What does your business do to find new customers?
Knowing your top marketing priority is important to find new clients and growing your business in new directions. Whether it’s PPC, cold calling, or email marketing: Everything you do likely is to boost sales and drive traffic to your website.
To scale your business, you need a strategy and a process that helps fill the top of your sales funnel. This is where inbound vs. outbound marketing comes into the picture. Each form can help your business in different ways. However, you may put your marketing budget towards the wrong initiatives if you aren’t aware of their role. In this article, we’ll walk you through the differences between inbound vs. outbound marketing and the benefits of each.
What Is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is all about pulling customers toward your business. It’s the marketing strategy your business uses to attract new customers and persuade them to purchase. Most inbound marketing strategies focus on appealing to an audience already interested in your business’s services or products.
The most common inbound marketing channels include email marketing, social media, content marketing, and search engine optimization. These marketing avenues are tailored to your audience to keep your customers engaged with your content and fill your sales funnel with high-quality leads.
What Is Outbound Marketing?
Outbound marketing is when your sales or marketing team goes out of its way to connect with customers. They initiate conversations with a consumer or another business through cold calls, emails, or media buys.
This marketing tactic aims to cast your message out as far as possible to connect with the right people at the right business. That means these customers are not necessarily interested in your product or services.
Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing
To put it simply: Inbound marketing aims to attract customers actively seeking your products and services, and outbound marketing is the opposite. Outbound marketing seeks to find customers who might need your help and could be interested. This means you could send 100 emails and only get one viable response.
Outbound marketing is one of the oldest strategies used, dating back to the days when print and billboards dominated the marketing industry. Many businesses allocate a large portion of their budget towards outbound but see different results than other inbound strategies. In some instances, outbound marketing is considered to be spammy, which can negatively impact how a customer views your company.
Both marketing strategies have their benefits and aim to connect with audiences. However, they both don’t have the same ROI. It takes more work to track the profitability of outbound marketing. Your sales team could send an email or make a cold call that doesn’t lead to a sale right away. However, prospects could see your website or social post later on, and that touch point convinces them to make a purchase. These two strategies work together, but inbound marketing convinces your customers to purchase with a higher success rate.
Harnessing the Power of Inbound Marketing
Marketing is constantly evolving, and it’s the marketer’s job to know when to pivot between inbound vs. outbound marketing. In today’s digital world, customers want to connect with a brand. They want to be able to head to your site and find answers to their questions, verifiable testimonials, and more. They want the emails they receive to be strategically segmented and personalized to them. When they need something, they head to Google rather than picking up the phone and calling. If you want to stay ahead of the ongoing trends, you need to understand the value inbound vs. outbound can provide and when each is most effective.
Inbound marketing is invaluable for attracting customers looking for your products and services. If you put the same time and effort into fine-tuning your different inbound marketing strategies, you can start to see the results that positively impact your bottom line. There are several different inbound channels you can utilize to see results. Here are three you can focus on to get started.
I. Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization helps your business maintain its competitive edge and rank higher on the search engine results page. With a buttoned-up SEO strategy, you can ensure your business stays at the top of the search results and receives quality organic traffic.
II. Content Marketing
Content is everywhere. It’s in the landing page you create and the blogs you schedule out once a week. Content marketing focuses on building your brand personality online and connecting with your consumer. With a content marketing strategy, you can ensure that all your inbound marketing initiatives are aligned with the same common goal.
III. Email Marketing
Email marketing aims to connect with individuals who are already interested in your brand. These prospects could have signed up via a lead gen page or voluntarily to your newsletter. Sending emails regularly is a great way to keep your brand top of mind and encourage customers and prospects to come back to make a purchase.
Marketing for Long Term Success
As you can see, inbound and outbound marketing isn’t too different fundamentally, however, there are key distinguishers that you must pay attention to when implementing campaigns in each stream.
If you’re ready to start prioritizing your marketing but don’t have the time or expertise – we can help. At Bluehour Digital, we’re passionate about helping our clients achieve long-lasting results through the power of SEO and content marketing.