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These are key terms you will have to know in order to plan a successful marketing strategy that will allow you to better position your company, captivate new audiences and most important of all, maintain their interest for as long as possible to convert them from leads to loyal customers.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is often described as “magnetic” and it’s easy to see why. Its focus lies mainly in attracting the audience that is already looking for those solutions. Once they reach your site, they find help, guidance, and even great content aimed at educating them on what they are looking for.

Organic traffic is crucial to inbound marketing, so these are great examples of strategies you might want to include in your future marketing plans:

• Blogs
• Responsive websites
• Search Engine Optimised (SEO) content
• Videos (How-to, presentation, viral content, etc)
• Webinars
• Social media campaigns

In short, Inbound marketing is about connecting with your audience over things they find useful.

Pros and cons of inbound marketing

• Transforms you into a helpful source of information for your niche
• Attracts quality prospects
• Builds long-term relationships with prospects
• Obtains feedback from the market

• Can be intimidating to start from scratch
• Requires strategy and planning to be effective
• It’s not always applicable
• Trust is limited at first, it takes time to develop

What is Outbound Marketing?

Outbound Marketing is also known as Interruption Marketing, and it is more commonly associated with traditional marketing.

During the past decade or so, traditional marketing techniques have clashed with the newer inbound marketing strategies we mentioned before, hence this “outbound” designation.

Outbound Marketing focuses on reaching consumers through general advertising as well as through in-person contact

Some examples of Outbound Marketing:

• TV, radio, and/or newspaper advertisements
• Cold-calling
• Blanket e-mails
• Trade shows
• Press releases
• Marketing content (brochures, postcards, catalogues)
• Newsletters
• Branded items (pens, flash drives, key chains)

You can think of outbound marketing as the first point of contact to let the world know who you are so that a customer-company relationship can then develop in time.

Pros and cons of outbound marketing

• Reaches a wider audience
• Easy to implement
• Makes it easier to target potential customers you may not have foreseen
• Faster results

• People tend to dislike ads
• Maybe annoying to certain people
• One way communication: no feedback from customer
• Requires higher budgets and ROI can be hard to track

So… which one is better?

Truth be told, we cannot say one is always better than the other.

There are many factors you need to take into account when choosing a marketing plan. How novel or niche your solution is will determine how much time you will have to dedicate to explaining it, and this is just one tiny example of what you will have to contemplate when planning your strategy.

It may be better to take a mixed approach and combine some outbound marketing strategies, like newsletters, brochures and blanket e-mails with other inbound strategies like blogs, videos, redesigned websites and webinars.

The outbound tactics will allow you to reach a wider audience faster while the inbound techniques will give them the perfect reason to stay and engage on a deeper level, the ultimate goal of any smart campaign.

Leave a comment with your favourite marketing strategies and subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date with our latest posts.

And remember, we are always happy to receive any question or enquiry you may have about your upcoming projects, we can’t wait to help you!