Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing focuses on consumers finding you. This approach  is attractive to marketers because it zeros in on people who are already actively searching for a product or service and generates more qualified leads. The components of this method are fairly simple: Create fresh, relevant, targeted content specifically designed to reach a distinct audience. Online research is now routine for consumers, who have embraced daily pre-purchase analysis in huge way. Inbound marketing is significantly less expensive than outbound marketing. Strategies include:

• Social media marketing
• Blogging and content marketing
• Podcasts
• White papers
• Email marketing
• Landing Pages
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Pay per click (PPC) advertising 

What is Outbound Marketing?
Outbound marketing focuses on paying to broadcast your message to find consumers who will listen to you. It’s a shotgun-blast approach to promotion — the campaign is broad-based and distributed as widely as possible to a large and diverse audience in hopes of generating the greatest number of sales. It’s a value-driven numbers game: The more billboard ads or banner ads you pay for = the more people see your product = the more sales you’ll make. Outbound marketing strategies include:

• Print ads
• TV ads
• Banner ads
• Trade shows
• Telemarketing
• Cold calling
• Press releases
• Trade shows
• Email marketing
• Direct mail 
  
                                                                          INBOUND MARKETING VS OUTBOUND MARKETING

  How is Inbound Marketing more cost-efficient than Outbound Marketing, and how does this difference explain inbound marketing’s huge success over the last decade? Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing is one of the more common questions nowadays. Here you will find the answer in 11 facts

  Inbound Marketing, sometimes called New Marketing, is more interested in rendering your brand more appealing to customers than pushing or “peddling” your specific products onto customers. The difference is actually profound. Here’s why:

  1. Inbound Marketing Embraces New Media 
  As an extremely cost-conscious form of Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing intelligently uses blogs, search engine optimization and Social Media Marketing to make your company more attractive to customers.

  Couple that with the fact that Inbound Marketing produces 50% more leads than Outbound Marketing.

  2. Why Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing ? Inbound Isn’t Stuck In The Past
  If Inbound Marketing is synonymously called New Marketing, then the obvious implication is that Outbound Marketing is old or somehow more obsolete.

  This is indeed the situation since Outbound Marketing doesn’t really touch social media, blogging, podcasts or newsletters… yet customers very much do.

  3. Promotes Lead Nurture And Lead Scoring
  You shouldn’t be thinking about Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing, if you know that Outbound Marketing involves reaching out to customers essentially only when you have a product to sell (e.g., through TV, print and radio advertising) whereas Inbound Marketing keeps an ongoing dialog with customers and supports lead nurturing and lead scoring.

  In fact, one of the major problems with Outbound Marketing is that it provides significant barriers to tracking your return on investment, and Inbound Marketing costs over 60% less per lead than Outbound Marketing.

  4. Inbound Marketing Allows For Constant Improvements 
  To the cost-conscious point, though, Outbound Marketing simply doesn’t allow marketers the opportunity to constantly assess, and reevaluate if necessary, the success of your marketing efforts.

  With Outbound Marketing, the plan is basically to run a television ad and see what happens-hardly a recipe for success.

  Inbound Marketing, on the other hand, allows for ongoing changes and even real-time analysis in the form of Facebook Insights and Google Analytics.

  5. More Permission-Based Marketing
  Another key advantage that Inbound Marketing has over outdated forms of Outbound Marketing is the fundamental way that customers interact with your brand.

  In Outbound Marketing you essentially scream down prospects with your message – figuratively speaking, of course – no matter whether customers want or need to hear that message; with Inbound Marketing, you’re instead getting your prospects permission before preceding.

  6. Increased ROI And Conversions
  This is why Inbound Marking has been called more permission-based: Inbound Marketing uses things like subscription based email marketing campaigns, blog subscriptions and likes on social media as a vote of approval from prospects to provide fresh content and upcoming promotions…all while offering better tracking and greater conversion

  7. Facilitates Ongoing Customer Relationships
  Inbound Marketing also gives marketers the opportunity to build relationships with prospects at various stages of the buying cycle.

  With the help of community managers and social media managers tasked with getting the word out on social media as well as posting and answering questions on forums to drum up excitement and raise awareness, Inbound Marketing is much more about a back-and-forth exchange than Outbound Marketing’s shouting-from-a-bullhorn approach.

  8. Inbound Marketing’s Lower Cost Of Entry
  Inbound Marketing allows even very, very small companies to gain worldwide exposure and expand their brand awareness in a relatively short amount of time.

  Contrast the fact that Inbound Marketing entails cost-conscious tactics like search engine optimization and Viral Marketing whereas Outbound Marketing involves higher cost, lower yield forms of “spammy” advertising.

  9. Generate Better Traffic And Actionable Leads
  In addition to Inbound Marketing’s ability to create more trust and stronger relationships with customers, Inbound Marketing also generates high-quality traffic and actionable leads to your website.

  Just consider that companies with 50 to 100 Twitter followers have 100% more traffic than companies with 25 or fewer followers on Twitter.

  10. Inbound Marketing Features Higher Close Rates
  In fact, search engine optimization has a close rate many times that of print advertising’s – SEO comes in at a 14.6% close rate whereas Outbound Marketing demonstrates an embarrassing 1.7% close rate, on average.

  Add this to the fact that prospects’ eyes gloss over when presented with television ads, while most eventual sales start with at least some research from customers through search engines, and you’re talking about some serious ROI by going the Inbound Marketing route.

  11. Combines Sales And Marketing Processes
  If you are considering Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing , you have to know that Inbound also considerably improves your company’s internal efficiency since it increasingly coalesces Sales and Marketing into one overarching process.

  By coupling sales and Marketing processes, yours get a whole that’s far greater than the sum of its parts since your salespeople are providing insights that marketers can then use to craft targeted content.

  The end result? When we talk about Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing, Inbound has a better use of your Marketing Dollar, improved lead nurture and far more robust close rates. 

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