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Amol Ghemud Published: August 14, 2018
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If you pay attention to marketing trends, you’ve heard people throwing around the terms “inbound marketing” and “outbound marketing,” but what do they really mean?
Inbound and outbound marketing aren’t just jargon, but these terms embody a kind of cultural shift in the entire concept of how marketing works, particularly across channels. Both of these concepts can prove very useful for your startup and can provide a well laid down plan to acquire and retain customers.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is a marketing concept where marketers attempt to “pull” in potential customers with interesting content. Also called content marketing, it involves creating blog posts, social media, infographics, white papers, email newsletters, and other content that people actually want to read.
Search engine optimization, paid discovery, and paid search help people find marketers’ content. If it’s engaging enough, they interact with it, reading and sharing, and come away with a positive impression of the brand that influences later purchasing decisions. Inbound marketing is very hands-off and indirect: there’s never a noticeable sales pitch.
Inbound marketing nudges customers down the sales funnel by increasing their engagement with the brand. Here’s an illustration of how it works.
Inbound is designed to bring potential customers to your startup who are actively in the market. It’s about getting found when they’re looking, rather than forcing your message on people who may or may not be interested.
Another way of looking at it is that inbound marketing is designed to better align your organization with the Buyer’s Journey, the natural process a modern buyer goes through when searching for a solution online.
The Buyer’s Journey
1.Awareness Stage
Prospect has a problem they want to solve or an opportunity they want to seize.
2. Consideration Stage
Prospect has researched their problem, understands it, and is aware of potential solutions.
3. Decision Stage
Prospect has narrowed down the products/services and must decide which one to purchase.
As an example, let’s talk about Clara. Clara owns a company that sells fancy electronic gadgets for teenagers. Cool, right?
Clara is looking understand how she can use different marketing strategies to drive sales for her growing startup.
After reading several marketing blogs on the topic, Clara decides that inbound marketing is the best strategy because she’s looking to invest in long-term revenue growth.
In her research, she found several agencies who can help her implement inbound marketing and reached out to a few whose service offering aligned with her needs.
Sound familiar?
Typical inbound marketing tactics that help take someone through the buyer’s journey include:
Blogging
Social media
Email marketing
Content creation
Lead magnets
SEO
Inbound marketing tactics like these are designed to help prospects discover the product offerings of your startup in the early stages of the Buyer’s Journey and to educate them on the benefits of your solution, all while building trust throughout the process.
Outbound marketing is what used to just be known as “marketing.” It’s interruptive and it pushes itself at an audience, whether the audience wants it or not. TV and radio ads, telemarketing, banner and display ads, billboards, newspaper and magazine ads, cold calling, pop-ups and pop-unders, and contextual ads are all examples of outbound marketing.
Often termed as traditional marketing activities, outbound marketing makes an attempt to bombard the consumers with the startup’s product offerings. Outbound marketing has fallen out of favor in the last 10 years. Oversaturation — especially on the internet — caused people to start ignoring display advertising.
Since the advent of the ad blocker, it’s only gotten worse. Click through rates for display ads are now at a dismal 0.05%, and according to Hubspot’s State of Inbound 2017, marketers consider paid advertising like print, outdoor, and broadcast to be the most overrated marketing tactic.
As opposed to marketing to people who are already looking for a solution like yours, outbound marketing aims at trying to reach as many people as possible, whether or not they are active buyers. It seldom depends on the hit rate in case of outbound marketing.
In general, outbound marketing tends to market to a larger volume of less-targeted people, using tactics like:
Commercials
Pay Per Click ads
Print ads
Billboards
Cold-calling
Direct mail
Unlike inbound marketing, outbound normally doesn’t take the Buyer’s Journey into consideration.
What Is the Difference Between Inbound and Outbound Marketing?
To review, here’s the difference between inbound and outbound tactics.
Inbound
Outbound
Pulls in interested readers
Pushes at everybody, regardless of interest
Written for the consumer’s needs
Written for the product’s needs
Interactive and fluid
Inert, one-way
Draws in customers
Seeks out customers
Is part of content consumption
Disrupts content consumption
Natural habitat: blogs, social media, opt-in emails, search, influencer marketing
Natural habitat: display ads, billboards, telemarketer scripts, magazines, TV ads
Choosing between Inbound and Outbound
Anyone who says that either inbound or outbound is always superior is giving you a biased answer. To determine which one is best, you have to consider your specific business, audience, and your marketing objectives. Now all these parameters tend to vary according to the product offerings you have and also the audience you want to have.
Let us now consider the advantages of both inbound and outbound marketing in isolation.
What Makes Inbound the Best?
One of the biggest strengths of inbound marketing is that it is focused on providing value to your prospects. It’s educational and often non-promotional.
Since inbound marketing aligns with the Buyer’s Journey, it builds a relationship between your prospects and your brand. This also attracts prospects to your brand at the right time, as opposed to interrupting them at a time when they are NOT in the market for what you offer.
For this reason, buyers prefer inbound marketing over outbound marketing. Instead of being annoying, it helps them.
The other major strength of inbound marketing is the long-term ROI.
Generally speaking, inbound marketing requires a higher upfront investment and brings slower results for the first several months. However, those initial stages are necessary to build your digital marketing assets, increase your presence online, and rank higher in search engines.
Over time, the value of those assets increases at a higher rate than they cost to maintain or improve. Digital assets like blog posts and premium offers can continue to generate leads years after they were originally created without costing an additional penny.
Here is a checklist you need to go through before you start implementing Inbound Marketing. It will give you an overview – how you should begin devising a plan for you busines with Inbound Marketing.
Ready to hit the “Go” button on your campaign?
What Makes Outbound the Best?
The biggest strength of outbound marketing is its ability to get in front of a large number of people quickly and build awareness.
If done correctly, you can launch an outbound marketing campaign, get seen by millions, and have new customers within a few weeks, however, the results are more dependent on the money you invest.
Usually have to spend more to see more results and when you stop spending money, the benefits stop. Unlike inbound, you don’t get many tangible, long-term assets that continue to generate leads with outbound marketing.
Also, outbound marketing tends to be more disliked.
In fact, entire businesses have been built on the premise of regaining the control that buyers have lost to outbound marketing. Take, for example, Netflix’s attractiveness over TV’s advertisement laden programming or the incredible success of AdBlock on the web.
The 5 main benefits of inbound marketing versus outbound marketing
It’s easy to boost brand awareness. In the simplest terms, inbound marketing generates awareness about your brand. When you pair informational content and a targeted SEO strategy, you’ll be closer to that coveted #1 spot on Google’s search results. It’s no secret that the higher your rank, the more awareness or eyeballs your brand will receive – and the more opportunities potential customers will have to engage with your company and its product offerings. The key is to work on how to promote your blog in a way that establishes your brand as a leader in your particular industry.
You’ll retain customers.
Finding new customers is probably at the top of your marketing objectives, but once you’ve got them you need to keep them. The simplest way to do that is to build a relationship with your current customer base. Utilizing inbound marketing options lets you know your customers and what they need. You learn how to keep them interested in and informed about your brand, and it allows you to offer exceptional customer service.
It’s easier to find new customers. The most common ways customers will find you these days is via blogs, organic searches, and a variety of social medial platforms. Instead of employing a full-time sales force, you can simply hire an SEO agency to get customers to come directly to you.
It costs less. As a start-up, you’re probably working on a shoestring budget. The good news about inbound marketing is that it’s much more affordable than outbound techniques.
It takes the pressure off your company. One of the first things you’ll notice when you implement an inbound strategy as part of a plan to reach your marketing objectives is that it’s much more analytical than outbound marketing. This allows you to more easily measure results and to gain specific leads. Potential customers have a personal interest of their own accord, which allows for more efficiency – and less stress – in your marketing plan.
Want to use Inbound Marketing to generate leads for your business?
Determining the best fit for your startup
There are startups that have found tremendous success by exclusively using inbound marketing or outbound marketing. There are also plenty who have done well by using both. Ultimately, you have to figure out what’s right for your company by considering the following:
Your Market
First, you have to consider who your ideal buyers are and how they normally shop for what you offer. Where do they go to learn more about the types solutions you offer?
To get a better idea, take a look at your industry as a whole and your direct competitors. What marketing tactics are most common and seem to be most effective?
For any startup understanding the market and the competition is of prime importance. It provides the founders with a holistic view of the dynamics associated with their startup.
Your Goals
What are you trying to achieve?
Do you want to build brand awareness?
Drive traffic?
How many customers are you aiming to get and what’s your timeline for that goal?
Inbound marketing is the best long-term strategy for stratups, but it’s probably not going to dramatically increase business in the first few months. Outbound marketing, on other hand, can help you get customers in the door quickly, but it comes with diminishing returns.
More often than not, the best strategy is to combine a little of both, while taking an inbound approach to both – meaning you are measuring results accurately and you’re aiming for long-term brand-building alongside short-term growth.
Your Brand
Finally, you should consider how the marketing tactics you deploy will affect your brand’s image. Launching an aggressive cold-calling might get some sales upfront for your startup, but how will it affect your reputation long-term?
You only want to use marketing tactics that your brand can be proud of and that your customers would approve of if they knew how you executed them. More often than not, the truth comes out and it’s incredibly difficult to overcome a bad reputation.
Developing a marketing strategy
If you are just getting started developing a marketing strategy for your startup business, then the path forward is clear.
Inbound marketing is your best bet
It is more effective and will ultimately cost less. You might also invest in more targeted traditional marketing if there is real evidence that you can reach your audience, but there is no reason to invest in large mass media advertising campaigns. Any traditional marketing that you do should drive people to your online resources.
If you are heavily invested in traditional marketing, you are probably seeing a drop in the effectiveness of your efforts. It may be time to start investing some of your marketing budget into inbound marketing. You can then align your traditional marketing campaigns with your online resources over time. As you move forward, you can shift more and more of your budget to inbound marketing.
The way people communicate is changing rapidly. Inbound marketing leverages these changes to more effectively promote your business. If you want to expand your audience, find new customers and grow, inbound marketing strategies are the way to go.
The role of marketing automation
Marketing automation software isn’t strictly required to implement the inbound approach to marketing. It can, however, help you do so at speed and with a, crucial, data-driven view.
Marketing automation is the technology which can connect data from all marketing channels with customer records in your CRM, allowing for a true buyer-centric, multi-channel approach within which analysis and continuous improvement is possible.
So while the use of marketing automation may not be mandatory, we believe it is a necessity if you are to see the benefits of inbound within a reasonable timeframe and budget.
Conclusion
Given the way that it aligns with the preferences of modern buyers, compound returns and lower costs per acquisition, inbound marketing should be considered the essential foundation of any startup’s marketing plan.
Outbound marketing channels can still be effective, and are perfectly acceptable as part of a full marketing mix. But relying on them alone for results is likely to lead to disappointment.
Watch: Inbound vs Outbound Marketing — Which is Best for Startups?
For Curious Minds
Inbound marketing's core philosophy is to attract customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them. Instead of pushing interruptive messages, it pulls people in by offering solutions when they are actively looking, which builds trust and aligns with modern buying behaviors. This 'pull' method is highly effective because it meets customers on their own terms, providing value before asking for anything in return. For example, a startup like Clara's gadget company would create blog posts about the coolest tech for teens, drawing in an interested audience naturally. The goal is to be a helpful resource, not a disruption. Key elements that make this approach work include:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): This ensures your helpful content appears when prospects search for information related to their problems.
Content Creation: Developing blog posts, videos, and social media content that addresses the specific pain points and interests of your target audience.
Lead Magnets: Offering valuable resources like white papers or guides in exchange for contact information, converting visitors into leads.
This strategy focuses on building a long-term relationship, positioning your brand as a credible authority. By earning attention instead of buying it, you create a more sustainable marketing engine, as explored in the full article.
The Buyer's Journey provides the essential context for inbound marketing by mapping out the natural process a consumer follows when making a purchase decision. It allows you to align your content with the prospect's mindset at each phase, ensuring you deliver the right message at the right time. Your goal is not to force a sale but to guide and educate the buyer toward a solution. The journey's stages have distinct marketing objectives:
Awareness Stage: Here, the prospect is experiencing a problem but may not have a name for it. Your goal is to educate them, not sell to them. Use blog posts and infographics to help them understand their issue.
Consideration Stage: The prospect has now defined their problem and is researching potential solutions. Your objective is to show them how your type of product can help. Content like white papers and case studies works well here.
Decision Stage: The prospect has narrowed their options and is ready to choose. Your aim is to prove why your specific solution is the best choice. Offer product demos, free trials, and detailed comparisons.
Successfully navigating these stages builds trust and positions your brand as the obvious choice. Discover more about tailoring content for this journey in our complete guide.
A startup must weigh the immediate but often fleeting impact of outbound against the slower, more sustainable growth of inbound. Outbound marketing, like display ads or cold calling, can generate quick visibility, but it is often costly and its effects stop when you stop paying. In contrast, inbound marketing is an investment in creating assets, like blog posts and SEO authority, that deliver compounding returns over time. The key trade-off is short-term, interruptive reach versus long-term, organic attraction. For example, Clara's gadget company could run a banner ad campaign for a quick sales spike or write a series of evergreen blog posts that attract teen customers for years. Factors to consider in your decision include:
Cost: Outbound often requires a larger, continuous budget, while inbound's costs are front-loaded in content creation but have a lower long-term cost per acquisition.
Audience Receptiveness: Inbound connects with audiences actively looking for solutions, leading to higher engagement, whereas outbound pushes a message on people who may not be interested.
Asset Durability: A great blog post can generate leads for years, becoming a valuable company asset. A TV ad's value disappears the moment it stops airing.
Most startups find a blend is effective, but prioritizing inbound builds a stronger foundation. Explore how to balance these approaches by reading the full analysis.
For a company like Clara's, which sells fancy electronic gadgets to teenagers, inbound marketing creates a natural path to purchase. Instead of disruptive ads, the strategy focuses on being the cool, helpful resource teenagers seek out themselves. Here is how specific tactics guide them through the Buyer's Journey:
Awareness: A teen might search for 'best headphones for gaming'. Clara's company could have a blog post titled 'Top 5 Gaming Headsets That Give You an Edge', optimized with SEO to rank high in search results. This makes the teen aware of the brand as a helpful expert.
Consideration: After reading the blog, the teen understands their options. The post could link to a detailed comparison guide or a video review on social media, helping them evaluate different types of gadgets.
Decision: The guide could feature one of Clara's products with customer testimonials and a special offer, nudging the now-informed teen to make a purchase on her site.
This entire process feels organic to the customer, building trust and a positive brand association along the way. Learn more about applying these tactics by exploring the full article.
Over the past decade, several traditional outbound marketing tactics have seen a dramatic decline in effectiveness. This is largely because they are interruptive by nature and fail to respect the consumer's time or attention in a world of information overload. The modern consumer has become adept at tuning out unsolicited messages. The most notable examples of declining tactics include:
Banner and Display Ads: The rise of 'banner blindness' and ad-blocking software means a significant portion of these ads are never even seen by the target audience.
Cold Calling and Telemarketing: These methods are widely viewed as intrusive and are often met with immediate resistance, leading to extremely low conversion rates.
Pop-Up Ads: These are particularly disliked by internet users as they disrupt the browsing experience, creating a negative brand association rather than a positive one.
These methods push a product onto an audience, whether they are interested or not. As the article highlights, outbound marketing has struggled because it cannot compete with the targeted, value-driven approach of inbound. Dive deeper into the data behind this shift in our complete analysis.
To build a long-term revenue engine, a startup must first establish a strong foundation at the top of the sales funnel. For Clara's gadget company, the initial focus should be on attracting the right audience by providing value before asking for a sale. This builds brand authority and a pipeline of future customers. The first three implementation steps should be:
Define Your Target Persona: Before creating any content, develop a detailed profile of your ideal customer. For Clara, this would involve understanding the specific interests, online habits, and problems of her teenage gadget-loving audience.
Conduct Keyword Research: Identify the search terms your target persona uses when looking for information related to your products. This SEO-focused step ensures the content you create will actually be discovered by potential customers.
Start a Blog with High-Value Content: Create and publish blog posts that answer your persona's most pressing questions and address their problems. This content should be educational and engaging, positioning your brand as a go-to resource in the gadget space.
Executing these foundational steps is critical for attracting qualified traffic. Learn how to scale this initial effort by reading the full guide.
The future of outbound marketing depends on its ability to adapt to a world that prioritizes user consent and value. As consumers gain more control over what they see, traditional interruptive methods will continue their decline, which has been happening for the last 10 years. However, outbound is not disappearing, it is evolving to become more data-driven, personalized, and integrated with inbound principles. The strategies that survive will be those that feel less like interruptions and more like relevant, timely suggestions. We can expect to see a few key shifts:
Smarter Ad Targeting: Rather than broad banner ad campaigns, outbound will use sophisticated data to reach highly specific audience segments who have shown prior interest.
Permission-Based Approaches: Tactics like opt-in email lists or sponsored content in niche publications will become more common, as they respect the user's choice to engage.
Integration with Inbound: Outbound channels may be used to promote valuable inbound assets, like a white paper or webinar, rather than just pushing a direct sales pitch.
Ultimately, the line between inbound and outbound will blur. To learn more about navigating this changing landscape, explore the complete article.
A common and costly mistake startups make is creating content that is too self-promotional rather than genuinely helpful. They fall into the trap of talking about their product's features instead of addressing the customer's actual problems. This approach undermines the core principle of inbound marketing, which is to build trust by providing value first. Content that reads like a sales pitch during the early stages of the Buyer's Journey will repel potential customers who are simply seeking information. To avoid this pitfall, your startup should:
Focus on Problems, Not Products: In the Awareness and Consideration stages, your content should revolve around the prospect's challenges and questions. For example, Clara's startup should blog about 'how to choose a gadget' rather than 'why our gadget is the best'.
Map Content to the Buyer's Journey: Create different types of content tailored to each stage, ensuring you are educating first and selling much later in the process.
Use a Customer-Centric Voice: Write from the perspective of the customer. Use 'you' and 'your' to speak directly to their needs and demonstrate a clear understanding of their world.
By prioritizing education over promotion, you build credibility and attract a more qualified audience. The full article offers more insights on creating content that truly resonates.
Traditional outbound campaigns often fail because they operate on a logic of interruption and scale, not precision and relevance. Tactics like banner ads and telemarketing push a message to a broad audience, a large portion of which has no interest in the product. This results in wasted ad spend and low conversion rates, making it difficult to generate a positive ROI. The core problem is that these methods force a conversation with people who are not actively looking for a solution. Inbound marketing solves this fundamental issue by completely flipping the model. Instead of you finding customers, they find you. It achieves this by:
Attracting Active Seekers: Through SEO and content creation, inbound connects you with prospects at the exact moment they are researching a problem your business can solve.
Building Trust Over Time: By providing helpful content through blogs and social media, inbound marketing nurtures a relationship with potential buyers, making them more receptive to a sales conversation later.
Lowering Acquisition Costs: Creating durable content assets provides long-term value, attracting leads for months or years without continuous ad spend, unlike a short-lived TV or radio ad.
This permission-based approach ensures your marketing efforts are focused on an engaged, receptive audience. Read the complete analysis to see how this impacts business growth.
Email newsletters and social media are crucial for building trust because they create consistent, non-transactional touchpoints with your audience. Unlike a direct sales pitch, these tactics focus on delivering ongoing value and fostering a sense of community around your brand. This steady engagement creates a positive impression long before a customer is ready to make a purchase. For a company like Clara's, this means becoming a trusted source for gadget news, not just a seller of products. These tactics build trust in specific ways:
Email Newsletters: By sending curated content, tips, and industry news directly to a subscriber's inbox, you are providing value without an immediate ask. This demonstrates expertise and keeps your brand top-of-mind in a helpful, non-intrusive manner.
Social Media Engagement: Interacting with followers, sharing useful content from others, and running polls or Q&A sessions shows that your brand is approachable and invested in the community's interests. It's a two-way conversation, not a one-way broadcast.
Both methods nurture leads by consistently proving that your brand's primary goal is to help. The full post further details how to cultivate these relationships for long-term loyalty.
In the Decision stage, your prospect has defined their problem and identified potential solutions, so your content must now focus on convincing them that your offering is the best choice. At this critical point, you need to shift from broad education to specific, product-focused proof. The most effective assets are those that make it easy for a buyer to compare options and visualize success with your product. For Clara's gadget company, this means demonstrating clear superiority over alternatives. Effective Decision stage assets include:
Case Studies and Testimonials: These provide social proof by showing how other, similar customers have succeeded with your product.
Free Trials or Live Demos: Allowing prospects to experience your product firsthand is one of the most powerful ways to remove risk and prove its value.
Detailed Comparison Guides: An honest, feature-by-feature comparison between your product and a direct competitor can build immense trust and position you as the superior option.
Structure these assets to be direct and benefit-oriented, clearly answering the question, 'Why you?'. Explore how to craft compelling Decision-stage content in our full guide.
Paid search and paid discovery are critical accelerators for an inbound marketing strategy, but they are still fundamentally 'pull' tactics. Unlike traditional ads that interrupt, these paid channels work by placing your helpful content in front of people who are already actively searching for answers. They align with user intent, which is the defining characteristic of inbound marketing. While they involve ad spend, they do not function like interruptive outbound tactics. Their specific roles in an inbound strategy include:
Paid Search (e.g., Google Ads): This allows you to target users based on the specific keywords they are searching for. You are not pushing an ad on someone randomly; you are answering a direct query, making it a powerful tool for capturing high-intent traffic for all stages of the Buyer's Journey.
Paid Discovery (e.g., Social Media Ads): This involves promoting your content to audiences on platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn based on their interests and behaviors. It helps your valuable blog posts and lead magnets get discovered by the right people, even if they do not follow you yet.
These methods are simply a way to pay for better placement in the path of an already-curious audience. Discover how to integrate these paid tactics into your content strategy by reading the complete article.
Amol has helped catalyse business growth with his strategic & data-driven methodologies. With a decade of experience in the field of marketing, he has donned multiple hats, from channel optimization, data analytics and creative brand positioning to growth engineering and sales.
Growth Strategy and Planning
