What is the difference between inbound and outbound marketing?
What is the difference between inbound and outbound marketing?
What’s best to promote your Brand? Understand the difference between inbound and outbound tactics. Generate great actions that drive sales.
Pull VS Push
What is the difference between inbound and outbound marketing?
The short answer will be that sales activities lie in the outbound category when classic marketing actions are related to inbound tactics.
Another way to make the difference between inbound and outbound marketing is to distinguish content creation and promotion from advertising. Inbound pull the user interests from a general topic to a product or a service of the brand when outbound push the company products or services to a visitor’s attention.
Before deciding what’s best for your brand, we will define the terms outbound and inbound and how to use them to generate results and drive sales.
What is Outbound Marketing
Outbound marketing, also called advertising, is fast but temporary. Money fuels publicity campaigns. The more you spend, the more visibility you get for your products or services.
The main intention of outbound actions is to catch transactional search intent. They drive sales. It’s easy to set up as long as you have the cash flow and results occur when significant amounts are spent.
What is Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing, also called content marketing, is long to create and stands the test of time. The exercise emulates brainpower within your business and is destined to inform your audience about your company values, products, industry, mission, culture, history, people.
When generating a content strategy, the primary purpose of the topics treated is to get people engaged with the brand. With inbound, your focus is to gather a public with informational and navigational search intents. Your main goal is to help.
This is where your company act similarly to media, creating informational content to educate and inform the public.
When to use Inbound Marketing
Many start-ups with limited budgets choose to capitalize on inbound marketing instead of outbound marketing because it is the best strategic fit for their audience to start. However, massive advertising campaigns are not only made for the big guys; a steady budget, well spent, can work wonders. The same methods are applied from top companies to seed projects.
Essential tools to use for an inbound approach are:
- Blog: A blog with relevant content for your audience. A great blog will be easy to categorize, optimize with relevant URLs for internal analysis and Search Engine Optimization. Your blog belongs to you. Therefore, you will be able to have full access to how people react and interact with it. Over time, you can see what posts work best, which products your public responds too, and adjust.
- Newsletter: we often underestimate the power of a regular well-designed newsletter. It does not matter if your audience is opening your email or not. You stay top of mind even if your audience does not read it. Email Service Provider such as Mailchimp supports organizations with templates, dashboards and reports. Hungry for more? Read this article about best practices to get more email subscribers.
- Contact form, Newsletter subscription form on your website or in your team email signature, and Thank You pages are inbound tactics relatively cheap that transforms followers into brand ambassadors.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Measuring is key to success. Google Analytics and other techniques/tools help you understand your activity and adjust to reach your goals. What is SEO? Read this article.
- Social Media: Social Media platforms are free to use, making them accessible for any size of businesses. Suppose you are looking to generate brand awareness, building an audience, and ultimately developing sales directly on social media or on your website or physical point of sales. In that case, social media is an essential part of your inbound strategy. Learn the technics you can use to grow your followers organically and generates more visibility, engagement and, leads on Instagram in this article.
When to use Outbound Marketing
Outbound marketing purpose is to generate leads. However, traffic on your website is not the same as leads. Leads generation instead of traffic generation is the big difference between inbound and outbound marketing.
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)
Massive Outbound marketing generates leads we qualified as Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL); they refer to a potential prospect within the targeted audience. Outbound marketing create first a large amount of MQL, then isolate a slighter percentage of them into Sales Qualified Leads and attempt to transform them into sales.
Advertising is outbound marketing made to generate at first, a large number of leads. Volume drives results.
For instance, Facebook Ads drive results to its users when used correctly. There is no quick win; proven frameworks and templates do the job. They are an excellent and powerful strategy that requires the proper attention and expertise. Nick Shackelford and Foundr have done a fantastic job creating and sharing an Ad framework. If you want to learn how to make profitable ads, check this!
Sales Qualified Leads (SLQ)
Less than 1% of the MQL will translate into sales. This is why it is crucial to understand the difference between MQL and SQL when it comes to outbound strategies. Additionally, the ratio from MQL to SQL is approximately 20% on average in any industry. For outbound marketing, it takes a large volume of action to generate results. Therefore, the right approach to adopt is both intensive and extensive. Success lies in finding the right balance between an expansive style at the beginning to gather data and experience with the audience, then narrowing the efforts and focus your energy to the right niche that will make most of your sales.
Traditional outbound marketing involves the sales workforce. Emails and direct Outreach with cold-calling are still working wonders. But, at the end of the day, we buy from people we trust. As human beings, we are highly wired to favours human connexion over digital interaction with the brand.
“7% of word of mouth happens online.” Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger. Even in the digital era, we still make our decisions by asking our friends, relatives, customers, suppliers and colleagues. In other words, people we trust.
A company representative interaction has still a strong impact. Customer-facing jobs will always be required in most businesses. As interrupting sales actions may seem, they ultimately drive results such as pop-up windows on the website and remain with us for a long time.
The difference between inbound and outbound marketing, what is best for your brand?
Both are important; it depends on when and what your goals and your industry are. So, what about Pull vs Push? Both activities are opposites and complementary. But, when it comes to defining what’s best for your business, it’s pull and push.
Balance your resources
It is essential to balance the resources you have inside your organization. The right balance between inbound and outbound lies within the amount of brainpower, aka qualified people, and financial resources at your disposal.
Traffic Matters
Traffic matters when it comes to addressing a large volume of potential customers. But traffic without qualitative content is pointless and, on the contrary, will damage your brand. Therefore, to ensure maximum conversions and generating a high volume of visits to your central hub, your website, or physical store must be powered up with great content and qualitative value.
Complimentary Tactics
In other words, advertising should be a complimentary outbound technic to temporarily valorize a product or service based upon a solid inbound long-term strategy.
Results happen when we use outbound marketing to establish a brand image and the company has the time and the financial possibilities to finance massive advertising in the long run. As the brand sticks with the users or customers, the advertising traffic progressively becomes more organic. However, this is almost impossible to realize without a robust inbound marketing strategy and content production.
Outbound marketing helps great machinery to get the temporary or not-so-quick boost they need to propel them forward. Advertising is the starter, while content creation is the fuel that will power your engine regularly in the long run.
Asset versus Expense
Additionally, when balancing both inbound and outbound marketing actions, we can see the difference of logic between them. Inbound is an asset when outbound works more as an expense. Years after, we can use the content produced again, repurpose it, or simply generate traffic and sales. The cost of maintaining inbound content up-to-date decreases over time, way under the price of ongoing publicity.
Another way to make the difference between inbound and outbound marketing is to distinguish content creation and promotion from advertising. Inbound pull the user interests from a general topic to a product or a service of the brand when outbound push the company products or services to a visitor’s attention.
