Businesses these days make potential customers interested in their products and services by running many marketing campaigns. The marketing campaigns can be divided into two broad categories – inbound and outbound. Inbound marketing strategies attract the attention of potential customers by delivering the information they are looking for. These strategies utilize various forms of pull marketing and leverage various digital technologies. Also, they deliver relevant and timely information to a prospect at different stages of her buyer’s journey through multiple digital marketing channels. On the other hand, outbound marketing strategies create brand awareness and influence prospective buyers by sending messages in the traditional way.
Many bloggers these days describe outbound marketing as push marketing or interruption marketing as the strategies push promotional messages out to the target audience. Inbound marketing strategies and outbound marketing strategies differ from each other in many aspects, including outcome and cost. We make it easier for you to choose the right marketing strategies by describing and comparing some of the widely used inbound marketing and outbound marketing strategies.
Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing helps businesses generate and convert leads through various digital marketing channels. Inbound marketing strategies emphasize delivering the right information to the potential customer through the right channel according to her current position in the buyer’s journey. The relevant and targeted content helps businesses to attract and influence potential customers.
“Inbound marketing is a strategy that focuses on attracting customers, or leads, via company-created Internet content, thereby having potential customers come to the company rather than marketers vying for their attention. This type of marketing tries to make it easier for customers, who are already actively looking for goods or services via the Internet, to find what a company offers.”
While planning inbound marketing strategies, businesses have the option to use a slew of digital marketing channels. They can further run multi-channel digital marketing campaigns to convey relevant information to every potential customer through their choice of communication channel. Several studies suggest the effectiveness of inbound marketing strategies in generating more leads and increasing conversion rates while reducing overall marketing costs.
Some of the Widely-Used Inbound Marketing Tactics
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This inbound tactic focuses on boosting a website’s search visibility using on-page and off-page SEO techniques. On-page SEO techniques boost the website’s search visibility by making it more appealing to searchers. At the same time, off-page SEO techniques divert organic traffic to the website from search engines by improving its authority, popularity, credibility, and relevance.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising
The inbound marketing tactic increases website traffic through paid advertising. Businesses opt for PPC advertising to divert more searchers to the website in a short amount of time. However, they have to focus on curtailing advertising costs by creating ads for every targeted keyword and complementing every ad with relevant landing pages.
Social Media Marketing
This inbound technique generates leads and drives lead conversion by leveraging the steady increase in the digital media time spent by consumers of popular social networks. Businesses these days sustain relationships with existing and potential customers by posting a variety of content on popular social networks. Also, they increase ROI by targeting the right social networking platforms.
Content Marketing
As the name suggests, this inbound marketing tactic focuses on providing relevant information to buyers through the creation, distribution, and promotion of content. While running content marketing campaigns, businesses these days deliver targeted and personalized content to potential buyers through various digital marketing channels.
Email Marketing
While running this inbound marketing campaign, businesses engage and influence potential buyers by sending targeted and personalized emails. They further send emails to potential buyers at various stages in their decision-making journey. Also, they persuade website visitors to share their email IDs using lead magnets and sign-in forms.
Video Marketing
This inbound marketing technique helps businesses leverage the massive popularity of videos. Businesses showcase and promote their products/services by uploading a variety of videos – explainers, product demonstrations, customer testimonials, and company culture. Also, they make the videos more impactful by focusing on their length, style, and tone.
Retargeting Ads
Unlike other inbound marketing techniques, retargeting ads remind potential customers to return to the website when they are visiting other websites. Businesses display retargeting ads to potential buyers after they visit the website. These ads remind customers about the product or service when they are evaluating alternatives.
In the age of digital communication channels, outbound marketing is often described as traditional markets. But there was a time when businesses were promoting their products or services by sending messages to a large number of people. They were sending messages to a large number of people simultaneously and continuously using techniques like print media advertising, cold calling, cold emailing, and above-the-line (ATL) advertising.
According to Wikipedia, “Outbound marketing or interruption marketing is promoting a product through continued advertising, promotions, public relations, and sales. It is considered to be an annoying version of the traditional way of doing marketing whereby companies focus on finding customers through advertising.”
Many businesses still use various outbound marketing techniques to generate and convert leads. However, they have to incur additional marketing costs to create brand awareness and acquire customers using outbound marketing techniques. Also, several studies suggest the effectiveness of inbound marketing strategies in generating and converting more leads than outbound marketing strategies.
Some of the Widely-Used Outbound Marketing Tactics
Cold Emails
This outbound marketing strategy emphasizes conveying information about products or services by sending unsolicited emails to potential buyers. Businesses initiate interactions with prospects by sending a large number of emails simultaneously. They further personalize cold emails to get a response from recipients.
Cold Calls
Businesses launch cold calling campaigns with the aim of initiating a conversation with potential customers. Marketers initiate conversations with customers by making scripted sales pitches. Many businesses these days make the outbound marketing strategy impactful by choosing the right prospects and respecting their privacy.
Direct Mails
This traditional marketing technique requires businesses to send mails instead of emails. Businesses make potential customers aware of their product or service by sending mails containing appealing ads. They make the outbound marketing strategy impactful by making ads stand out and segmenting recipients based on important parameters like demographics and purchase history.
Trade Shows/Events
Trade shows and industry events create opportunities for businesses to connect and interact with potential customers in the real world. Leading brands these days plan trade shows to boost presence and maintain brand relevance. But they have to incur upfront costs to stand out at major trade shows.
TV, Radio, and Print Ads
Leading businesses still promote their brands traditionally by investing in TV and radio ads. Also, they invest in print advertising to reach out to a larger audience in a short amount of time. But businesses have to incur huge expenses to run ads on TV and radio. Also, they must convey the messaging creatively to get higher returns.
Social Media Ads
This outbound marketing technique helps businesses leverage a hugely popular digital marketing channel like social media. However, businesses have to create brand awareness by running paid social media ads. Social media ads are more effective than organic social media promotion in creating brand awareness and connecting with targeted customers.
Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing
Your business these days has the option to implement many inbound and outbound marketing techniques. However, you can choose and combine the right marketing tactics only by understanding the key differences between inbound marketing and outbound marketing.
11 Important Differences between Inbound Marketing and Outbound Marketing
1. Approach
Outbound marketing strategies require businesses to connect and interact with potential buyers, regardless of their interest in the product or service. However, inbound marketing strategies focus on drawing interested buyers to the business’s website across communication channels. Hence, enterprises have to adopt different approaches while planning inbound and outbound marketing campaigns.
2. Marketing Content
While creating content for outbound marketing campaigns, copywriters focus on promoting and selling the product or service. The content often highlights the key features of the product or service. On the other hand, writers focus on consumers’ needs, pain points, and expectations while creating content for inbound marketing campaigns. The content helps potential buyers to meet precise needs or solve specific problems.
3. Content Consumption
Consumers access digital marketing content like articles, blogs, infographics, and videos – as part of digital content consumption. They collect information about a product or service by accessing online content while conducting pre-purchase research. However, outbound marketing content like display ads and cold emails often interrupts or disrupts consumers’ content consumption.
4. Marketing Channels
While planning inbound marketing campaigns, marketers distribute content through popular digital marketing channels like websites, blogs, search engines, social media, and opt-in emails. Many enterprises reach out to a wider audience by integrating multiple channels. However outbound marketing campaigns use traditional channels like billboards, display ads, TV ads, print ads, and telemarketing.
5. Communication
The outbound marketing tactics do not emphasize or facilitate bidirectional communication. They deliver information about a product or service to consumers without getting their response. However inbound marketing techniques focus on engaging and interacting with potential buyers by sending targeted and personalized content. The engagement and interactions lead to email list expansion and lead generation.
6. Audience Engagement
Outbound marketing campaigns display disassociated ads to a large number of people simultaneously. The disassociated ads impact audience engagement adversely by disrupting content consumption. On the other hand, inbound marketing campaigns focus on delivering relevant content to every consumer through her preferred communication channel. Also, the inbound marketing campaigns keep consumers engaged by answering their questions and meeting their needs.
7. Messaging
Outbound marketing tactics deliver the same message to a large number of people without considering their demographics and expectations. These strategies aim to promote a product or service by standing out in the crowd. However, inbound marketing strategies focus on delivering fresh, relevant, and targeted content to a consumer according to her position on the buyer’s journey. In addition to keeping readers engaged the messaging aims to deliver value by answering specific questions and easing pain points.
8. Measurability
Outbound marketing campaigns promote a product/service in a short amount of time by reaching out to a wider audience. However, decision-makers find it difficult to quantify and measure these campaigns due to unreliable and error-prone results. On the other hand, decision-makers can measure inbound marketing campaigns using a wide variety of digital marketing metrics. They can further use a slew of tools to measure the performance of various campaigns without putting in extra time and effort.
9. Scalability
Outbound marketing aims at delivering messages at scale, while inbound marketing emphasizes sending targeted and personalized messages. An enterprise can run outbound marketing campaigns to deliver the desired message to a larger audience in a short period. However, it needs to invest in additional resources to send targeted and personalized messages to a large number of potential buyers.
“Inbound marketing costs 62 percent less per lead than traditional outbound marketing.”
Small businesses and startups always opt for inbound marketing to overcome budgetary constraints. Also, traditional businesses have been switching from outbound marketing to inbound marketing to curtail upfront and ongoing costs.
11. Outcome
In addition to curtailing marketing costs, inbound marketing tactics are more effective than outbound marketing campaigns in generating leads.
According to HubSpot,
“Inbound marketing tactics generate 54% more leads than traditional paid marketing methods.”
Also, the leads generated through various inbound marketing campaigns are more likely to become buying customers than outbound-generated leads.
Conclusion
While comparing inbound marketing vs outbound marketing, you must remember that each of these marketing strategies has its pros and cons. Also, individual inbound and outbound marketing strategies differ from each other in many aspects. Your business can boost lead generation and conversion by leveraging both traditional and digital marketing techniques.
You can boost the performance of inbound marketing campaigns by running outbound marketing campaigns. Likewise, inbound marketing campaigns will make your outbound marketing strategies more effective. It is always advisable to evaluate and combine various inbound and outbound marketing tactics according to your industry and target customers.
As a strategic communication process, public relations (PR) helps a business make and protect its image by forming mutually beneficial relationships with the public. Digital tools, techniques, and channels have transformed conventional PR by facilitating a faster and wider spread of information and news.
Companies and startups have been switching from conventional PR to digital PR to increase brand awareness, enhance brand reputation, and establish online authority without partnering with PR agencies.
They leverage top digital marketing channels to build and sustain long-term relationships with the public through direct interactions. Also, they manage their online presence and image using several digital PR strategies and tools.
Your business can grow website traffic, generate leads, and increase sales using a slew of digital PR strategies. Likewise, you can announce news or share information with the public using a variety of digital PR tools.
Common Digital PR Strategies
While planning PR campaigns, you can spread the news and announce events through many digital communication channels. Hence, your digital PR strategies must adopt a multichannel approach. Also, you should focus on quality instead of quantity while using some of these tried and trusted digital PR strategies.
Press Releases
This commonly used digital PR strategy emphasizes providing information to members of the news media by issuing official statements in the form of press releases. You can circulate press releases to share information about your products, services, projects, partnerships, and events. You can create digital press releases in many formats using online templates. Also, you can circulate the press release to various members of the press using press release distribution services.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is one of the simple digital PR strategies. You can increase brand awareness and influence readers by writing blogs for reputable websites. But you cannot make the strategy successful by writing guest posts regularly. You should focus on projecting yourself as an industry leader by sharing original insights on a topic.
Content Marketing
Many organizations these days drive PR campaigns by publishing and promoting a variety of digital content. While planning content marketing campaigns, you should focus on building trusting relationships with readers. The content created for PR campaigns must establish you as a thought leader and enhance your brand’s trustworthiness. Also, you should create content that highlights the achievements of your company and the awards won by it. Here is a blog on how to plan your content strategy along with PR.
Unlinked Mentions
While discussing your brand online, people often do not provide links back to your website. But brand mentions enhance your brand’s online presence and increase brand awareness. You can make your PR campaigns more impactful by monitoring these unlinked mentions on social networks and other online platforms. The monitoring will help you understand what impacts the perception of your products or services negatively. Also, you can generate high-quality backlinks by converting these unlinked brand mentions into hyperlinks.
Business Directory Inclusions
This digital PR strategy makes you leverage business directories just like digital phone books. The directories make it easier for the public to find important information about your business and visit your website. Popular directories categorize businesses using a variety of parameters – location, size, turnover, industry, and activities. But you should focus on getting your business listed in niche and reputable directories.
Community Panels
This digital PR strategy helps you showcase your expertise by fostering community. Community panels provide relevant information and assistance to members through open conversations. You can leverage the strategy simply by answering questions asked by members briefly. But your answer will appear on the community panel only if it is considered one of the best answers by the editors.
Community Spotlight
Many video bloggers and journalists these days interview experts across industries and regions. They gather relevant information from experts with the aim to help viewers solve common problems. Also, they highlight the interviewee as an industry expert by mentioning her achievements, biography, and professional journey. You can implement the digital PR strategy by answering questions asked by the interviewer.
Customer Reviews
91% of customers these days trust online reviews and personalized recommendations. Also, major search engines like Google use review sentiment as one of the key local search ranking factors. Your digital PR strategies can increase website traffic and influence website visitors by increasing customer reviews. But you must focus on generating authentic customer reviews on Google My Business and other online platforms.
Essential Digital PR Tools
While planning PR campaigns, you have the option to choose from many digital PR tools and platforms. Some of these digital PR tools help you announce news and events, while others make it easier for you to build and maintain public relationships. Hence, your business needs different categories of digital PR tools to achieve preset campaign goals.
Press Release Distribution Services
Your PR campaigns must focus on announcing news and events by targeting bloggers, journalists, and other media professionals. You can share the right information with the right people by distributing press releases over the internet. There are many press release distribution services that make it easier for you to share press releases with the right people through multiple digital communication channels.
Social Media Monitoring Tools
Tracking social media conversations about your product, service, or brand is an essential aspect of digital PR. You can track ongoing conversations on popular social networks using a slew of social media monitoring tools. In addition to tracking brand-related conversations, these tools create opportunities for you to find the right influencers and engage with potential brand ambassadors.
Content Marketing Tools
We have highlighted the importance of adding PR to your content marketing strategy in a previous blog. Your business should make digital PR a key part of content marketing to expand content outreach, sustain customer relationships, and boost SEO campaigns. You can simplify the creation, publication, and promotion of multi-format digital content using several content marketing tools.
Website Analytics Tools
In addition to running PR campaigns, you must track and evaluate their performance using the right metrics. Website analytics tools help you measure the performance of PR campaigns by analyzing website data. You can use these digital tools to know if the PR campaigns are increasing website visitors, generating leads, or driving sales conversions.
Conclusion
Your business can spread news and information using several types of digital PR – press releases, online publications, blogging, social media, and viral marketing. Hence, you must combine digital PR strategies and tools according to the target audience and campaign goals. Also, it is important to refine PR strategies and use new PR tools regularly to boost the performance of PR campaigns.
With people spending a quarter of their waking lives online, it becomes essential for businesses to switch from outbound marketing to inbound marketing. They can easily convert prospects into customers by providing various forms of quality content through inbound marketing channels. But they have to focus extensively on the brand marketing strategy to launch and run the inbound marketing campaigns efficiently.
