Get Out Of Outbound Marketing

It’s time to ditch outbound marketing.

You may hear a lot of conversations about outbound vs. inbound marketing nowadays. It sounds fancy and hard to follow, but it’s simple and the benefits from inbound marketing are constantly talked about among marketers. But before you implement this approach, it’s important to understand the difference between these types of marketing.

Outbound marketing used to be the sole method that consumers learned about products. It worked ten years ago, but things have changed. People don’t respond as well to pop-up ads, cold calls, and SPAM emails. Customers want to feel valued, not bombarded with ads for your products.

Outbound marketing is known as interruption-based marketing, while inbound marketing is permission-based marketing. It’s the simple difference between changing a channel once and ad comes on and making the choice to subscribe to receiving emails from a company. This means that it’s time to turn away from pop-up ads that annoy customers and, instead, ask them for permission before you give them the information you believe they want to hear.

Interruption-based marketing, such as TV and newspaper ads, bank on the idea that a consumer will accept the interruption and turn into a customer. What it doesn’t account for, is a consumer who is too focused on the task they were trying to complete – watching a show or reading the news – that they simply choose to skip over the ad. This is where marketers saw the need for a new approach to reaching customers.

Inbound marketing changes the focus from the product to the customer. To be successful with inbound marketing, you have to rely on your content to speak for itself. No more spamming the public eye with information; instead, by creating messages that speak with customers, they will inherently want to know more about your brand and will seek the answers for themselves.

The internet has brought inbound marketing to the top of its game. Social media, blogs, and SEO tactics have created a web of possibilities for marketers everywhere to find new ways to reach their customers better. By using inbound marketing practices on the web, things like email subscriptions and social media posts have a stronger chance of performing better. Customers will want to hear what you have to say, because they’ve already given you permission to speak.