There are two main approaches, in the marketing world, that aim to engage and attract potential customers: Inbound marketing and Outbound marketing.
Those methods have assumptions, philosophies and strategies very much different from each other, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. Let’s explore together the key differences between these two approaches.
Definition and objectives
- Inbound marketing
Inbound marketing aims to attract and maintain customers’ attention through contents that bring them value. the main goal is to satisfy the customers to make the become brand ambassadors, or promoters. Common strategies of inbound marketing include content marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social media marketing and email marketing.
- Outbound marketing
This approach, that is part of traditional marketing, use more direct methods to advertise the brand’s messages to the potential customers. The aim is to reach the most possible potential customers, through non-targeted channels such as TV advertising, cold calling, mail and advertising on paper. It’s also called “push marketing”, since it pushes its message to the persons, independently from their needs and interests.
Methods and techniques
Strategies and techniques of inbound marketing, as we already saw, focus on the creation of contents able to respond to the targeted customers’ needs, interests and wishes, and aims to engage only (or almost only) those qualified clients that have good possibilities of purchasing. They include:
- Content Marketing: creation of contents (those can be blog, video, texts, podcasts, images etc…) that are informative, engaging and interesting for the user;
- SEO: optimizing contents with keywords and structures that make them more and better indexed by search engines;
- Social Media Marketing: Use of social media channels to build a community, share contents, bring value and offer an identity in which the customers can reflect themselves;
- Email Marketing: customized and automate emails, based on behaviors and preferences of users, offering interesting and stimulating content.
Outbound marketing, instead, is based on more traditional techniques, that interrupt the public to capture its attention, independently from its interests and needs, and includes:
- Advertising: on TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, websites;
- Direct mail: sending physical promotional material;
- Cold Calling: phone calls to potential customers without any previous contact;
- Participation in fairs and events: to promote your products and services directly and indiscriminately
Advantages and disadvantages
Regarding inbound marketing, the advantages are about the creation of organic traffic and qualified long-term leads, reducing the advertising costs, the measurability of the results, the targeting of efforts and the creation of a trust-based relationship. Disadvantages include the long time necessary to create quality content and to build a customer base, and the necessity of a constant effort to stand out in a market that is saturated with content.
Talking about outbound marketing, instead, advantages include the immediate impact, the possibility of reaching a large audience rapidly, and a better control over how and where the public will view brand’s messages. It has, unfortunately, the disadvantages of requiring elevated costs and of being perceived as intrusive, with the possibility to generate negative reaction to the brand from the public, because it subtracts value from an experience instead of adding it.
Conclusions
Both approaches, if used correctly, offer unique advantages and can be effective. Inbound marketing aims more at creating trust-based relationships and at building loyalty, while outbound marketing serves for its ability to provide rapid results.
Often is necessary a strategic synergy between the two, to maximize effectiveness and reach an audience that is large, but also qualified.