Understanding Inbound Marketing and Outbound Marketing

Whenever you think of acquiring customers for your business, you get many options nowadays to reach out to your audience. With so many options available today, you might get confused about which one to choose, which will be effective for your business. We did some findings and identified more than 50 different marketing techniques available at the moment, and each of them promises to deliver the best value for our buck. In most cases, it is true as well, but what usually happens is we usually end up trying out a lot of them, testing and experimenting with a lot of things. In the end, we either run out of cash for marketing spends or gets knocked out by the competition, who are there in the market with a lot of budget and experiences.

Having so many options around and everybody promising results, most of the time, gets so overwhelmed that you end up trying either 1-2 choices and giving up or not doing anything at all. Frankly, you can get results from any marketing tactics; if you are ready to spend a reasonable amount of time, dig deeper into the data and test everything. But who has that much time and patience to do all this testing and analysis? By the time you start working on any one method and try to dedicate your heart and soul there and start seeing some result, one new way of marketing or platform pops up, which promises far better performance with the current one started. Then FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) takes over, and we end up having below average or extremely poor performance with our existing marketing style.

Over the years of testing & experimenting with many marketing tactics and methodology, we have created our combination of marketing tactics that are working well for us now. But I am not saying that you also have to do the same thing. Invest a lot of time and money to figure out what suits you best. However, it is advisable that at a later stage, you should try other options when things are running smoothly for some of the marketing techniques, majorly when you are looking to scale your marketing efforts. Majorly, you must figure out what will be ideal marketing technique based on the kind of business you are into, and then you can look out or learn from others’ experiences what has worked best for them and try to replicate the same for the initial start.

Once you start looking for answers to your queries, you will see many marketing methods that various organizations utilize. Broadly, can group most of them into two clusters:

1. Outbound Marketing.
2. Inbound Marketing. 

Both techniques have their advantages and disadvantages and can utilize the marketing methodologies separately and in combination. The significant difference between both techniques lies in how you reach your audience. Outbound Marketing is more of an aggressive approach where businesses try to approach their potential customers directly. And Inbound Marketing acts more like an attracting technique where the company first attempts to create value for their potential customers, keep them engaged, nurture them and then try to sell to the customers.

Let us go into detail about each of them to understand both methods further; there are similarities and differences and try to figure out what can be used in your business.

Okay!! First, let’s understand a little more about both Inbound Marketing and Outbound Marketing concepts.

Inbound Marketing: It’s more focused on getting the clients inwards. Which means, rather than just sending your message out loud to everybody, you focus on attracting customers to your doorstep. You do that by creating valuable Content – it can be blog articles, eBooks, whitepapers, opt-in emails, SERPs, guides, tips sheets, videos, etc., which will help users have their queries answered and make them feel comfortable and warm with your identity.

You create creative, interactive, and informative content that will create an impression on your audience’s mind about your intent to help them in the best possible manner. You provide so much value to them that you gain their utmost trust in your brand. Afterward, you can pitch your offerings to them. Since they (your prospects) now have their faith in you, the likelihood of getting them converted to paying customers or whatever you are offering increases a lot.

It’s a lean model where marketers are encouraged to use methodologies that will help the audience gain as much information as the Advertisers’ products or services. This methodology is in trend for the past ten years as marketers understand the value of Inbound Marketing and the long-term impact it creates in the eyes of customers.

Content is critical in Inbound Marketing Methodology as everything revolves around it. The better Content you have, the better it will be. Hmm…. You might argue that if everything in Inbound Marketing revolves around Content, then it is content marketing only, Correct!! Why create unnecessary jargon to add one more heavy marketing word to confuse many of us and make you(marketer) sound smarter.

Okay!! You are right partially, but many things are considered in Inbound marketing and not in content marketing. There are similarities, of course, but there are a lot of differences between both. We have tried to explain it in detail in this article:

Difference between Inbound Marketing and Content Marketing.

Significant Advantages of utilizing this methodology are:

• Connects directly with the audience as Content is created, keeping prospects in mind.
• ROI is better as compared to Outbound Marketing as the conversion rate is greater. Prospects are already looking for a solution to their problems, and you become their savior.
• Content is created for providing value to prospects; therefore, its impact on prospects’ minds is more substantial than other methods. Hence, higher Brand Remembrance.

With all these benefits, you might be thinking that this is it. This is the solution I was looking for, but again this methodology has some disadvantages too. Below pointers will help to identify those:

• As it revolves around Content and creating value, the turnaround time of converting a prospect into a lead is more as compared to Outbound Marketing.
• Like Outbound Marketing, it is difficult to quantify the strategy, as there is no sure-shot thing if the user is going to convert or how much time it’s going to take to get prospects converted.

Where you can use this methodology:

This marketing technique is utilized in almost all industries but majorly works best for long sales cycle processes. Ex: Real Estate, Automobile, SAAS Subscription, etc., where buying decision has many factors to be considered or recurring payment is involved.

 

Outbound Marketing: 

This methodology lets you broadcast or convey your message to a large audience, irrespective of whom you are targeting. You send out your message to the max possible audience and expect some users to be interested in your product or service in that large group. Some examples are Print, TV, Magazines, Radio, Billboards, Newspapers, Mass Email, Display Banners or Videos, Tradeshows, Direct Email, Mass Email, Cold Calling, etc.

This is still the most widely used technique out there. Also called Interruptive Marketing or push marketing, it uses generic messaging aiming to sell products or services directly to a large group of audience. It’s fast and suitable for Brand Awareness as it captures a large audience at one go. If you are looking to move your brand quickly and reach out to as many audiences as possible, this is the right option.

The only thing you need to consider is it becomes expensive as compared to Inbound Methodology. You may need to spend a lot to have its impact or to perform well. But it is not like you cannot get a good ROI with the Outbound technique. All the big companies do heavy spending on this technique, especially these funded start-ups who have enough funds to acquire audiences at any cost. In this highly competitive environment, it becomes imperative to acquire users fast and as well as acquiring them first.

This marketing technique comes in handy when you are looking for a product launch or wants a new brand to enter the market. Here, people don’t know about your product or service; you need to reach out to them to exhibit your existence and make them aware of yourself. If you are a small business or start-up with decent cash flow, you can still use Outbound Marketing but with proper strategy. Better to combine both marketing strategies to gain the best possible value for your organization.

Major advantages of using this methodology are:

• It is a faster means of communication and reaches a broader audience.
• Suitable for products and services that are new to the market or not many people know about it. Predominantly for raising brand awareness.
• Encourages users to take immediate action, which in turn helps advertisers to get conversions faster.

Some disadvantages of using this technique are:

• You really cannot gauge the effectiveness of your ads. Since you are just sending out your message to many people, it is not easy to calculate your ads’ ROI.
• This type of marketing technique is costly compared to the inbound marketing technique as it is not responsive or targeted well.
• The conversion rate is meager because it isn’t targeted effectively.
• These types of ads are skipped or avoided nowadays.

Where you can use this methodology:

You can use this technique if you are majorly looking to increase your user base dramatically and have some decent spending to back that up. Or you are a new entrant in the market, going to launch a new product or service, then to generate Brand Awareness and want to reach out to a lot of users in less time.

Conclusion:

Which one to choose for your business? Which is better in both? If you start to think in that direction, your marketing journey will become difficult daily. It’s always better to analyze your business first, then figure out who is your reasonable prospects. Once that is clear, figure out how much time it can take to convert a prospect to a paying customer? If the duration is longer to convert those prospects, usually, Inbound marketing techniques are better than Outbound. It’s better to have a strong strategy or marketing plan that will resonate with your brand and help you get better ROI for your ad.

If you find it challenging to come up with a good strategy that can help you deliver performance from your ad spends, you can anytime reach out to us; we will be more than happy to assist you with creating the right strategy and deliver that as well.