Inbound vs Outbound Marketing

Well, we’ve got you covered! In this month’s blog post, we’ll highlight the differences between the two and help you to decide which method to adopt to suit your marketing goals.

When you decide to take an inbound approach to marketing you create a tailored and personalised experience for your customers. The inbound approach is all about helping your clients and creating a marketing effort that speaks to them.

You’ll want to create detailed buyer personas so that you know exactly who you’ll be targeting. Once your buyer personas are sorted, you can create social media posts, blogs and reports that are consciously created with them in mind.

You will want to understand their problems, show them your knowledge and make it clear that you have the answers.

There are plenty of pros to inbound marketing, which both you and your clients will appreciate. The personalised element of this strategy is where you can build quality, lasting relationships with customers.

Some strong pros to this model include:

• It allows the customer to stay in control
• The approach is interwoven into your whole strategy
• Your content is educational and solves customer problems
• Creates quality leads

It’s important to bear in mind that whilst the payoff from an inbound approach may be big, it requires a lot of work. Therefore it’s important we consider the possible cons, of this approach, which are as follows:

• Your marketing effort requires continuous maintenance and tweaking
• You will need to invest a lot of time and effort into performing a/b tests and learning about your clients
• You will need to invest in quality tools that assess and observe the behaviours of clients and your inbound strategy. 

These may only be small ‘cons’, but it’s important to appreciate the time and effort needed to create a quality, inbound marketing strategy.

First up is outbound marketing!

So, what do we mean when we discuss an ‘outbound’ approach?

Well, this tends to be content that is designed for anybody to consume. You are essentially casting a net out to the market, and hoping it appeals to someone.

Within this approach, your desire to sell is more obvious.

There are some benefits to using an outbound marketing strategy, especially if you are a new business. Some of the major pros include:

• Promoting brand awareness to consumers
• Clear and direct in what you’re selling
• Customers have been exposed to outbound marketing for years

Outbound marketing does have its limitations, and it’s important to bear these in mind before deploying an outbound approach.

• It’s a generalised, non-specific form of marketing
• Clients are less drawn in as the content is less relevant 
• Risk of putting clients off as there is a less genuine, long-lasting connection
• It’s more difficult to measure the effectiveness of

The goals you set out to achieve from your marketing campaign are crucial to answering this question.

Depending on where you are in your business journey, and the ambitions you have,  you will need to select the approach that works for you.

Within the modern era marketers, such as ourselves, tend to opt for inbound marketing techniques. This is because you can build lasting relationships with clients and create a meaningful and loyal customer base. However, the power of outbound marketing during the awareness stage, shouldn’t be underestimated.