It's no secret that the Internet turned the entire world on its head. While some professionals were slow to adapt to new methods brought on by an online world, marketers were quick to jump onto the change-making bandwagon.
In its infancy, many professionals had a hard time understanding how inbound marketing could ever make its mark in a world that had become so accustomed to the traditional marketing campaigns of cold calling, direct mail, radio commercials, and TV spots. After all, the whole point of marketing is to reach out to your audience and hope someone pays attention to it, right...?
Thankfully, strategic marketers were quick to realize the benefits waiting to be discovered. Today, inbound runs the marketing game, but like every good competition, a great inbound strategy can only benefit from a solid outbound marketing running mate.
Here are some reasons inbound marketing has taken the popular vote:
Measurable Metrics
The advantage of marketing becoming more technology-driven is that there’s now data and metrics to measure and support activities. Since outbound efforts often provide a vague picture of true ROI, inbound swoops in to answer the call with analytics and real-time data that can help leaders close the gap on the customer engagement conundrum.
Winning Customers with a Strategy that is Welcoming and Encourages Sharing
With inbound marketing, you strategically present awesome content to an audience of people that is already likely to be interested in what you have to say. This content should be educational and of such good value to your prospects that they are willing and wanting to share it with others. When your content is being shared to people from others they know, it feels more welcoming.
Conversely, outbound marketing isn't really built around the idea of a sharing strategy. While it allows you to cast a wide net, it's all about selling something to the buyer that they may or may not be interested in buying. And these days, no one wants to be sold to.
Engagement over Annoyances
Inbound seeks to educate, entertain, and engage audiences with valuable, trustworthy content that keeps consumers coming back for more.Outbound is typically interruptive and as a result it’s resented by prospects.
Think about that telemarketer who interrupts your dinner to sell you a couple of seats on a Caribbean cruise. It’s much more effective and relevant to have an article about the Top Ten Reasons to take a Cruise to the Caribbean on your blog. People who are searching for cruises online will find your article read it, continue to browse your website and convert there if what they want is in line with what you offer.
In most cases, inbound will trump outbound marketing efforts, but outbound can be useful as a parallel strategy. Especially in cases where a small business wants to grow leads from day 1, inbound marketing, which generally takes some time to ramp up can benefit from an outbound strategy running mate.
