Marketing is an inevitable part of any business. Whether your business is an online, e-commerce one, whether you operate a large store, or offer another product or service at an on-site location, you need to market your products in order to publicize them. However, the marketing strategy that you follow is the decision maker of whether you succeed or fail to gain enough customers. Of course, the two most popular marketing strategies are inbound and outbound marketing.
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Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing refers to a marketing strategy that is basically user or customer dominated/oriented. This marketing strategy focuses on what a specific and targeted group of potential buyers other than targeting the mass. In a word, inbound marketing is an online based marketing tool that is proven as effective. It can be directed at a certain group of people, although even if this is done, the chances of reaching the masses are just as good. For example, you may have a website for your business, and even though you’ve designed it with a target demographic in mind, you’ve created something that is accessible by many and that is dedicated to customer interaction, and that fits into the way people now buy products and services.
Outbound Marketing
On the other hand, outbound marketing is not potentiality specific and it generally targets mass people in a limited way to catch attention in order to convert leads into sales. For example, publishing an advertisement on the television is an example of outbound marketing where the advertisement is estimated to be watched by people of all classes, not necessarily the market that the business prefers to buy the products.
Platforms Used For Inbound and Outbound Marketing
Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is basically an online marketing system where a business organization develops a website or a blog and uses it for multiple purposes. First, they create website content that elaborate the products they sale, then the website is optimized for search engines, and finally social media marketing (SMM) is done with the website. Essentially, three platforms are used for inbound marketing, content writing, search engine optimization (SEO) and SMM.
Outbound Marketing
The concept of outbound marketing is a bit elaborate. A number of platforms are usually used for attracting potential buyers. Television advertisements, unanimous phone calls advertising products, newspaper printouts and so on are the primary areas of outbound marketing that have been most successful in the past, and while they still work, they’re not always as productive as inbound marketing techniques.
Effectiveness of Inbound marketing and Outbound Marketing
However, outbound marketing is becoming less effective day by day. There are two basic reasons why people pay less heed to these marketing strategies. According to the e-book, “The Essential Step by Step Guide To Internet Marketing,” you must first remember that if you are executing outbound marketing techniques, you are automatically competing with 2000 or more institutions that are just like you who are doing the same you are. In addition, the serious question is whether you can be generating new ideas to motivate people and figuring out how profitable the ideas are.
One significant hindrance is that people now prefer using call blocking services, spam filters and other spam prevention methods. And secondly, outbound marketing is obviously costlier than inbound marketing because it requires a lot of online techniques that can be executed sitting right before the computer, and often for free, such as social media marketing, blog maintenance, and updated website content, whereas outbound marketing generally has to be completed physically, can take longer to not only put in place but to receive a response.
For example, it is far easier to learn about a new product on the internet than going to a seminar in a nearby city or stopping at a particular business, and sometimes even making a simple phone call can be inconvenient. Additionally, inbound marketing allows for more convenience for the consumers, since a website, for example, is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, making it convenient for anyone at anytime. Perhaps most importantly is that since inbound marketing can be much cheaper, if a business did try it and didn’t receive the results they wanted, then there wouldn’t be such a huge loss suffered.
One positive thing about outbound marketing is that you can get instant user response from the potential buyers versus the fact that it may take a while in case of inbound marketing. As it requires search engine optimization when applying inbound marketing, you may have to wait for weeks to get traffic. However, after waiting for the 15 to 45 days that most inbound marketing techniques take in order to become effective, the traffic will increase geometrically with the passage of time. Here, inbound marketing requires less marketing expenditure whereas outbound marketing can put a damper on your marketing expenses.
A statistics report available at Slideshare.net shows that 86% of the people living in the US skip television ads, 46% of them never like to watch tech trade shows, and 44% of the emails sent to the inboxes of USA citizens are never opened. These reports clearly suggest how people tend to ignore outbound marketing approaches. But in comparison, a business company with no website is now treated as an ancient business company.
Tools Used
The way people live and communicate have changed with the passage of time. Instead of meeting up physically, people now prefer communicating via social networking websites like Google+, Facebook, Twitter and so on. Inbound marketing eventually uses these platforms as marketing tools and can bring major results. Thus, it is clearly visible how powerful this marketing system already is and will have in the future.
Finally, because of the extensive usage of internet, businesses have become overwhelmingly competitive. Instead of setting up franchises all across the country, many institutions even prefer taking orders online and sell the products with no hassles. All these are the examples of how inbound marketing is expanding. While it is true that the need for outbound marketing has yet not died, adding inbound marketing to your marketing campaign can greatly optimize your exposure, which of course, delivers the results you want no matter what: sales conversions, return on investments, and new and continuing business.
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If inbound marketing is something that you are interested in but don’t know how to get started, contact us today to schedule your free marketing analysis.
Sources:
“The Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Internet Marketing”-E-Book
SlideShare.net
Image Source: HubSpot, “The 2011 State of Inbound Marketing”, E-Marketer.com
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