Inbound Marketing versus Outbound Marketing

This post was inspired from this website which offers a better explanation of inbound and outbound marketing.

I found an interesting term called “Inbound Marketing”.  I think this is very relevant in today’s marketing.  Most of the people out there only know about outbound marketing because that’s almost the only way that they know of.  But it seems to me that the conversion rate of inbound marketing is much better than outbound.  Why is this so?

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is basically focusing on being found by potential customers.  For example, if you have all the necessary tools put together in optimizing your website, your visitors coming in from the search engines are very likely to ask for more details when they come upon your website!

What is Outbound Marketing?

Outbound marketing is the kind of marketing which is very familiar to all of us.  For example, you will see salespeople going out there to do cold-calling, direct-mailer, spam, advertising and any other ways that can get that very little attention of the untargeted market.

Leveraging on technology for inbound marketing

Technology has basically allowed a lot of interesting inbound marketing to happen with instant gratification.  We are always on a lookout to get something done everyday.  For example in the morning, we will start to think of what to buy for breakfast.  When we are running out of stationery or even to think of a suitable book to buy, we will think of which bookshop to go to.

All these examples above are not possible without the usage of technology.  We really want instant gratification in what products and services that we need to buy.  And the very first thing we will go to is the Internet, look for some references such as Yellow Pages… Oh yes, we can use Yellow Pages (If you do have one) and start calling for help.

Outbound marketing is very tedious

I dread the idea that we have to make 100 phone calls to strangers to create that one sale.  I would rather spend the time on something more productive that can help me to build more leads.  It is very tiring to talk to strangers who are simply not interested in us.  There is even an automation to send out massive spam messages to strangers, hoping to get something out of it.  Luckily for my gmail, we are all very corporative to select mails which are spams.  But as for my physical mail box, I have to filter it out even though we have this lock to allow postmen only.  These spammers really have their ways and means to get attention!

In other words, outbound marketing is quite annoying to the strangers most of the times.

Outbound marketing can be expensive!

It can be expensive to maintain that humorous campaign that you have to keep your audience laughing!  You audience may be hoping to see “What’s next” in the TV advertisement.  This is making brand awareness for sure!  This is probably giving you ROI as well! But how long can you maintain this?

Inbound marketing is more passive, and they may only be chargeable when they are being paid!  There are many ways of getting the ROI that we need, and it is not very hard to understand it once you get the hook of it!

Ok, enough of me saying.  Let’s watch some interesting video about this: