Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing

First off what is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is the strategy for getting your products/service found by customers. Instead of interrupting people, marketers must now find new ways of integrating marketing to potential customers in less intrusive but still effective ways, such as how tv shows integrate music but seamlessly show viewers what the song and artist are and where they can purchase the music. Outbound marketing is the opposite; it’s interrupting the customers to get attention through traditional marketing methods such as print ads, television ads, cold calling & tradeshows.

In a recent survey that was conducted through constant contact of small businesses they found that the top 10 most effective marketing strategies were related to inbound marketing. The survey found that all strategies that scored 50% of higher were related to inbound marketing because consumers are now in control of how they receive advertisements and how they respond to marketing strategies.

These are the results:

1. Email marketing – 83%
2. Website (content and SEO) – 71%
3. In-person interactions – 68%
4. Social media – 49%
5. Events 41%
6. Outbound calling – 33%
7. PR – 22%
8. Direct mail – 21%
9. Traditional advertising (TV, radio, print, etc.) – 17%
10. 10. Pay-per-click – 17%

The full survey can be found here:

http://img.constantcontact.com/docs/pdf/Small_Business_Pulse_Preliminary_Results.pdf

Now that you know the most effective ways to market, you will need to know the most successful components to an inbound marketing campaign.

1. Content is the core of any business and is the key to attracting customers.
2. (SEO) Search engine optimization is the process of building inbound links to your site to rank in search results. SEO looks at how search engines work, what people are searching for and keywords.
3. Social media is the process of gaining website traffic through the attention of social media sites. This overall strategy increases communications for organizations for brand awareness and will help improve customer service.

How does this all work?

1. Content – blogs, videos, website content
2. SEO – on page, off page, link building , keyword search
3. Social Media – Twitter, Facebook. Blogs, forums, LinkedIn

When you have the right strategies, your end goal can result in getting more prospects, convert those prospects into leads and eventually close those leads efficiently. The biggest plus to inbound marketing is the fact that is costs less than traditional marketing. Content is free, social media sites are free, blogs are free and all of this will draw consumers to your site.

Inbound marketing gives you the ability to only approach people who self qualify themselves. If they are interested in your content then they could be interested in your product.

By Rhianydd Phillips, Project Coordinator at NetGain.