Marketing – Inbound Vs Outbound

With more and more business setting up online, there has been a greater demand for good marketing strategies. With over 100M active websites, it is difficult to stand out and get your website noticed. Different companies apply different marketing methods. Inbound and Outbound marketing are two ways of communicating with potential customers.

Inbound Marketing is where customers come to you as result of SEO or content you have sent to them. Typically B2C works like this.  Since the customers are looking for your product or service, it means that they are already interested in what you are selling which means there is a high intent of buying.  However, since this type of marketing is not pushed onto customers, and expects them to come looking for the product, the volume of customers is not as high.

Outbound Marketing uses a ‘push’ strategy and more likely to be used in B2B. It is where the company tries to reach as many potential customers through ‘interrupting’ tactics such as ads, emails, banners, cold calls etc. Although some people argue that inbound marketing is a superior form of marketing. Outbound Marketing is a direct way of marketing. This means that it is proactive and not just reactive. People buy from people and referrals is one of the most popular successes for winning new clients.

Is Outbound Marketing dying out?

No. Outbound Marketing is evolving. With new data technology, cold calls and email campaign, relevant audiences can easily be targeted. CRM and other data tools have made lives easier for the sales people. Calls and emails can be personalized, allowing for a better response rate. Podcasts on radio can reach niche audiences. Distribution is key and outbound marketing tends to focus on mass-media.

Even with ad block or the ability to spam emails, outbound marketers have found a way to stay relevant. For example, it was found that the average attention spam is eight seconds. Marketers are inputting this knowledge into everyday marketing. Everything is cut short in order to attract attention. Less is more.

A perfect mix of both

Marketers have discovered that content distribution matters more than the quality of the content. Professional content marketers call it a 80/20 split. 80% of your time should be focused on sharing your content – this is where outbound marketing can come into play and 20% should be spend on actually creating your content. There are so many companies that have great and unique products and if they don’t get discovered ­– if no one sees their product within the mass of other excellent products, it simply won’t matter. Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, states that having a product that is not strategically distributed is like ‘’running into a field with a large metal pole hoping that lightning strike’’. He believes that it is not a winning strategy.

Depends on the nature of your business, we recommend inbound marketing when B2C and outbound marketing when B2B. Using TAMI market intelligence platform we can reveal all of your future customers if you are B2B. However for B2C you are a slave to Google and Facebook to pay for ads and hope the crowds will come.