Inbound Vs Outbound Marketing- A Deep Dive Into The Pros & Cons
- By Aman Bhati
- October 12, 2023
Technology has made Marketing for products and services more complex.
Today, there are so many mediums for you to market your services and products that it is almost overwhelming.
Should you stick to the traditional methods, or should you explore new avenues?
Many business owners and established companies enquire about the merits and demerits when it comes to Inbound Marketing vs outbound marketing. We finally decided to end this discourse here!
If you are still considering your course of action regarding inbound vs outbound marketing, this blog will prove to be valuable for you.
In this blog, we talk about:
- Difference between inbound and outbound marketing
- Strategies of inbound and outbound marketing
- Challenges faced in inbound vs outbound marketing
- Which marketing strategies should you deploy?
Difference Between Inbound vs Outbound Marketing
The key to understanding the difference between inbound marketing and outbound marketing lies in the approach of both processes. While inbound marketing works on understanding the customer intent first and personalizing the communication with respect to that, outbound works on reaching out to many leads with a much more vague intent.
Inbound marketing as a concept is relatively new. However, it was practised from a very early time.
While many people consider Hubspot as the pioneer of inbound marketing and owe it to spread the idea of empathizing with the audience before pitching in products and services, there are a few interesting examples dated earlier than that.
“John Deere, a popular company that manufactures agriculture related products published a magazine called The Furrow. This magazine consisted of a bunch of tips for the farmers, repurposed content to add more value each time, stories that resonate to the specific target audience-the farmers and many more types of relevant content. It was targetted towards farmers and spoke about the various ways in which framers could increase the quality and the quantity of their agricultural yield.”
The furrow is still considered one of the earliest known content marketing campaigns, while other brands were focused on creating print ads centred only on their products. And that is the precise definition of the difference between inbound outbound marketing.
This table will make inbound vs outbound marketing more clear:
| Inbound Marketing | Outbound Marketing |
|---|---|
|
Performed through a customer centric approach to solve a problem and educate them. |
Performed to simply capture the attention of customers.
|
|
Customer’s interest is valued.
|
Seller’s interest is valued. |
|
Interactive content with which users can engage, like forms, emails, blogs, and others. |
Passive content like magazine ads, TV, billboards and others. |
|
Strategy spread across many channels. |
Limited number of channels. |
|
Easy to measure performance through softwares and tools. |
Difficult to measure the performance. |
But, this table is not enough to ascertain the difference between inbound and outbound marketing. There is so much more to it.
Inbound Marketing
We will begin to understand inbound vs outbound marketing by taking one approach at a time.
Inbound marketing generates three times more leads per dollar than traditional marketing methods.
And they cost 61% less than outbound methods. Primarily because, for a good inbound campaign, you primarily need a professional with knowledge and a bunch of useful tools.
Some examples of great inbound marketing campaigns you might have seen are – Spotify, Starbucks, and many more. Feel free to add to this list!
Spotify makes strong use of a form of user-generated content in the form of yearly reports of what songs people have listened to the most. People perceive such reports to be an extension of the good and bad memories they have had over the years and hence share them with their friends and family over their socials.
Starbucks provides a completely personalized end-to-end experience from start to finish, right from making small talk to providing you with a cup of coffee with your name on it and the endless customizations that allow you to create the best coffee for yourself.
A few years ago, you might have said, “Oh, It’s just coffee” or “Oh, it’s just music”, but today, coffee and music are synonymous with the names of these brands. Both of them have used strong individual branding techniques and inbound strategies to build a loyal and sustainable user base.
Ways of inbound marketing
Okay, but how should I do Inbound marketing for my brand?
Yes, we heard you.
Here are a few ways of inbound marketing:
Content marketing
Create and promote high quality, relevant and targetted content across all digital platforms such as websites, third-party websites, social media, online listings such as Google Business, and several other places.
Personalizing communication channels such as emails, SMS’s, push notifications and other mediums are also a part of this, whereby the communication sent is so targetted that the user feels the excitement to go through any of your call-to-actions like clicking on know more, filling up a form or hopping on your socials.
The various ways in which you can do content marketing are:
- Blogs
- Infographics/ Informational videos
- Whitepapers
- E-books
- Case study
- Webinar
- Podcast
And as far as your creativity goes.
Once you have high quality content, you can focus on digital marketing services.Search Engine Optimization
You have made amazing, relevant and valuable content. Now what? You need to make sure that your content reaches your audience. The most reliable way to do that is through optimizing your content to make it more searchable.
There is a combination of on-page and off-page activities that will help you achieve this. Most SEO services recommend a combination of both.
Influencer Marketing
Businesses that use influencer marketing for brand promotion earn $18 for every dollar invested. It is difficult to classify influencer marketing into inbound vs outbound marketing, but the creators that thrive on organic growth lead to inbound marketing avenues only.
Such high ROI should be leveraged to the maximum potential.
Social Media Marketing
Create a personalized brand identity by leveraging social media marketing.
Put your best business foot forward on LinkedIn network with valuable business owners and collaborators. Be a bit more creative and personal on Instagram. The lines to what all you can do on social media are clearly non-existent today, with 90% of Instagram users following some business profile.
Newsletter and Webinars
One of the most known approaches to inbound marketing is to educate your consumers through a multitude of channels.
Providing new and valuable content to your consumers consistently through newsletters delivered directly to their inboxes is a convenient, fast and reliable way to subtly make them believe that you are a top voice in the industry, prefer valuable clients and empathize with the bottlenecks in their experience.
You can even create webinars and sell them at a free/nominal rate.
Besides being an amazing marketing approach, it also helps you gain qualified, educated and well-informed leads.
PPC
Advertise on multiple platforms with the help of pay-per-click advertisements.
Though most businesses still elude from PPC, this channel is highly cost-effective. The cost is only incurred once the user clicks on a particular ad.
PPC advertising also produces very fast results in bringing qualified leads owing to the user-centric approach that allows it to leverage the algorithm of the social media platform.
Podcast appearances and Interviews
With Podcast appearances and interviews, you can leverage the particular creator’s existing follower base. You can look for a podcast or a creator inviting guests from your specific niche.
This is a proven, tried and tested strategy because it conveys the message from trusted voices in the industry. More than seeing these platforms just as audio ads, persuade the speakers to drive social media engagement.
What actions will lead potential customers to you? Which creator’s content are your target audience members? Which voice is the most influential at the moment?
After carefully considering all of these parameters, you can approach people who would be looking to invite brands like yours.
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Challenges of Inbound Marketing
Time-taking
With any inbound marketing strategy, you need to be extremely patient in expecting the results.
Content can, at most times, surprise you. It can work for you in ways you did not imagine it to work, and it can even disappoint you at times.
If you want immediate, fast results, chances are that inbound marketing is not the one for you. But if you want long-term, term-sustainable growth, then there is nothing like inbound strategies.
But that is not the only thing you need to consider in inbound vs outbound marketing. There is more!
Lesser resources, knowledge of tools
Inbound marketing requires many resources, skilled hands and tools to get things rolling.
To run an effective marketing campaign, you need tools right from the start, like tools that asses your target persona, the keywords and intent they search for campaign performance monitoring tools, and various others.
Though these tools come with high ease of use, it is comparatively easy to use them, but you need someone to operate on them to tap into the potential of these tools to bring maximum ROI.
Now let us explore the other side of the discourse of inbound vs outbound marketing.
Outbound Marketing
The set of approaches where the brand puts itself out there and waits for the customers to walk up to them is called outbound marketing.
Outbound marketing works by putting your brand out there at the right place and at the right time.
To simplify your understanding, you can think of inbound marketing as an approach where the target persona is very well defined, and all activities are designed according to that. Your content will depend on the
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