Why Your Growth Team Needs Inbound and Outbound Marketing

Originally published on Growth Marketing Conference Blog by Sujan Patel.

Broadly speaking, marketing tactics can be placed into two distinct groups: inbound marketing tactics and outbound marketing tactics.

Inbound tactics help potential customers discover you on their terms. This includes most forms of content marketing, SEO, social media, and email marketing (but only when the customer has specifically opted-in).

BENEFITS OF OUTBOUND MARKETING

Outbound tactics are based around activities that involve the business reaching out to the customer. This can include cold calling, direct mail campaigns, and most types of advertising.    

They’re also often described as interruption-based and permission-based marketing – you can probably guess which one is which.

Outbound has fallen out of favor with many marketers in recent years, but this doesn’t mean making the first move with customers doesn’t have its advantages.

• Outbound marketing can get you in front of huge numbers of people very quickly.
• It gets fast results (in terms of how quickly leads become sales).
• It’s easily scalable
• Direct forms of outbound marketing allow you to talk to customers, build relationships with them, and understand how you can market to them more effectively.

BENEFITS OF INBOUND MARKETING

According to HubSpot’s 2017 State of Inbound Report, 71% of companies primarily conduct inbound marketing.

That’s a significant chunk of businesses, so why are they doing it? When outbound marketing gets you fast, scalable results, why are so many companies choosing to decrease their use of outbound marketing tactics in favor of inbound activities?

• Inbound gets more sustainable, long-term results than outbound marketing.
• It can effectively target customers at all stages of the sales funnel
• It’s preferred by consumers because it doesn’t interrupt their flow and targets them on their terms.

WHY YOUR GROWTH TEAM NEEDS BOTH…

The way most marketers think about outbound marketing has shifted. It’s frequently viewed as outdated. Many marketers think it just doesn’t work anymore – period. They believe only inbound tactics are worth their time and investment.

In fact, when asked what they think the most overrated marketing tactic is, 32% of marketers said paid advertising.

I think marketers with this mindset are missing out.

Outbound marketing isn’t the problem – it’s how we use it.

Traditionally, outbound marketers would relentlessly push their product onto prospects at all costs. It was largely seen as a numbers game. It didn’t matter whether a prospect was interested – get in front of enough of them, and someone’s going to buy.

This has (by and large), changed.

While we’re still reaching out to customers directly, we’re not focusing on what our product can do, but what it can do to help the customer. We need to overcome objections by understanding customers’ pain points and where our product fits in.

The result is a set of tactics that can drive great results alone, but are even more effective when used alongside an inbound marketing strategy.

Here’s why your growth team should be using both inbound and outbound marketing tactics.

• It allows you to more effectively target every stage of the sales funnel.
• It drives sales immediately.
• It helps future-proof your bottom line.
• It makes it easier to respond to the immediate needs of the company (i.e. to scale up or scale down).
• It can help you stand out from the competition.

Since so many companies are rejecting traditional outbound activities, competition for attention in these areas will have understandably dropped. Consequently, it’s easier to stand out and get prospects to listen to you.

By a similar token, if your competitors are using both inbound and outbound tactics, you need to be using them both too if you want to ensure you’re on a level playing field.

For more information about inbound and outbound tactics and why it's important to use both, read the full blog post here.