Inbound marketing is also called ‘warm leads marketing’. This method makes your business attractive to customers. Outbound marketing uses push marketing strategies and focuses on the actions to sell products or services.
What Is Inbound Marketing And How Is It Different From Outbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is a pull marketing strategy that allows you to meet the needs of your potential customers when it suits them. Outbound marketing follows a push strategy with which you want to sell products or services quickly and which is often experienced as intrusive, but can also ensure rapid brand awareness. Read below for more differences and the pros and cons of both marketing strategies.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is the process of helping your potential customers find your business.
You focus on customers who are not yet ready to make a purchase or take a service from you, but you already make them ‘warm’ to come back to you when they are ready.
When do you use inbound marketing?
You use inbound marketing to:
- attract the right customers: people who are really interested in your product or service
- gain loyal, regular customers
- build trust in your name, company and your products or services
- increase your visibility and your CTR (click-through-rates) in search engines. (With a higher percentage of CTR, you have more customers who perform actions on your website or webshop, which increases the chance that they will become your customers.)
Difference Between Inbound and Outbound Marketing
Inbound: pull marketing strategy
Inbound marketing uses a pull marketing strategy. Pull marketing uses new methods aimed at:
- providing information that people are looking for
- developing relationships, getting regular customers
- increasing visibility and findability in search engines (SEO)
- generating (organic) leads.
With inbound marketing, customers come to you.
Outbound: push marketing strategy
Outbound marketing uses push marketing strategies. Push marketing focuses on the actions to sell products or services. You can recognize outbound marketing by texts that motivate you to purchase the product or service immediately. That is why it is also called ‘direct marketing‘. With push marketing you can sell many products or services, but the question is whether you build trust and (positive) brand awareness and whether you get satisfied and loyal customers. Outbound marketing makes extensive use of paid advertising on Google and advertising on social media.
Outbound marketing is mainly aimed at finding new customers.
Inbound and outbound marketing can be used well together
When you use inbound marketing, you usually also apply outbound strategies. This is usually limited to one or more CtAs (Call-to-Actions, such as ‘contact us’ and/or ‘share this message’).
With inbound, the content and the way it is presented to people is important. This is because it is assumed that people will take that action on their own if they want to and when they are ready.
Inbound marketing is therefore also called ‘warm leads marketing’. This method makes your business attractive to customers because you don’t make people feel like you just want to sell something. Your website content is educational, focused on information your visitors are looking for and it offers solutions to problems that your potential customers can use.
In addition to good content on your website that is really aimed at your desired customers, you can also advertise on Google and social media platforms to boost the awareness of your company. SEA can be a good addition to SEO.
Advantages and disadvantages of outbound marketing
If you want to sell your products or services quickly, and are willing to pay a nice budget for advertising costs, you choose outbound marketing. Outbound can be successful because many people make impulse purchases. This often leads to the problem that they are not satisfied, want their money back and start writing negative reviews. This is mainly the result of not researching what your customers want and paying too little attention to them.
Traditional marketing, which includes outbound marketing, is not always appreciated. The push strategy used for this marketing method disrupts people’s activities and often confronts them with an offer that they are not ready for yet.
Advantages and disadvantages of inbound marketing
Inbound marketing has the powerful ability to put customers in the driver’s seat, connecting you with people who are genuinely interested. When done correctly, inbound marketing can deliver significantly better results than traditional marketing’s push strategies.
A disadvantage of inbound marketing is that it takes more time and a good, strategic SEO plan. You need a lot of good texts (blogs), keyword research and competitor analysis. You also need to know how to reach your ideal customers.
Advertising a few times in Google and/or social media can be cheaper and deliver faster results, but these benefits are often short-lived. If you work with a long-term strategy, you will ultimately be cheaper, you will build good brand awareness and you will get the customers you want.
Get organic traffic to your website with inbound marketing
When your potential customers find your business organically, they are already interested in your product or service (because they searched for the keyword you used for your webpage). If people find your business this way, it will have a stronger influence on their future purchasing decisions and they will feel positive about your business in general. After all, you show that you understand the problems for which your customers are looking for a solution.
In addition, you treat people with respect and let them make well-considered choices. With this you can build a nice, regular customer base of people who like to come back to use your services and/or to buy your products.
Are you looking for a certified Inbound Marketer?
Do you want to start with inbound marketing or do you want to adapt your website to implement the pull marketing strategy? Margreet Nannenberg from MarsConnects is a certified inbound marketer and is specialized in combining this strategy with good SEO.
Contact us if you want to have an efficient marketing plan and a marketer who knows when to push and when to pull in order to get you a profitable business.
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