Inbound marketing vs. outbound marketing: Strategies to scale your business?

Inbound marketing vs. outbound marketing

Inbound marketing and outbound marketing are the two universal marketing concepts that can help you achieve your marketing and sales objectives by connecting you with the right audience at the right time. In this competitive atmosphere, where every brand tries to reach its customer, an average person is exposed to several advertising messages each day.

Key Point	Outbound Marketing	Inbound Marketing
Engagement	You actively go after your leads with your offer.	You passively nurture your leads, build credibility, and wait for your leads to contact you.
Communication	The communication tends to be personalized, as the call or email thread is between the lead and your salesperson.	Catered to buyer journey and segmented audiences
Time frame	As you directly go after your lead, the time frame could range between a week to a month.	As you passively nurture your leads and wait for them to contact you, it could take a longer time frame
Return On Investment	You could simply calculate the return on investment by multiplying the number of deals closed to the amount. As you already know the number of cold calls or emails sent, it becomes easier to calculate the ROI.	It is quite difficult to measure the commercial value of the inbound marketing tactic as it is almost impossible to measure which client came due to which marketing strategy.
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What is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing

Inbound marketing is a business strategy that focuses on attracting customers by creating tailored experiences and creating valuable content which would ultimately bring value to them. It aims at building meaningful, lasting relationships with customers, prospects, and clients. In inbound marketing, you aim to attract, engage, delight, and ultimately sell to your customers and deliver an exceptional customer experience.

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How to use the inbound methodology in your marketing campaign to reach your desired goals?

Marketing funnel stages

As a marketer, your first aim should be to attract the target audience to your company website or social media profile and add values to them to develop a liking and advocacy for your business, which you could ultimately use for conversion. Once you have successfully sparked interest for your product or service in the minds of your customer persona, you could use inbound strategies to engage your audience and ensure that you are communicating and dealing with leads and customers in a way that makes them want to build long-term relationships with your brand. 

Now let's see the best-case scenario where the customer has purchased the product or service from your company, and you have successfully achieved your marketing goal. However, it is equally important to delight your customers and make them happy and satisfied with your after-sales services to resell and keep them as your recurring customers. In the digital world, you must keep good relationships with your customers because the cost of acquiring new customers eats up most of your profits, making it essential to have recurring customers.

Which strategies could help you attract your target audience with the inbound methodology?

To attract your audience to your website, it is essential and critical to have a content marketing and search engine optimization strategy to get highly qualified traffic organically from Google. Even if you see the day to day as an example, every person heads over to Google to find answers for their queries. It means that if you have a customer persona and understand the challenges of your target audience, it would be of great help if you created content specifically meant for your target audience and solved their problems. 

Furthermore, it means that every time your target audience searches on Google, they would land at your website in an ideal world, ultimately leading to brand advocacy, brand recognition, and loyal customers. However, many websites, specifically your competitors, would have already been working on the strategy. Hence, you need to develop an SEO strategy to outcompete your competition and rank on top of the search engine results page for every query of your target audience.

How to engage and delight the audience to build long-term relationships with them(inbound marketing)?

Once you have attracted your target audience to your company website or profile using inbound strategies, it becomes necessary for you to communicate and deal with them to build long-term relationships and ultimately convert them to enhance your revenue. In the B2B space, inbound sales calls are a major part of your strategies. It would help if you always focused on selling the solutions rather than selling the products to the prospects. It would ensure that your offers and deals have some mutual benefits for both the customer and business. Once the customer feels valued and positive after the end of the sales process, it would ensure you got a recurring revenue and a loyal customer. You could work with CodeDesign to improve your marketing campaign and improve sales. Codedesign has a physical presence in Lisbon, Zurich and Manchester, but we consider anywhere there's WiFi to be our digital office space.

The strategies that you would consider to delight your customers after they purchase would involve chatbots, surveys, feedback, and time to time customer support and a personalized approach. You must also ensure that the customer onboarding process is smooth so that you don't begin the experience in a rough tone, which could ultimately lead to a rough user experience for the customer. As we have already tested ourselves, we could afford to say that social media listening is an important strategy to delight customers. You could constantly look at your profile's comment section, direct messages, comment section of your blogs that you could rank well with SEO; and monitor what people say about your brand. It would bring you feedback, social emotion, and the consumer's experience with your brand. It is essential to focus on delighting the customer, as it would make them your brand advocates and promoters, which could lead to more sales and brand awareness.

What is outbound marketing?

Outbound marketing

Outbound marketing could be seen as the traditional non-digital marketing approach filled with jargon messages to draw the consumers' attention. It could include TV commercials, billboards, direct mail, newspaper and magazine ads. The biggest difference between inbound marketing and outbound marketing is audience engagement. Generally, in the case of outbound marketing, we see interruption-based strategy, which is often disassociated and has limited marketing avenues. On the other hand, inbound marketing is more permission-based and relevant. 

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How to set up an outbound marketing campaign?

Even though the outbound marketing strategy focuses on spreading the message to a large audience, you could develop the best marketing campaign only when it is somewhat targeted to the right audience for your business. A general person is subjected to a wide number of inbound and outbound marketing campaigns, which highlights the factor why the attention span of people is so low these days.

First and foremost, ensure that you have properly assessed your product or service. It means that you must be having an idea about your customer persona, your unique selling point or USP, your targeted geography, demography, and other factors that could help you choose your target audience from a vast audience.

Factors to take into consideration while planning your outbound marketing strategy:

Market Variation: Different market requires different campaigns and an understanding of the culture, behavior, and the preferred channel for people from given geography.

Market Accessibility: The accessibility of a given market, which would be determined by the factors like competition, brand awareness, and the behavior of the customers, plays an important role while planning the outbound marketing strategy. Different channels and promotional strategies would be needed to expand to difficult markets.

Competition: If your niche has ferocious competition, it would mean that you need more dynamic promotion to reach your target audience. Also, your advertising strategy on billboards and newspapers would have to be very eye-catching to stand out among your competition.

Budget: the sky is the limit. However, the limiting factor for your marketing campaign would be your budget. Be sure that you have properly planned your advertising expenditure to get maximum return on your investment.

Collect data to be better focused with your approach in your outbound marketing

To better connect with the right audience, ensure that you collect both historical and targeted data. For example, if your email campaign blast doesn't perform as expected, it could mean various things. For example, if the click-through rate is low, it would indicate a bad subject line. On the other hand, low conversion rate, link clicking rate, or contact rate would mean poor email body. Thus, to succeed and perform better with your campaigns, you need to collect data and analyze it to find what is missing and how to overcome the issue.

Improve your messages to get better responses

You need to send the right message to your audience so that they understand your offer, get the value from it, and respond to it in a way that fulfills your marketing objective. You should hire a creative copywriter to let your messages be crystal clear and crisp enough to entice your audience's attention. At the same time, your marketing message should contain a link to your website, phone number, physical address so that your audience can obtain more information about the product or service with that relevant information. SEO is a great opportunity.

Choose the right channel to send your message to your audience.

It depends on the size of your target audience while selecting the right channel to address the message. In case of a large mass, you would need some combination of mast media – television, radio, newspaper, magazine, or a strong internet presence that could include viral videos, aggressive Facebook and affiliate advertising, etc.

Conclusion

Inbound marketing and outbound marketing are the opposite of each other based on the time frame, engagement, and communication method; however, a combination of both could bring you the desired results for your business and marketing operations.

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