbound marketing that help you to determine if it’s the right strategy for your company:
First, prospects can read your blog posts or attend a webinar on their own time, inbound marketing is non-invasive. Second, inbound marketing content is educational — it’s specifically designed for each stage in the sales funnel. Third, inbound marketing is quantifiable 一 you can tie each part of your strategy to a metric that gets monitored over time.
So, inbound marketing continues drawing in qualified leads over time because your website and content are continuously being updated.
Meanwhile, outbound marketing has a few perks that should not be overlooked:
For sure, outbound marketing promotes brand awareness, attracting people who haven’t heard of your products or services before. Also, outbound marketing can achieve immediate results 一 people interested in your products and services are likely to make a purchase. So, consumers are accustomed to outbound marketing 一 they expect to see ads in the newspaper or on TV and may trust those ads more than the ones presented to them on social media platforms.
Improving Your Marketing from Outbound to Inbound
Rather than doing outbound marketing to the masses of people who are trying to block you out, we recommend focusing on inbound marketing, where you build long-term relations with people interested in your industry.
You should set your website up like a “hub” for your industry. Attract, engage, and delight your prospective customers. Your site must attract visitors naturally through search engines, blogging, and social media.
To attract your audience, develop a strong content strategy.
For consumers to be aware of your brand and product It`s needed updating social media and ads will work great to introduce users. You should plan the content for every stage in the marketing funnel.
Blogging will position you as a credible and trustworthy source within your industry and allow your target audience to find you. During this process, it’s also significant to develop an SEO strategy to ensure your website is optimized for search. Once visitors turn into leads, you can nurture them through email marketing, conversational chatbots, and automated workflows.
In the “Delight” stage, your goal is to provide your audience can easily connect with your sales and service teams, and resolve their issues quickly. Inbound marketing is all about meeting your audience where they’re at. You’ll quickly find that your marketing efforts are performing better and helping your brand grow.
Let’s highlight the key concept of inbound marketing: to gently help customers find your company by providing the necessary information. Regular reminders about yourself via email and push mailings will help you with this. If you consider that organizing the systematic sending of emails is a difficult task, you are not mistaken.
However, using a marketing automation platform may solve this problem. Such a platform as our GetSales allows you to cooperate with customers through various communication channels (email, LinkedIn), automate marketing processes through scripts, and build conversion funnels.