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Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing for Beginners

What is the difference between inbound marketing and outbound marketing? Which marketing methodology should your business implement?

In this article, we will answer these questions and ultimately decide who is the winner in the inbound marketing vs outbound marketing battle.

We will also share some of our favorite tools to attract visitors and convert leads into customers. In the end, those are the main goals of every marketing strategy.

Outbound Marketing for Beginners

When you think of traditional marketing, you are most likely thinking of outbound marketing.

For beginners with little to no experience in the world of marketing, it may seem like the only possible way to gain new clients is through interruptive advertisements.

Outbound marketing includes all the traditional marketing strategies you may have seen on Mad Men or any of the multiple films about advertising agencies. Advertisements on TV or the radio, small ads in newspapers and magazines, large billboards next to highways, these are all part of the outbound marketing methodology.

And outbound marketing includes other types of interruptive strategies: cold calls from call centers offering discounts, spam emails promoting a new product, even brochures being handled on the streets.

In a nutshell, outbound marketing englobes all the marketing methods that can be considered interruptive: the user is presented with an advertisement for a product or a service that interrupts their activity.

The goal of outbound marketing is to make people feel like they need to buy from you, even if that wasn’t something that they were considering.

Although we are all used to it, outbound marketing advertisements are not something that we deliberately want to consume. Quite the opposite: we tolerate advertisements even though we usually don’t find any useful value in them.

Let’s be clear: there are opportunities in which you do find value in advertisements. You may see a service that you wanted at a special price or a product that you’ve been needing but didn’t know where to buy.

However, according to Jay Walker-Smith, President of the Marketing Firm Yankelovich, the average person is exposed to as many as 5,000 ads per day. Even if people find value in a few advertisements per day, it is an extremely low portion of the total of ads they are exposed to.

And this is even more relevant in the era of the Internet and social media. Back when people consumed all their entertainment content on TV or the radio, they had no option but to sit through the advertisements they were shown. It is not the case anymore.

When people browse the internet, and particularly social media platforms, they don’t need to watch the ads. Users have the power to choose which contents they want to consume, and they will choose only those who add value to their lives.

Does this mean outbound marketing isn’t worth investing in? Not at all, outbound marketing is still relevant. It is particularly relevant for big corporations who can invest large amounts of money into their marketing departments, and come up with clever and intriguing ads.

However, because of the digital revolution, there is a new way to advertise: inbound marketing.

Inbound Marketing for Beginners

The best way to understand inbound marketing for beginners is as the opposite of outbound marketing. It is not interruptive, because it is the user who wants to consume the content.

Inbound marketing is based on a simple principle: people will try to find help and solutions to their problems.

How do people look for those solutions? They search on Google, or they watch YouTube videos, or they ask on social media.

And who offers them the solutions? Well, you. And if you’re not offering them solutions yet, you should start as soon as possible.

Instead of advertisements, inbound marketing methods include writing informative blog posts, creating attractive web pages and sending useful emails.

Basically, instead of bombarding people with annoying interruptive ads, inbound marketing is about creating interesting and informative content that solves problems. After you solve someone’s problem, you will have gained their trust and they will become leads, and then customers.

But inbound marketing isn’t easy — at least it isn’t as easy as outbound marketing. With outbound marketing, you create an advertisement and then expect people to respond to it, and buy your products.

The inbound marketing process is quite more complex. According to HubSpot, there are four stages in the inbound marketing methodology: Attract, Convert, Close and Delight. These are the stages that take users from strangers to visitors, then leads, customers and finally promoters.

The inbound marketing methodology, by HubSpot

For each stage, there are a series of methods that make the entire process work. For example, blog posts are meant to attract strangers to your website, turning them into visitors. Emails, on the other hand, are used to convert leads into customers.

For an inbound marketing strategy to work, you need to create several types of content, and all that content needs to be of the highest quality.

Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing: The Pros and Cons

So which one should you choose for your business in the inbound marketing vs outbound marketing battle? Before deciding, let’s sum up the advantages and disadvantages of inbound and outbound marketing.

Outbound marketing is an outdated technique with a very low conversion rate, but it’s fairly simple to implement. Potentially, you could gain customers directly from your outbound marketing advertisements.

Inbound marketing is a modern methodology that has a much higher conversion rate, but it is harder to implement. In order to gain customers through inbound marketing, you need to guide them through a long process.

Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing: Useful Tools

Deciding between inbound marketing vs outbound marketing really comes down to deciding which tools your business will use to attract new leads and convert customers. So let’s look at three examples.

Udimi Solo Ads – An outbound marketing tool

If you want to include an outbound marketing tool for your marketing strategies, we recommend Udimi. Udimi is a network where you can contact publishers to send ads to a specific target audience.

What’s best about Udimi is that you pay only if people click on the ad and are redirected to your website. Plus, you can get excellent information about who the people visit your website are, to then improve your outbound marketing strategy.

GetResponse – An inbound marketing tool

One of our favorite inbound marketing tools is GetResponse. They offer email marketing, webinars, landing pages and marketing automation that will allow you to guide your buyers through their journey from strangers to customers and promoters.

GetResponse has several features that make customized email marketing extremely simple. It’s the best way to stay in touch with leads and help them engage with your business.

Click Funnels – An inbound marketing & outbound marketing tool

If you aren’t sure whether you prefer inbound marketing or outbound marketing, you can try Click Funnels. Although Click Funnels is mainly focused on outbound marketing, it can be used as a part of an inbound marketing strategy.

The best thing about Click Funnels is its versatility. Click Funnels can be used for several tasks simultaneously, from creating websites to capturing leads and even selling products.

Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing: Which One Wins?

So which methodology should you implement? According to a study done by HubSpot, inbound marketing leads cost 61% less than outbound leads. Even if it appears to be more difficult to implement an inbound marketing strategy, it is worth the effort and the money.

Average cost per lead of inbound marketing vs outbound marketing, by HubSpot

Does this result mean it isn’t worth investing in outbound marketing and traditional advertisement? Not at all. Large corporations still invest millions of dollars to run short ads during the Super Bowl, and they do it for a reason.

However, most small businesses don’t have a large marketing budget. What the study by HubSpot really shows is that, when small businesses have limited resources to promote their products and services, their best option is inbound marketing.

Ultimately, you should decide on the marketing strategy that feels best for your business. Your best option is to try different methodologies and choose the one with the best results.

Disclosure: Kaizen Sigma is an independent ClickFunnels Affiliate, not an employee. Our agency receives referral payments from ClickFunnels. The opinions expressed here are our own and are not official statements of ClickFunnels or its parent company, Etison LLC.

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Kaizen Sigma, LLC

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