Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing

Businesses strive to find a suitable marketing tactic to reach their goals especially achieving a higher Return on Investment (ROI). Generating the best results can be achieved in several ways and it depends on how you choose the most suitable strategy for your brand. After inbound marketing tactics emerged, numerous experts and practitioners in the marketing world have a debate on which one is better between inbound and outbound marketing. Some practitioners identify that outbound marketing still has an important role in marketing while some experts and practitioners prefer an inbound marketing perspective. In fact, outbound marketing might be the best strategy for some businesses while for the others it might be best to execute the combination between inbound and outbound.
Before determining which perspective works best, let’s look further on the differences between these two:

What is Outbound Marketing?

Outbound marketing or what is often called traditional marketing is the type of marketing that gives out a marketing message to the broadest possible audience. This tactic is more focused on the products or services offered by a brand, simply put, it is a one-way approach marketing tactic. This marketing approach uses a single message to reach a wide audience in the hopes that anyone will be attracted to the message and eventually turn into a customer. This is the reason why nowadays many practitioners refer to this tactic as an interruption or push marketing. The main purpose of this marketing approach is to reach as wide as an audience as possible, whether if they are active buyers or not. In general, the outbound tactical method tends to advertise to a broader number of less-targeted people. Some tactics of outbound marketing include Pay Per Click ads, commercials, print ads, direct mail, billboards, and cold-calling.

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Different from the traditional approach or outbound strategy, the inbound marketing approach is more into educating potential customers with relevant content marketing and messaging. This approach turns old promotional tactics that interrupt the audience in the hope to gain their attention. In other words, this tactic aims to get the attention of your target audience in a more natural way rather than bombarding them with forced content and messaging. This tactic allows you to better communicate with the targeted audience who are more likely to be interested in your messages. By giving them value and helping them to find solutions to their problems, you will ultimately attract them to become prospects. In conclusion, it is a permission-based and customer-driven approach. Inbound technique aims to bring potential customers who are active in the market to your business. Therefore, instead of forcing your message on people who may or may not be interested and betting the result, this approach is more about getting found by people naturally. 

Inbound marketing strategy revolves around creating valuable content and giving it out to the specifically targeted audience. The main concern of this tactic is creating content that is easy and enjoyable to digest. The aim to be educational and focused on providing value to the audience becomes one of the greatest strengths of inbound marketing strategy. Inbound marketing tactics include email marketing, social media marketing, blogging, content marketing, and SEO.

The Main Differences between Inbound and Outbound Marketing

The way businesses communicate with their audience is one of the big differences between outbound and inbound marketing. While inbound marketing is about being found and intended to bring potential customers to your business naturally, it allows you to interact with your customers in the most meaningful ways possible. Inbound marketing aligns your content marketing and your messages with the audience’s interests. You answer their problems and it gives them what they need. On the other side, with outbound marketing, businesses offer their message forcefully in the hope that customers somehow will respond to it. In other words, it provides a one-sided message.

The audience is one of the main differences between these two marketing perspectives. Inbound revolves around discovering the audience and giving out content and message that will be more related to them, offering them information that will resonate with their concern or interests.

Then aligned those related content with the products or services that the brand offers. This tactic focuses on pulling in audiences with the help of search engines and social media. In fact, the audience that becomes the focus in the inbound tactical strategy is targeted and designed to resonate with the brand personality. On the other hand, the outbound promotional tactic does not specifically target the audience with the aim to maximize the brand’s reach in the market because reach is significant in generating the desired action.

It is important to carefully assess the type of promotional campaign which works best for your business. In order to determine which one is best, whether it is inbound marketing, outbound marketing, or the combination of these two campaigns, you should take your goals and your specific audience into consideration.