Why is Outbound marketing seen as the bad guy compared to Inbound? Is really Inbound marketing where you should spend all your budget?
I’ve read multiple definitions about both terms and seems to me that Outbound is a victim of bad publicity created by digital marketers.
If you want to annoy a potential customer, use Outbound. If you want to delight, use Inbound. That’s not simply true. We need to draw a better and clear line and reconcile both terms.
What Outbound and Inbound Marketing have in common? They are both methodologies that look to grab the user’s attention. Without attention, you can’t initiative any funnel; it doesn’t matter what channel or tool you use.
What’s a better definition for Outbound and Inbound marketing? then Outbound and inbound are not opposite. Inbound is the next phase of Outbound marketing. Outbound is the prospecting campaign, and Inbound is the retargeting campaign.
As much as you want to respect the Permission Marketing creed, if a user never heard about your brand, you will need to interrupt her, via a TV commercial, podcast ad, or Facebook Ad.
If you are selling clothes for cats, and users are googling “where to buy clothes for cats,” if you have a Google Ad running, you are interrupting on the first page.
If you respectfully earned the first position -due to hard work on SEO-, you are interrupting again (that’s why Google prefers to give a straight answer in the form of content, regardless of the brand or domain.)
If you are sending a mass SMS text with “we buy junk cars,” you are not doing Outbound marketing, you are spamming. If you are sending a “Discount laptops” email to people who never heard about you or your company, you are, again, spamming.
If you are running a Facebook Ad with a cat in PJ’s to cat lovers, you are doing Outbound marketing.
You are still interrupting, but with something meaningful and relevant. Once the user got into your website and subscribed to your daily cat pics, you are doing Inbound Marketing. Regardless if the user came from a google search or the Facebook ad.
It’s time to take away the negative connotation to Outbound marketing and make it work together with your Inbound marketing strategies.
