Inbound Vs Outbound Marketing – A Short Note

I’ve been speaking to a couple of organizations to understand their marketing strategies so that I can provide a suitable recommendation for their campaign objectives.

One of the things that I noticed was that they often shared the different mediums for outreach and the amount of money have invested into campaigns but still are not seeing the results that they want.

Underneath the elaborate plans and systems that they are using, they will skip on understanding one important idea – what kind of marketing have they been doing?

Inbound or Outbound?

Inbound Marketing:

This method of marketing is the current trend right now, and for good reasons! Social Media Marketing and content marketing has gained tremendous traction and is all that everyone ever talks about! The reason why this form of marketing have been under the spotlight is because of the value it provides.

Its less invasive and is focused more on educating the audience and building a relationship with your audience .It boosts your visibility across the online platform and cements your credibility for the subject matter after a period of time.

Inbound Marketing takes place when you engage your existing pool of audience by sharing content or ideas about your industry. Similarly, this can also take place when they land on your page through a back-link or organic search from google or Facebook and they choose to check out your page.

The results is much more gradual and cumulative. Though is often confused as purely churning out content just for the sake of engagement.

In reality, Inbound Marketing can be a complex web of linking key themes and ideas to form a narrative that speaks of your organization and its services

This part could lead to a discussion Branding vs Marketing – but I shall save it for another day!

Example:

” Inbound marketing is like opening up a fine dining restaurant, calling up all your past customers, and inviting the people you know to join you for nice dinner.

Before dinner is served, your waiter provides recommendation of your best dishes and how to enjoy the experience. Stories of your exceptional food becomes the talk of the town as it spreads through word of mouth.”

Outbound Marketing:

This method of marketing have gained a bit of bad rep due to how it has been misused and the recent talks of how the social media platforms sucking in the money spent without producing results.

This has been the case because many of the marketing teams have been deploying these ‘techniques’ without first spending time understanding their tools.

Just like any other tools, you need to first learn how to use it.

I’ve met people throwing hundreds of US dollars into Facebook advertisements per day, and generate only a handful of unqualified leads!

When applied correctly, outbound marketing can significantly boost your page’s presence, generate leads and even achieve to higher conversion rates!

Example

“Imagine opening a fine dining restaurant, paying a group of people to find specific diners who enjoys your menu and invite them to have a meal in your restaurant It’s highly targeted and specific to a behaviour. That’s what it’s like to do outbound marketing.”

Which is better ?:

Both are equally important, though I might lean a little to Outbound or Paid Traffic.

Why?

For any business, the cardinal rule of success boils down to having either of these 2 things:

Time or Money.

✅ If you have Money – you can use it to accelerate your progress.

✅ If you have Time – you can use it to substitute Money.

✅If you have BOTH – you’re going to enjoy great results!

Then again, if you focus too much on paid ads/traffic and neglect building your organic presence, you will end up exhausting all your money and have no results.

In order to achieve a good snowball effect, have a balance of both.

You will experience better results if you have a good content creation plan for the campaign (these platforms love it when you continuously share content and can encourage their users to linger on their platforms longer. They will reward you for your effort by giving better results)

Paid ads/traffic for speed, organic for sustainability.

This just the tip of the iceberg, I could keep going but I’d rather you PM or drop me a comment below!