The digital marketplace is crowded with companies looking to get the attention of potential clients. To compete, companies have to come up with creative strategies that capture potential clients’ attention, direct them to their site, and convert them to leads. To achieve this, companies and marketing agencies opt for either inbound marketing or outbound marketing.
Difference between inbound and outbound marketing
Inbound marketing was coined by Hubspot SaaS platform in 2006 and describes a marketing strategy that revolves around creating quality content meant to attract potential clients, convert them to leads, and then closing the deal while also creating long-term clients. Inbound marketing’s core principle is creating quality content for websites such as blogs, infographics, whitepapers, e-books and webinars to attract potential customers to your site.
Outbound marketing is what is traditionally known as marketing and it aims at interrupting and pushing products to an audience. It is more direct in its approach and involves naming the products being marketed, their prices, and trying to convince potential customers on why they should purchase these products. Outbound marketing is what is found in traditional media such as TVs and radios. It also involves telemarketing, cold calling, pop-ups and pop-unders on websites and contextual ads such as Facebook ads.
In recent times, inbound marketing is increasingly being sought after due to its effectiveness in creating leads. The primary reason for this phenomenon is because of its effectiveness in creating an interest in products being offered. The strategy also has the potential for establishing long-lasting relationships with potential customers, therefore expanding the client base.
If you are a digital marketer who is still doubtful about inbound marketing, here are the 10 reasons why you should start using it.
1. It is cheaper
Inbound marketing is able to drive more traffic to the website by using only a fraction of the money that outbound marketing would have required. Research data shows that the cost of inbound marketing was 60 percent less compared to other traditional marketing strategies.
2. Inbound marketing is more effective than outbound marketing
Inbound marketing is also more effective in getting long-lasting clients as compared to outbound marketing because the strategies employed are meant for long-term engagement with clients. Data from Hubspot shows that outbound marketing strategies are annoying to potential clients, with 86 percent of people skipping TV and radio advertisements. However, this is not the case with inbound marketing because it involves clients looking for the information being provided by the website.
Inbound marketing is also effective because it is not intrusive as compared to outbound marketing which, in most cases, is unsolicited. The content displayed to potential clients during inbound marketing is what they are looking for, unlike other forms of marketing, where potential clients are flooded with advertisements they are not interested in.
3. Inbound marketing offers the ability to build an audience continually
The core principles of inbound marketing are attracting, engage and delight. These principals have one goal, to keep potential customers interested in what’s being offered for as long as possible.
Inbound marketing strives to turn strangers visiting your sight into delighted customers and promoters of your products, helping your brand to grow. Therefore, inbound marketing strategy employs long-term planning for any visitor on a website and looks to ensure that there is a continued relationship with potential customers.
4. Boosts customer referrals
Emphasis on offering quality and useful content to potential customers creates a base of returning customers. These customers feel valued from the experience, leading to referrals from these customers to other potential customers, creating growth in brand and customer base.
5. Potential to generate more traffic than outbound marketing
Inbound marketing requires more effort than outbound marketing to grow an audience. However, an inbound marketing audience is totally different from other marketing strategies. Once they like the content value a website is offering, they become an audience of the website, creating more traffic to the site.
Inbound marketing also involves long-term strategies such as SEO optimization that ensure that clients looking for information on the internet in future can still find your website with zero advertisement costs. This further generates traffic of potential customers to your site.
6. Produces qualified leads
Inbound marketing is more targeted than outbound marketing in that content produced by inbound marketers reflect what a given site is offering. The content used in this marketing strategy is also very targetted and provides useful information about what a website is doing. Therefore, potential customers on your website are interested in what you are offering and are more likely to become leads.
Unlike outbound marketing, which aims to broadcast to a big audience in hopes that this will lead to a potential client purchasing a product, inbound marketing has a higher conversion rate due to its laser-focused marketing strategy.
7. Inbound marketing is time-saving
Inbound marketing strategies such as emailing potential clients, social media posts, monitoring brand mentions, campaign reports,and email workflows can easily be automated, making it easy to use the method.
These time-consuming tasks become seamless for marketers who can now focus on creating quality content for their clients.
8. It has the ability to build on itself
One of the biggest advantages of inbound content is that it is available on the company’s website. This means that, unlike other marketing strategies that rely on third-party platforms for their audience, inbound marketing has the potential to help a company’s website to grow organically.
Every optimization done by marketers will continue to generate results for years to come, building upon itself and potentially increasing future sales.
9. Inbound marketing helps in strong business-customer relationship
The strategy for inbound marketing is not centered on a sales pitch, where clients are bombarded with information about a product. It is built on a long term trust where clients are made to understand about the brand and experience friendliness through engaging content on the website.
The information offered on the site is also a strong indicator of whether a long-lasting relationship with a client is possible. Although this depends on the industry, writing quality, informative and engaging content ensures that your clients are always coming back to your site.
10. Potential to use sales funnel
Potential customers do their research before deciding to spend their money on a given product. By offering quality content about the services you offer, clients are able to do all research they need to do and make decisions to purchase a product while still on your site.
By keeping the content on your website, you are able to create a strong call to action(CTAs) and encourage your audience to purchase the products on your site. This can involve sales funnels, which are forms that clients fill out with their information that enables them to subscribe to a newsletter on your site or make a purchase.
