Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing

Business Owners or marketers are looking for new ways to become more effecient with their marketing methods or activities. While previously, techniques such as phone book advertising, newspaper advertising,cold calling and door-to-door advertising were the only way to generate leads. With the adoption of the Internet and Social Media, marketers can now connect with customers in a whole new way. Now more than ever, not only are consumers buying online. But they're asking questions, doing research and looking to Google (and other Search engines) for answers. We know many business owners who if asked where their phone book was would say that it's "holding up the desk" or was thrown away the day it was recieved. As an Internet Marketing Agency, Impulse Creative looks to increase marketing ROI by helping prospects and clients make the switch from Outbound to Inbound marketing.

Here's the breakdown.

Outbound Marketing: (Sledgehammer Mentality) Outbound marketing has been successful in driving results in the past years. However with respect to consumer behavior and the recent business marketing trends, it has showed itself as a costly and unproductive marketing tactic, yet we find businesses doing it because "it's what they know".

Typical Outbound Marketing Techniques include:

• Newspaper Advertising
• Phone Book Advertising
• Tele marketing
• Cold-calling
• Direct Mail
• Trade shows or Seminars
• Billboard advertisements
• Television advertisements

While these techniques still work they can be very costly. As marketers we have to shift our focus from "interruption advertising" to new and different approach.

Inbound marketing (Magnet Mentality): The Methodology of Inbound Marketing was coined by Hubspot, a market leader in internet marketing. As per Wikipedia: Inbound marketing is based on the concept of earning the attention of prospects, making yourself easy to be found and drawing customers to your website by producing content customers value.

Inbound marketing has been extremely successful by employing the use of various innovative methods that if used correctly can reap fruitful results. Inbound Marketing is a combination of internet marketing techniques and is also referred to as pull marketing. 

Inbound marketing includes strategies such as:

• Blogging
• Email marketing
• Search Engine Optimization (keyword optimization)
• Online Videos
• Pod casts
• E-books
• Social Media Marketing (and listening)

Why to switch from outbound marketing?

From The Marketer's Perspective: The high cost of traditional outbound marketing tactics, the uncertainty about qualified leads and overall outcomes of the campaign. Due to the limited targeting of the potential customer or prospect makes tracking ROI a challenge.

From the Consumer’s perspective, outbound marketing is primarily "interruption based" marketing, or techniques that breaks in to your normal activities whether it be reading articles in the newspaper, watching TV etc. The unwanted interruption common to outbound marketing is more unproductive and the mindset is broadcasting to ALL to get a FEW. While outbound marketing techniques can still generate results the cost per lead will be much higher than when compared to Inbound Marketing.

Outbound Marketing to Inbound Marketing: Making the switch:

Inbound marketing focuses on creating great content to generate relevant traffic to your website, converting that qualified traffic to leads, and in the final phase, turning those leads into customers. Interested traffic is aimed at your website through striking and resourceful content marketing techniques. This methodology of catching the attention of your prospective buyers by providing relevant content rather than the exchange of unsolicited messages broadcasted to unresponsive individuals following in the hopes of finding an interested prospect. Recent statistics have shown that:

• 44% typical outbound snail mails is hardly checked out, that means the waste of time and money.
• 85% of the people watching TV swap the channels during unsought television advertisements.
•  86% from the age group of 24-38 year olds have stopped the use of their favorite websites due to the intrusion of irrelevant advertisements.
• The ground reality puts forward that with recession taking over, and struggling economy, inbound marketing costs 65% less per follow up than the typical outbound marketing.
• Companies have also lifted up their customer acquisition through social media; inbound marketing at a whooping rate of 80%.

Statistics from Hubspot's State of inbound marketing the 2012