ByOutbound Marketing Vs Inbound Marketing: Who is going to win?
Marketing is the key to success for any company. You have to market your services/products to let people know that you exist and provide services and products which can help them achieve better results. When you normally market your services or products, you generally have three marketing options – you can try out outbound marketing or inbound marketing or a mixture of both.
What is Outbound Marketing:-
Outbound marketing is the use of outdated and common forms of marketing, like; television advertisements, radio advertisements, cold calling, direct mail, etc. where you target many individuals and hope that your direct marketing material converts well (5 to 10%). Here you normally sell your products directly to your clients without educating the reader. The problem with this method is that it’s expensive and you go out seeking for clients in a large group of people (only a few individuals in this group will be interested in your services/products) and it will only reach the minority of these individuals.
This type of marketing is getting outdated and hard to use, as latest technology in the form of caller ID’s, spam folders, more television channels, etc. have been distracting your audience and protecting them from outbound marketing methods and from marketers who try a direct approach. Also this type of marketing is tried by most companies. Of course there are services and tools like email to mail that are simplifying outbound marketing. .
What is Inbound Marketing:-
Inbound marketing is the method of marketing which uses blogs, white papers, videos, newsletters, etc. Here you educate the reader. The aim here is to be found by the reader, by using sources like, social media and SEO to market your products/services. Here, the conversion rate is high and you gain long lasting clients as they normally hire you after you have educated them, helped them and built a strong relationship with them. This type of marketing is also cheaper than outbound marketing.
More advantages:-
The other advantage of inbound marketing is that it goes well with the latest Google Panda Updates. The latest Google Panda update ranks websites, by taking more information into consideration; like a low bounce rate (which means that people are visiting other pages of your website, instead of exiting right after entering it and viewing one page) and if your content is being shared on twitter, facebook and other social media – this gives you an advantage over outbound marketing; as content, that helps readers, is shared on social media. Google Panda Update sees to it that the websites giving readers a better user experience will rank better than websites that don’t.
One more advantage is that blogs and videos are search engine friendly. Search engines, normally give priority to websites that have new content added or changed on a regular basis. This gives blogs that are updated with fresh content daily, an edge over direct marketing material, which are rarely updated. Also, videos normally appear higher on search engines than regular content.
If you haven’t already tried out inbound marketing, you have to give it a go. It costs a lot less than outbound marketing and the conversion rate and results are better, as here you don’t have to make an effort to find your clients, by sending out your message to a lot of them and hope that a few of them find your product helpful. Here your clients find you through social media, search engines, etc. They come looking for solutions to their problems and once you display your expertise and skill through your content and help them, they will hire you and take advantage of your services.
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Have you tried out inbound marketing or helped someone with inbound marketing? Do you have any tips you would like to share with us? Please share them in the comments box below.
Mitt Ray is the CEO and Director of Social Marketing Writing and Imittcopy. He is also the author of the book Living With Ogres. Connect with him on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Linkedin.
