Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing
Inbound marketing involves methods that help build awareness, develop relationships and generate leads. It helps you create quality content to attract people who are already looking for the types of services you offer, checking out your competitors, researching your industry and trying to determine whether or not they need your services. Therefore, you should focus on creating content that addresses all of these scenarios to capture the interested prospects.
On the other hand, outbound marketing is all about looking out for customers, where you push out marketing messages to a group of audiences and hope for responses and leads. Outbound marketing includes traditional marketing methods such as buying radio and TV ads, running print ads, buying email lists, cold-calling, advertising on billboards, or sponsoring a booth at a tradeshow.
What is Inbound Methodology?
Inbound methodology refers to methods that help build significant and lasting relationships with prospects, consumers and customers. These help empower them to achieve their goals using your support. This is applied in three steps:
- Attract: Draw in targeted customers using valuable content and meaningful conversations to prove credibility and build trust.
- Engage: Offer tailor-made solutions that address their pain points and requirements so they are more likely to engage with you.
- Delight: Provide dedicated support to customers and empower them so they can successfully make purchases.
With happy and satisfied customers going on to share their experiences with others, you can expect to establish a self-sustaining loop to attract new prospects.
Implementation and Optimization
Content is integral to inbound marketing, and when it comes to creating engaging content, the more you invest, the better returns you receive.
Here are a few steps to implement and optimize inbound marketing strategies through content:
- Define Business Goals: Identify your target audience and learn as much as possible about them. You need to know what they’re looking for in order to come up with the most accurate content for their needs.
- Provide Stage-Based Content: Try to figure out what questions your customers might have during the different stages of their journeys and attempt to preemptively answer them. Design stories that are unique and compelling enough that your audience listens to you. Emphasize creating personalized and relevant content to retain customers throughout their entire lifecycle, not just when they’re prospects.
- Choose Delivery Platform: While creating informative and engaging content is important, it’s also essential to deliver it effectively. Identify the most effective platforms to reach your target customers – such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest or your blog – and choose wisely.
- Execute Content Calendar: Create a schedule that helps deliver fresh and engaging content consistently. Ensure a steady and constant flow of content that addresses your customers’ queries, concerns and pain points. This helps establish your brand as a trusted thought leader thanks to the consistency and quality of your work.
- Analyze Results: Choose the right metrics to measure the success of your marketing strategies. Analyze inbound links, SEO rankings or the number of published articles to get valuable insights on campaign performance. Make sure to analyze reports periodically to understand the effectiveness of your inbound marketing efforts and to identify areas of improvement.
Primary Benefits
By implementing inbound marketing as a long-term strategy, you can help increase preference, brand awareness, lead generation and definitely, revenue. But how? Let’s take a look at how inbound marketing efforts help solve these problems:
- Lead Generation: If your business needs to generate more leads, but you have less capital and resources to invest, inbound marketing could prove to be an effective measure. As it’s a long-term strategy, the more skillfully you can create and curate content, the better results you receive over time.
- Brand Preference: Educate, entertain and interact with potential customers before they plan purchases to build trust and credibility. Leverage the impact of becoming a familiar face to them.
- Brand Awareness: Ensure your brand appears in the top search results and is active on social media channels to increase awareness organically. Be sure to have the right content and messaging in place for each of these key inbound channels.
- Revenue Generation: Even if you’re running on a tight budget, investing in inbound marketing can help drive revenue. Devise an effective strategy that outlines the content, key themes and distribution, ensuring there are no wasted efforts.
