What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a technique for drawing customers to products and services via content marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimisation and branding.

Outbound marketing

Outbound marketing refers to any kind of marketing where a company initiates the conversation and sends its message out to an audience.

I spent the first half of my career in sales and the second half in marketing.

When I started out in sales there was no internet. Just a Yellow Pages and a telephone.

I can still remember the buzz I felt when anyone got a sale. It would be announced to the whole company over the tannoy. It spurred me on like nothing else.

I absolutely hammered the phone (and my Yellow Pages) and booked appointments for the sales reps with ease.

Yes, I was one of the better telemarketers, but it was easy.

I had an offer. I could save the customer money and arrange for someone to pop in and tell them all about it.

Outbound marketing was our key strategy back then.

Types of outbound marketing include:

  1. Cold calling/telemarketing
  2. TV/radio advertisements
  3. Trade shows
  4. Newspaper advertising
  5. Press releases
  6. Direct mail (brochures, postcards, catalogues)
Inbound marketing

Outbound marketing is the opposite of inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing is where customers find you when they need you.

Times have changed.

Customers don’t need someone to ring up or pop in to tell them all about the products or services. In fact, it really annoys them when people try to do that.

The internet means that customers have a world of information at their fingertips. They do their own research and only come to your website (if you are lucky) when they are almost ready to buy.

In order to be successful you have to be there when they are looking for what you sell.

Here’s how to capture their attention.

  1. Create valuable, educational and useful content (slow and free)
  2. Create online ads to drive them to your products and services (fast and expensive)

Ideally you want a mixture of the two.

However, most small businesses don’t have big marketing budgets.

If that is the case you have to find a way to start small and scale it.

Inbound marketing strategy

Start with a good strategy to identify exactly who your ideal customers are.

Then devise a plan of how you are going to get traffic to your website and a method for getting them to opt-in to your email list, so you can nurture them into customers.

Once you find what works for your business, you can put more time, effort and money behind it.

For more information about the inbound marketing process, read about our COG™ System.

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