With a new digital era comes a better way to do marketing. Still, marketers face a lot of confusion regarding inbound and outbound marketing strategies. The critical question for many remains: “Are inbound strategies more effective than outbound strategies in getting potential customers to the top of the sales funnel?”
More and more brands are opting out of outbound tactics, like cold calling and TV ads, and getting into more natural inbound strategies—think blog posts, infographics, and explainer videos.
Is this the right marketing strategy in today’s competitive business landscape? Read on as we explore inbound and outbound strategies to help you answer this question.
What is inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing focuses on attracting customers—or drawing them in—to your brand. You primarily do this with valuable and relevant content that answers their most immediate, pressing problem.
Content marketing is one of the core subsets of inbound marketing. Think of how you usually find the answer to a question or problem. More often than not, you use an online search engine. Generally, you find a helpful article that gives you great insights or points you to a solution. Then, you begin trusting the brand that wrote the article. Pretty soon, you trust them enough to buy something from them.
This is inbound marketing in action. As you can see, it’s customer-centric and banks wholly on providing valuable content and interactions. It relies on non-intrusive forms of marketing that offer value upfront. This helps build more trust and is far more effective at getting qualified leads without annoying the prospect. Examples of inbound marketing tactics include:
- Content marketing (like blogging)
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Social media posts
- Webinars
- Website lead capture forms
- Email marketing (when customers give consent to receiving emails)
What is outbound marketing?
In contrast to inbound, outbound marketing consists of “traditional” strategies and tactics that we’re all used to. Outbound marketing focuses more on pushing messages to a broad audience and selling products or services than helping target audiences.
Marketers typically need to spend money to relay the marketing message to their prospects when they adopt the outbound approach. Hence, it’s often costlier to do outbound marketing vs. inbound marketing. Common examples of outbound marketing tactics include:
- Direct mail
- Telemarketing
- Door-to-door sales
- Radio and TV commercials
- Print ads
- Cold calling
Inbound vs. outbound marketing: A detailed comparison
Now that we’ve discussed the definitions of inbound and outbound marketing, let’s take a closer look at their differences:
Customer journey
The two marketing strategies focus on different stages of the customer journey. Inbound marketing is more of an early-stage strategy, primarily focusing on attracting customers during their initial research and consideration phases—think blogs (they focus on providing customers with information to help solve their problems).
Outbound marketing is often a late-stage marketing strategy. It targets potential customers who have already done their research and are closer to making purchasing decisions—think cold emails (they are more likely to persuade someone actively looking for a product or service than someone who has not yet identified a need).
Audience targeting
Since the two strategies focus on different stages of the customer journey, their target audiences are also different. Inbound marketing targets a defined audience actively seeking information or solutions related to the product or service. It suits industries like education, technology, healthcare, and consulting.
The target audiences in these industries often search for valuable information to stay up-to-date with trends or get insights into their pain points. As inbound marketing primarily focuses on providing helpful content, it’s the best solution.
On the other hand, outbound marketing targets a broad audience or specific demographics that may or may not be actively searching for a product/service. It can be ideal for industries that benefit from direct outreach, like hospitality and retail. It can also be suitable for B2B lead generation thanks to its focus on broad audiences.
Messaging
You can tell whether a campaign uses inbound or outbound marketing by assessing its messaging. Inbound marketing focuses on valuable content, thought leadership, and educating an audience about a product or service’s benefits. It’s genuine and authentic, aiming to solve problems without asking for anything.
Outbound marketing is often more direct—it highlights product or service features and directs potential customers to a call to action. Some customers are cautious about outbound marketing campaigns as they tend to be in your face and carry sensational claims or sugar-coating, sometimes at the expense of the truth.
Engagement approach
Inbound is permission-based marketing. That means people who consume content do it because they want to. They seek out a brand of their own volition and not because they’re forced. Further, inbound marketing relies on pull marketing strategies, attracting audiences through valuable content. Businesses create content that addresses customer pain points and use branded links to boost recognizability and build trust. As a result, people have a high chance of converting with inbound marketing.
Outbound marketing primarily employs push marketing strategies, actively reaching out to potential customers through various channels—think TV or radio ads while watching or listening to your favorite show. This marketing strategy is essentially a numbers game. The goal is to blast a big enough group of prospects, hoping a few will notice.
Strategy
Inbound marketing’s strategy primarily revolves around high-quality content creation, website SEO, and lead nurturing through email marketing automation. Additionally, it uses a more holistic strategy. Each aspect of your marketing—website, blog, social media channels, content strategy—is one component that contributes to the whole. To succeed, everything needs to work together.
Conversely, outbound marketing focuses on tactics like cold calling, email marketing (purchased lists), attending trade shows, and leveraging paid advertising campaigns. It uses a traditional linear strategy. That means each campaign and marketing initiative is standalone. Marketers typically pick a channel, run a campaign, and see how it goes. They then choose the best-performing medium and run an even bigger campaign. Rinse and repeat.
Measurement of success
What’s a campaign without success measurement? A liability that only consumes resources without giving anything back. As such, an assessment of the return on investment is critical for both types of marketing campaigns. However, they have different metrics.
The key performance indicators (KPIs) to track for inbound marketing include website traffic, keyword ranking, lead generation, and customer engagement with content. These metrics tell you whether to continue your current strategy or change things up.
In contrast, key metrics to track regularly for outbound marketing include cost-per-acquisition (CPA), conversion rates, and response rates to outreach efforts.
Attribution
The last difference between inbound vs. outbound sales is undoubtedly one of the most critical—attribution. Attributing conversions to specific marketing efforts can be challenging regardless of your chosen type of marketing approach. But just because something is difficult doesn’t mean it’s impossible. With reliable digital marketing tools like Bitly, you can make it easier for your team to keep track of each marketing method’s returns.
How exactly do you attribute returns for inbound and outbound marketing techniques? Well, if you’re running an inbound campaign, you can analyze content performance by reviewing how many people read your content and assess website visitor behavior by tracking their actions on your site.
For outbound marketing, attribution is trickier, but it’s possible if you play your cards right and choose the right platforms. For example, say you want to run a cold email marketing campaign and keep track of its success. You can use Bitly for digital marketing, create branded and trackable Bitly links, and email them to your target audience. This way, you can track the number of link clicks from cold emails.
Choosing the right approach for your business
What would be your answer if you were asked to choose between outbound and inbound marketing tactics? Let us guess—you’d go for inbound marketing, as almost all businesses are headed in that direction.
But is following the crowd a smart idea? We think not—at least not before you’re completely sure the marketing strategy is ideal for your business.
Here are some tips to help you choose between the two:
Assess your goals
You can only plan your route if you have a destination in mind. So, start by defining your short-term and long-term business goals. This is one of the best ways to determine if an inbound, outbound, or combined strategy is ideal for your business.
Do you want to increase brand awareness and engagement, build thought leadership, and generate high-quality leads? If you answer yes, an inbound strategy is the best choice for you. If you’re more focused on making immediate sales and promoting special offers, an outbound marketing strategy is ideal. For diverse goals, it’d be best to combine both approaches.
Think about the target audience
Assess your target audience’s preferences and behaviors. If your audience values informative content like blog posts and video tutorials, inbound marketing is the best option. For audiences that value direct marketing techniques and outreach programs, outbound marketing is suitable.
Also, consider where your audience spends its time online. If your market mainly comprises Gen Z, inbound marketing strategies like social media marketing are suitable—Gen Z makes up roughly 80% of TikTok and Instagram users, proving that social media is one of the best ways to reach them. Outbound techniques may be sufficient if your audience is still traditional and regularly reads print media and watches TV.
The customer journey also needs to play a role in your decision-making process. As mentioned earlier, inbound marketing techniques are suitable for buyers in the early phases of purchase, while outbound options are ideal for potential customers ready to purchase products or services.
Understand your budget and resources
Inbound and outbound marketing efforts have varying budget requirements. Typically, inbound generated leads are 60% cheaper than outbound leads, making inbound marketing a suitable option for small businesses with financial constraints.
However, resource considerations shouldn’t end with a budget analysis. Also, consider aspects like team skills, technological tools, and content creation capacity, as the success of inbound marketing relies heavily on these factors.
Consider combining approaches for maximum impact
Are you on the fence about which marketing strategy to choose? Why not leverage both?
When you integrate inbound and outbound strategies, you can amplify your marketing results and reach potential buyers at different stages of the customer journey. Blending the two approaches also allows you to optimize your marketing campaigns—you can experiment with both and continuously refine your strategies based on customer or prospect feedback as well as lead and sales reports.
Make an informed decision on marketing strategies
Your choice of inbound or outbound marketing can determine the success of your marketing campaign. So, be careful when choosing your preferred strategies. If you’re unsure which option to implement, integrate both marketing approaches and monitor your return on investment to determine the most appropriate option for your business.
Regardless of your choice, rest assured you have the perfect partner in Bitly. With our platform, you can easily create custom trackable links to support your branding and marketing optimization efforts, boosting your chances of running successful campaigns.
Whether you’re leaning toward a modern approach like social media marketing or a more traditional option like cold emailing, create a Bitly account today for actionable, real-time insights that’ll help you choose the right marketing strategies.