Have you ever been entrusted with creating or modifying a marketing plan for your company? It’s easy to become overwhelmed by the amount of information and advice available – should you focus on creating eye-catching signs, networking with potential leads at an industry event, or building a digital-only strategy?

Fortunately, inbound and outbound marketing are two universal marketing ideas that might help you narrow your reach. These are two of the most prevalent broad marketing techniques, each with its own set of uses, advantages, and drawbacks. In this post, we’ll look at an overview of inbound and outbound marketing, as well as examples of how to implement each strategy and the benefits and drawbacks of each.

Inbound vs Outbound Marketing

Between inbound and outbound marketing, there are a few key distinctions. Outbound marketing entails reaching out to customers in order to pique their interest in a product. Inbound marketing, on the other hand, focuses on developing and sharing content that attracts visitors to your website.

Outbound marketing takes a more aggressive, all-encompassing strategy in the hopes of converting at least some people. Inbound marketing is generally more subtle and focused on gradually persuading a certain set of people to make a purchase. Here are a few more notable distinctions:

Inbound Marketing

The goal of inbound marketing is to bring people to your products and services. Up to 63 percent of customers start their purchasing trip online, thus your top prospects are looking for things online. To meet a demand or address an issue, they start by looking for products, services, or content. As a result, your material should describe how your goods or services will solve their problems, answer critical industry questions, or meet their demands.

This may be accomplished in a variety of methods, including blogs, video material, guidebooks, and more. Each of these pieces of material may also be used to set your product apart from the competitors. Product comparisons, incredible testimonials, competitive pricing, and stellar reviews may all be incorporated into your podcast, social media postings, or reports. Keep in mind that prospective buyers should get intelligent content at various stages of their purchasing journey that is varied in content but consistent in tone.

Assume a customer is in the market for new marketing software. To begin, they can put “greatest marketing tool” into a search engine to see what comes up. The first organic result will be a blog that clearly and objectively summarises the top 10 marketing platforms. They might wish to learn more about digital marketing after reading the blog article.

Conveniently, the end of the blog has a link to encourage them to sign up for an upcoming webinar to learn more about a new digital marketing strategy. They click the link, then enter their name and email address to access the content. The site stores their contact information and tracks whether or not they attend the webinar.

Once they attend the webinar, they might wonder if any companies successfully implemented the strategy that was discussed. Right on cue, the vendor will send them a follow-up email containing case studies that show how one of their competitors effectively used digital marketing to achieve a huge ROI. This prompts them to request a demo with a sales representative. They go into the sales call already interested in (and educated on) what the software does, providing you with an easier sell.

The Benefits of Inbound Marketing

There are several benefits to inbound marketing that can help you determine if it’s the right strategy for your company:

• Inbound marketing is non-invasive — prospects can read your blog posts or attend a webinar on their own time.
• Inbound marketing content is educational — it’s specifically designed for each stage in the sales funnel.
• Inbound marketing is quantifiable 一 you can tie each part of your strategy to a metric that gets monitored over time.
• Your website and content are continuously being updated, so Inbound marketing continues drawing in qualified leads over time.

The Challenges of Inbound Marketing

Of course, inbound marketing isn’t for every company. There are some drawbacks to focusing on digital content:

• Inbound marketing requires continuous maintenance, to ensure that content always speaks to consumers’ evolving wants and needs.
• Inbound marketers spend a great deal of time and effort developing and testing out different content that will entice customers to convert.
• Inbound marketing demands a holistic strategy, meaning you’ll need to buy tools to help you implement integrated, cross-channel campaigns.

Outbound Marketing

Outbound marketing involves sending a message to a large number of individuals in the goal of converting them into customers. This method is based on the idea that the larger the group to whom you send your message, the greater the return. Traditional marketing methods such as direct mail, events, billboards, cold phoning, newspapers, and radio are generally connected with outbound marketing. Outbound marketing, on the other hand, can be used with more current technologies such as pay-per-click advertising and spam emails.

Consumers are frequently unaware of or uninterested in the goods being sold. Prospects may be watching TV or browsing a website when they are stopped by an advertisement demonstrating why they should purchase a specific product.

Let’s imagine a consumer is travelling down the highway and notices a billboard advertising a local furniture company. They may have a fleeting thought that they should get a new couch, but it remains in the back of their minds. They notice a promo for the same furniture business on the local news a few weeks later. They consider buying a sofa once again, but forget when the news comes back on.

Three months later, they check their mailbox and find a discount coupon for the furniture store. As it happens, they just received a bonus at work. Finally, they decide to go ahead and buy that new couch. None of the ads referred to a sofa, and they weren’t necessarily looking to buy a sofa right away. Nevertheless, ads kept popping up in their everyday life, so they ended up shifting their attention to a need that wasn’t top of mind.

The Benefits of Outbound Marketing

Outbound marketing has a few perks that should not be overlooked:

• Outbound marketing promotes brand awareness, helping you reach people who haven’t heard of your products or services before.
• Outbound marketing can yield immediate results 一 people interested in your products and services are likely to take action on your ads and make a purchase.
• Consumers are accustomed to outbound marketing 一 they know that there will be ads in the Sunday paper or on TV and may trust those ads more than the ones presented to them on newer technology

The Challenges of Outbound Marketing

Outbound marketing can be difficult to get right. Here are some disadvantages to going the outbound marketing route:

• It’s difficult to make outbound marketing appealing and relevant to everyone, so outbound marketing is more generalized.
• It’s easy for consumers to tune out outbound marketing 一 many people mute the TV during commercials or immediately throw out or recycle their junk mail.
• It’s challenging to measure the effectiveness of some outbound marketing strategies like billboards.
• Outbound marketing is costly, traveling to trade shows, paying for banner ads, and purchasing billboard spaces add up.

Outbound marketing is all about broadcasting a message to a large audience, but inbound marketing is more focused. Although there is a good chance that at least some people may convert as a result of your outbound marketing efforts, this is generally accompanied with a high acquisition cost. Inbound marketing material may be properly tailored to appeal to your best-fit prospects, rather than shouting your product’s name from the rooftops and praying a few people react.

Get started on your inbound or outbound marketing strategy

Whatever marketing technique you choose, you’ll need a means to stay up with the ever-changing marketing landscape. Consumer marketing, email marketing, mobile marketing, revenue attribution, account-based marketing, lead management, and more are all covered by Digitizal. Digitizal has assisted hundreds of business clients in achieving their inbound and outbound marketing objectives by recommending new methods to communicate with customers at scale. With a free Digitizal Engage product tour, you can begin unlocking the power of inbound and outbound marketing now.