There is a sin committed by Digital Marketing professionals that even I am guilty of having committed in the past: defending a specific sales strategy as superior to the detriment of other techniques!
This division often occurs when the topic is applying the theories of Inbound Marketing , in comparison with Outbound Marketing, to a strategy that aims to increase profit by making a brand popular on the Internet!
What I, Enjoy Minder, have learned after more than 10 years as CEO of the largest Inbound Marketing agency, is that both Inbound and Outbound can play important roles in the same strategy!
Since competition on the Internet is increasingly fierce — and each company tries to throw as much information at users as possible in order to capture their attention — it is essential to know when to apply these two methodologies to:
- Get ahead of the competition;
- Attract and convert new customers;
- And achieve true success!
I wrote this content to demystify the misconceptions that some clients, professionals and even my past self popularized without understanding that, when used together, both Inbound and Outbound Marketing are capable of taking companies like yours to infinite sales — and beyond!
But what is Inbound and Outbound Marketing?
It is easier to visualize the difference between Inbound and Outbound Marketing like going fishing with a rod or a harpoon.
Inbound Marketing aims to use bait to attract the right type of fish — so that the fish, unable to resist the easy food to satisfy its hunger, decides to take the bait of its own free will.
Outbound Marketing is the strategy you don’t expect — you head out into the water to find your target and hit them with a spear!
This analogy serves to show how Inbound Marketing has an approach focused on:
- Attract your ideal audience;
- Engage her through valuable content;
- And convert them into potential customers.
While Outbound Marketing is more aggressive, with the objective of:
- Actively go after your desired audience;
- Reveal that he has a problem and needs to act quickly (by buying your solution);
- And keep insisting until he actually acts.
Context is everything in Digital Marketing and, looking at these two methodologies side by side, it seems that one may be better than the other.
In reality, both attracting the right customers and pursuing them have value at different stages of your sales planning.
Using both at the right time is what can take your company out of stagnation and achieve results never expected before!
I’ll give you details on how to do this below, but if you want to watch an extra video to learn a little more about this difference, I have a chat with Myrian Mourão about the subject, which is unmissable. Don’t miss it!
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound Marketing is a set of techniques within Digital Marketing focused on creating valuable content to attract the perfect audience and convert them into buyers by helping them to:
- Put an end to doubts about a topic;
- Solve the problems they face;
- Or achieve a desire they feel!
At the beginning of this content, I said that competition for people’s attention on the Internet is fiercer than ever.
This happens because people resolve their most intimate doubts by searching for answers on search engines (like Google) and social networks (like Instagram).
An effective way to show that your company has the authority and the solution that these people need is by offering content that can truly change their lives!
After attracting and fascinating them with this free content, you captivate these people in such a radical way that they start to trust only your business when it comes to making a purchase — and they come back to buy as long as you nurture this relationship based on relevance and digital presence!
The creation of rich materials (through Content Marketing), their optimization so that they can be found on the Internet (SEO) and the highly personalized nature of communications with potential customers (with the aim of getting to know them better and hooking them with baits that are impossible for them to ignore) are the pillars of this sales strategy!
What is Outbound Marketing?
In Outbound Marketing, your company doesn’t wait for the potential customer to be hooked by your bait: you dive your company into the ocean and go hunting with the best harpoon — which, in this analogy, is your best offer !
After defining an ICP (an Ideal Customer Profile ), your business approaches them through cold calls, email messages, conversations on social media or WhatsApp, and wherever else the target audience is!
This initiative is called “cold” because it is cold: your company makes previously unauthorized contacts — without the person expecting it, without them knowing your brand, and without the need for a relationship with them.
Inbound Marketing aims to build constant and lifelong traffic of people who come to your business through the valuable content that your brand offers — which is a strategy focused on the medium and long term, with results that take a little longer to appear, but with the potential for exponential growth!
Outbound Marketing is more intense and faster, used to accelerate Inbound Marketing efforts or to urgently communicate something important to your ideal audience or your business (such as the launch of a product or service, for example).
Another difference to Inbound Marketing is that Outbound needs to use Paid Media to be executed at full strength, which requires a slightly greater investment of resources (time, productivity and money), but proportional to the speed with which it brings specific results!
After all, do Inbound and Outbound Marketing work?
Both Inbound and Outbound Marketing practices work incredibly well on their own — and even better when used together in a strategy aimed at increasing your sales!
The myth that Inbound and Outbound are antagonistic was born from a feud that existed in the past, long before the integration of the efforts of Marketing teams with sales teams was seen as the perfect chemistry for the profitability of a business.
Today, the differences between these two methodologies (and also between teams) are what make a brand’s financial goals even more viable, since the lifetime and automatic conversion of people (using highly personalized content, but automated by Digital Marketing technologies) is built by Inbound, while the immediate distribution of these “bait” is covered by Outbound Marketing!
The mission is to make your company sell more and make real profits, which leaves no room for disputes: the more collaborations and tools are applied, the better!
Benefits of Inbound Marketing
Since Inbound Marketing is based on making your brand relevant to a potential customer before they even become a consumer, the biggest benefit of this strategy is to make your company become a pillar of trust: a figure that aims for Customer Success above sales!
In practice, this authority is what increases profitability, since the further a potential customer advances in the purchasing journey (the path they take from being a stranger to becoming a buyer), the more information they provide about:
- How he thinks;
- What he likes;
- What fears;
- And the role you expect from your brand.
The great advantage of Inbound Marketing is that all relevant and valuable content for this potential customer is created in advance — and made available on your platform (such as a website or blog) 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
From there, the more information you accumulate about your ideal customer in this practice, the more automated triggers you can create using Digital Marketing, to make the order of this previously created content (and the communications from it) personalized to the moment of the individual purchase journey in which this potential customer is!
After being “warmed up” by so much useful content and personalization that demonstrates your brand’s desire to see the customer solving a problem or achieving a desire, your business becomes the object of their consumption — going far beyond your products or services!
When this customer reaches your sales team after going through this journey, they are ready to close a deal — which becomes even easier when your sales team has all of this customer’s information and preferences available due to this relationship between the customer and your brand through Inbound Marketing.
The result of this is not only a considerable increase in sales, but an absurd saving of resources, since, in addition to attracting more people to your business, these people are much more likely to buy than someone who is simply curious — or worse: disinterested!
Advantages of Outbound Marketing
Outbound Marketing can be used to immediately attract even more people to the strategy of warming up potential customers throughout their buying journey!
Because creating content optimized to be found in the first results of search engines (SEO) takes a little longer to bring in a huge number of new customers, Outbound Marketing can be used to expand your reach and insert these people into the purchasing journey in a segmented way.
Segmentation is what I and other Marketing professionals call the classification of potential customers (leads) into groups of similar profiles, interests and reactions.
This categorization allows filtering at an individual level to ensure that certain content is delivered only to profiles with the highest conversion potential in an automated manner!
This leads to an accelerated construction of leads’ awareness of your brand, increasing the chances of them entering the purchasing journey (shaped by Inbound Marketing) with a much greater interest in what you expect: that they buy!
How do you know which Marketing approach to choose?
Think of Inbound and Outbound Marketing as two modes of communication:
- A method aimed at building a loyal audience, who buy for the first time and come back to buy many more times later;
- And a way to impact more immediate people, who urgently need the solution your brand offers!
Without covering these two types of people, your business runs the risk of losing sales — and if your business loses a sale, it means one of your competitors has taken it from you!
Some people prefer more passive communication and, for them, Inbound Marketing is ideal.
On the other hand, there are people who will never consume your content, but will be directly impacted by your Outbound Marketing!
The fact is that there is no magic strategy — the success of Inbound and Outbound Marketing depends on:
- The particular objectives of your business;
- Where your customers spend most of their time on the Internet;
- And their person (and buyer) profile!
The same company can have customers with completely different or even opposite profiles! With this in mind, using Inbound and Outbound together can bring the best results!
That’s why you need to diagnose your Digital Marketing to find out which types of customers would be most interesting to target first — thus discovering which strategy phases you will need to implement to get the maximum return on your investments!
How can Inbound and Outbound Marketing be used together?
Aligning your attraction and conversion strategies is all you need to successfully integrate Inbound and Outbound Marketing!
As long as your company’s purpose is to create a cohesive and personalized experience to convert curious people into buyers , you’re sure to achieve the result you’re hoping for: more sales in less time and in ever-increasing volumes!
A common practice in this integration is to maintain an Outbound Marketing team with the role of approaching leads proactively:
- Whether they are cold ones, who do not yet know the brand;
- Or interested, warm leads that arrived through Inbound Marketing and have the right profile to be approached!
A great advantage of this approach by the Outbound Marketing team is that these leads that arrive via Inbound leave a considerable trail of data about how they behave and what they need.
This makes the approach seem like a magical act to them: your company fell from the sky when they needed it most!
This is the fascination you can create by combining Inbound and Outbound in your sales strategy — and it’s not hard to achieve if you keep in mind that your products and services need to be relevant to your audience!
I will explain each advantage of this integration below!
1. Close deals
To close deals with certain types of customers, your company will need to proactively reach out to them via phone call or one-on-one conversation — a job for your Outbound team!
However, this contact information and conversation initiative require that your brand has already collected some data about these customers by filling out forms in exchange for valuable content — something your Inbound Marketing team is an expert at doing!
The results are more deals closed in less time , and less waste of resources on channels or curious people who do not generate the profitability your company needs to grow!
2. Facilitate the approach
When I mentioned in the previous item that data about your leads needs to be collected by Inbound Marketing, I meant that your company will have made available so much relevant content — and essential for the success of your audience — that your potential customers will be happy to provide personal information (such as name, email address and telephone number) in exchange for more useful material!
This is done through forms that will be used to offer educational content (that changes the lives of your audience) and whose information will be used by your Outbound team to initiate phone calls or conversations from the emails offered by these leads — who, just by showing interest in your more exclusive materials, will be classified as much more qualified leads!
Your company reduces the incidence of conversations that do not lead to any sales and also multiplies the number of people ready to buy from your business!
3. Strengthen your presence in the consumer’s mind
Use this as an example: would you prefer to buy from an unknown brand or from a company you already know?
This is what value generation is all about: making your business represent much more than a product or service — but rather an amalgamation of authority, trust and commitment to consumer success!
The more familiar a person is with a figure, the more he or she will tend to trust it over lesser-known options (even when those options are better than the ones available)!
Through Inbound Marketing, you ensure that the warmest leads will not forget your role in their lives (and that the problems they face can only be solved with the solutions you offer) and that, together with Outbound, you begin the process of familiarizing yourself with strangers and the most wary audience.
Therefore, it never hurts to make sure your company is always ahead of your potential consumers — and also ahead of your competitors!
4. Promote personalized campaigns
By attracting new people and capturing them in your super personalized buying journey, you can segment excellent groups of potential buyers to use in Email Marketing and Paid Media campaigns, with the goal of converting the largest number of people in the shortest possible time — and for the lowest investment!
In this example, Outbound is just as capable of delivering specific promotional offers to qualified leads as it is of reactivating inactive leads.
Inbound Marketing runs in parallel, sending automated (but highly personalized) content to prevent your brand from falling into oblivion and increase the chances of old customers buying from you again!
This execution happens in unison — and both the customer and your brand always win!
Are you unsure about how to implement Inbound and Outbound Marketing?
If you only implement Outbound Marketing, you will waste ammunition shooting in the dark and hitting someone here and there.
But if you implement Inbound Marketing together with Outbound, you ensure that you not only hit people in the dark, but also a multitude of targets illuminated by the sun — with no chance of missing!
Furthermore, it is the job of Inbound Marketing to nurture the relationship with leads, turning them from cold to hot in a way that prepares them for the accurate approach of your Outbound team!
I use and believe in this integration so much that, in my opinion, Inbound and Outbound will no longer be seen as separate strategies in the future — since both form the entry legs of the Y-shaped funnel that leads to the best (and biggest) sales!
To find out if your business is lacking a little more (or less) Inbound and Outbound Marketing, I recommend that you take the free Digital Marketing diagnosis here at Enjoy Minder as soon as possible!
Everyone knows that time is money, but when it comes to the Internet, time is authority — and if you’re not creating yours right this minute, your competitors certainly are!
Don’t waste time — your true success is right here!
