Will Inbound Marketing Ever Rule The Marketing World?

So, we at iSmart LOVE Inbound Marketing.

What’s not to love? Useful content for the right people, happy leads and more customers.

We have also covered the potential pitfalls of outbound marketing in a previous post. But, is outbound marketing truly dead? Is Inbound really the way to go?

People continue to use outbound marketing and even have some success with it.

Is there, perhaps a way to integrate both seemingly disparate marketing styles into your marketing strategy?

Check out the survey results from the Q2 2016 Inbound Marketing Effectiveness Benchmark Study Report

Image Source: Q2 2016 Inbound Marketing Effectiveness Benchmark Study Report

Most study participants agreed (84%) that a mix of outbound and inbound marketing was key to drive their business.

For inbound marketing, top 3 tactics were social media & SEO, (82%), blogging (60%) and pay-per-click advertising (41%)

For outbound marketing, top 3 tactics were email marketing (90%), tradeshows, events and conferences (62%) and press / media relations (61%).

Perplexed? In this article, I will share 2 possibilities of how outbound marketing and inbound marketing can work together to generate leads.

#1: Inbound Marketing Attracts, Outbound Marketing Nurtures And Closes

Think about how you found this blog post in the first place.

You were probably looking for information related to marketing tactics or lead generation and you found this blog post (yay you!). To look for that information, you probably found the blog post through either a social media post or typing some related keywords into Google.

These are all inbound marketing tactics, so it’s safe to say inbound plays a larger role in the start of the sales process.

But if you downloaded our eBook, you will be put in a lead nurturing workflow which sends you email messages on a regular basis. Or think about what happens when you click our Contact Us page. You want to hear from someone in the company who can help you on your lead generation query.

The usage of email and phone calls is where outbound marketing tactics come in later in the sales process to nurture and close leads to become customers.

#2: Outbound and Inbound Marketing Can Complement Each Other 

Let’s say you run a tradeshow to generate leads for your company.

At the tradeshow, you run into people who may not know of your company so these aren’t leads who are ready to buy (yet), but they are keen to learn more information and find out more about your company.

So, you get their contact details and send them some whitepapers to address specific questions they have about your company. These leads are then enrolled into a lead nurturing workflow which sends them more news and regular emails about your company.

In here we have an example of outbound marketing (events) promoting your inbound marketing content (whitepapers) which leads to lead nurturing via email (outbound / inbound) and finally potentially closing them as a customer (outbound).

So there we have it, inbound and outbound marketing need not be enemies! Instead of focusing on one style exclusively, you can also consider using both types of marketing for your marketing tactics.