When we talk about entrepreneurship and growing our businesses, it is inevitable to want to identify our target audience, their behavior, tastes, interests, what channels they frequent in order to know when, how and where to show them the benefits of our product and/or service. This, broadly speaking, is a marketing strategy… Now we have to plan actions and define whether our strategy will be inbound or outbound… What is inbound and outbound marketing? What differentiates them? Which one should I choose? , Which is better? If you want to know, continue reading…
Outbound marketing: What is it?
It is traditional marketing, the one that seeks to capture the attention of users by bombarding them with messages in which we offer our products and services with the aim of closing sales. For example, the typical cold door sale is a perfect example of an outbound strategy.
It is very common to fall into the mistake of believing that any digital marketing strategy is inbound, when in reality there are many digital actions to develop outbound, such as a display campaign or sending newsletters to a database. The characteristic that best differentiates outbound is that the number of impacts prevails, since there is little segmentation capacity, so our messages will be shown to those who may or may not be interested in us.
Inbound Marketing: What is it?
In contrast, we have inbound marketing that instead of chasing and interrupting with our messages, here what we do is seduce our ideal clients until we attract them and guide them throughout the journey from the moment they meet us until we achieve the long-awaited loyalty.
Inbound techniques are not intrusive and the objective is to attract traffic to our website, offer them content or offers that are very much in line with their interests in order to convert them into leads and, through automation, make each of those leads receive personalized impacts until they become client. In inbound, unlike outbound, quality prevails because we seek to get closer to our ideal client.
Inbound marketing in numbers
- Creating content costs 31% less than conventional advertising (Inbound Marketing Agents).
- 61% of consumers feel better with a brand that offers them personalized content according to their needs (Custom Content Council).
- Companies that have a blog generate 126% more leads than those that do not (Hubspot).
- Websites with between 51 and 100 pages generate 48% more traffic than those with between 1 and 50 pages (Hubspot).
- In inbound strategies, each lead costs 62% less than with traditional marketing (Mashable).
- Inbound marketers manage to double the average conversion rate, going from 6 to 12% (Hubspot).
- Companies spend 34% of their overall budgets on user acquisition tactics through inbound marketing, 11% more than they spend on intrusive advertising (Gannett Local).
- Thanks to lead nurturing we get 50% more qualified leads at a 33% lower acquisition cost (Forrester Research).
- Globally, 86% of marketers are doing inbound marketing and 34% of them have seen their return on investment grow in the last year (Hubspot).
- 31% of people expect brands to post personalized content that grabs their attention and makes them useful (Inbound Marketing Agents).
Outbound or Inbound? Which one should I use in my strategy?
It seems obvious that what we are going to recommend is an inbound marketing strategy and more after reviewing the data… And yes, we believe that today inbound is the path to choose but not the only one. The idea is not to put outbound aside either, these two strategies do not have to be mutually exclusive. In fact, we are convinced that the best option is to rely on both to have a good performance.
The ideal is to capture a large number of potential customers with outbound strategies and then with integrated inbound accompany them until conversion and subsequent loyalty. It is not a question of ruling out outbound actions but of knowing when to use them and not abusing them.
Now, regardless of the type of strategy you decide to implement, there are 4 basic rules that you must not forget:
Segment and segment: In the age of information and data in which we live, it is very important to make use of them to get to know our target better and thus know what to offer them.
Do not harass your users: Respect your potential customers, the fact that they have left us their data does not give us permission to spam them. It is not about chasing them until they buy from you, because you can achieve the opposite effect. Remember that with advertising blockers or sending us spam, the user is in control. Create attractive advertising that they want to consume and that, as far as possible, does not interrupt their browsing.
Automate tasks: With the help of technology and artificial intelligence, you can automate all those repetitive and arduous tasks to leave room for creativity.
Metrics and more metrics: Every action you do must be measured, without performance data it is impossible to differentiate what works for us from what does not and without this information we will not be able to optimize future actions.
We hope this information will be useful to you!
