In the world of marketing today, many marketers view inbound marketing as the good guy while outbound marketing is the bad guy. Instead of seeing them as opposing forces, you can use them together to generate leads for your business.
Do you know the difference between inbound vs outbound marketing?
Read more to find out which marketing strategies can be the most powerful and effective in today’s digital world.
What Is Outbound Marketing?
Outbound marketing uses a push strategy to attract consumers. It’s interruption-based marketing. This is the traditional method for promotional product marketing used for years.
For outbound marketing to work, people have to stop what they’re doing and pay attention to the advertisement or message.
You put your commercial message in front of consumers even when they’re not interested instead of directing it toward a target audience. Because of this, it’s intrusive and often ignored by many people.
What Is Inbound Marketing?
The growth of digital technology and the Internet led to the popularity of inbound marketing. The big difference between digital marketing and traditional marketing is content.
Unlike push marketing, inbound marketing uses a pull strategy or permission-based tactics. It attracts prospects.
They look for you, hoping you can give them what they need to solve their problems. You do this by giving them helpful, compelling information.
Focusing on content attracts prospects, empowers them and helps build relationships with them. When you create relevant content for your target audience, you also build your brand value.
As long as you offer solutions and provide meaningful and valuable content, you’ll inspire confidence in your prospects and existing customers.
Inbound content marketing is all about telling your story. It’s conversational, personalized and human. It doesn’t try to sell your target audience anything.
Inbound vs Outbound Marketing?
The big difference between outbound vs inbound marketing is outbound is advertising, while inbound is attracting consumers.
Outbound marketing is expensive. Inbound costs 61% less per lead than push marketing. You buy people’s attention with outbound marketing while inbound earns people’s attention.
The huge advantage of inbound marketing is the way you interact with your target audience. Your prospects engage in conversations through your posts and comments.
If you’re a startup business, you might want to focus on inbound marketing. It’s less expensive and attracts prospects that need you.
Your audience sees you as a trusted authority, which strengthens brand awareness. Because you focus on prospects interested in your products and services, you get better results than using outbound marketing techniques.
How to Get Started with Inbound Marketing
When you embrace inbound marketing, you promote your business with value-added content. It can be long-form content, such as blog posts, ebooks, case studies, whitepapers, videos, and podcasts.
You can also use short-form content like Twitter posts, Facebook comments, Instagram images and active discussions on social media or online forums.
This complex form of marketing also involves using several digital components at the same time:
- Implementing SEO for better page ranking and generating traffic
- Constantly updating your website design and content for brand exposure
- Developing buyer personas to help understand your target market
- Publishing on social media platforms for sharing relevant content
- Regularly publishing effective, educational content
- Implementing analysis tools and A/B testing to find out what’s working or not working for you
Putting Digital Marketing Components to Work
To start inbound marketing designed to attract more leads follow these strategies for SEO, website design, social media marketing, email marketing, and blog marketing.
SEO Strategies
It isn’t enough just to write educational content. You have to include SEO strategies that get your content noticed. These include using keyword phrases relevant to your content, internal and external links, creating relevant meta descriptions and tags, include anchor text, tag your images and add CTAs.
Website Design Tips
Inbound marketing relies on the audience attracted to the content on your website. So, it’s important to make sure that your website design makes a good impression.
If you haven’t updated your website in a few years, it’s time you did. Check all your links to make sure they’re working and keep your content updated.
Page loading speed is essential. If your site takes too long to load, your visitors will click out and go to a competitor’s site. They’ll never get to read the content you worked so hard to create.
Also, you want them to stay on your pages long enough to click on your CTAs. So a fast, attractive and mobile-friendly website design is essential for successful inbound marketing.
Social Media Marketing
Social media and inbound marketing make a powerful duo for driving traffic to your website. By posting status updates on your social media pages that encourage your followers to click on your links, it leads them to your website.
Posting content on social media not only encourages your followers to take action, but it also builds trusting relationships with them. This inbound marketing strategy helps lead your prospects down the sales funnel.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is alive and well. Did you know that 144.8 billion emails go to inboxes every day and 89 billion of them are from businesses? These staggering numbers are from a report by Mashable.
Using inbound email marketing, you can make your messages stand out from the crowd. By nurturing your readers with personalized, targeted emails, your open rates will improve.
If you segment your subscribers, you can schedule emails to recognize special occasions, holiday offers and personalized gifts. Using inbound content makes your subscribers feel like friends rather than customers.
Blog Marketing
Blog marketing is skyrocketing with businesses that blog regularly receiving 55 percent more web visitors and 70 percent more leads than those who ignore blogging.
When Google gets queries from potential prospects, your keyword rich content goes to the top of the search page. The result is more visitors to your blog and more conversions for your products and services.
That’s the beauty of inbound marketing. If you blog, your target audience will find you.
Time to Decide
Deciding on inbound vs outbound marketing depends on the resources available for your business. No matter whether you’re big or small, every business should build relationships with inbound marketing techniques.
If you’d like more advice about how to use inbound marketing for building brand awareness and high quality leads that convert, contact us. We’d be happy to help you with your marketing plan.