What is Outbound Marketing?
Outbound marketing is when marketers push their product, service or information as far out into the public as possible hoping that others will find them when the need arises. It is generating leads that will turn into sales by using methods such as door to door flyers, radio or tv ads, trade shows, seminars, internal cold calling, telemarketing etc.
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What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound Marketing is when you help yourself get found by those who are already looking for your product, service or information. This type of marketing is not pushing yourself as far into everywhere as possible, but rather building up your own presence so when people are looking in your industry – you are there! In order to do this, you will want to build yourself up and create a presence for you in places where others will be searching, such as your website on search engines, social media sites, blogosphere etc.
Why not Outbound Marketing?
Outbound marketing is not only expensive but is less effective. Now that technology is drawing people to easier ways of searching, outbound methods such as print advertising and cold calling are not giving the desired results. Each day an average person is interrupted 2000 times with outbound marketing techniques. So we have found new ways to weed out these annoyances, or just throw those printed flyers in the trash. Because of things such as caller id, or spam filtering, outbound techniques are less effective and cost much more!
Why Inbound Marketing?
When using Outbound Marketing techniques, most of the time you are selling the idea of what you are offering. Once you convince your audience that they need your product/service – they now only have the idea, and may run with this by getting quotes from other competitors etc. Whereas when you use Inbound Marketing techniques, you are making sure you are coming up exactly where your potential customers are looking for you. They have already determined they need your product/service now you just have to show that they need YOU!
Three Keys to Inbound Marketing
- Content – You want to provide reliable content to your potential customers, attracting them to you over your competition.
- Search Engine Optimization – This is the best way to give yourself the boast to be found in search engines by your potential customers. Make sure you are coming up in search engines on top when your industry keywords are searched.
- Social Media – Spread your content out over social media networks and get people discussing your industry. If you are starting the conversation, then it is pretty likely that the conversation will end with you as the solution.