Today, it becomes vital to anticipate even the slightest changes in the behavior and wishes of the customers, so inbound=personalized marketing sets the mode for the relationship between brands and consumers. The benefits of customized offers are clear, but the amount of data that needs to be taken into account is overwhelming. This is where ML technologies and custom software solutions come in.
Table of Contents
Outbound and inbound marketing approaches
The segregation into outbound and inbound marketing appeared relatively recently, namely when the internet became a powerful way of promoting a business. And, finally, how we all consume information widely influences the methods to attract customers. In the digital world, we have to introduce a fresh approach to marketing as well.
In recent years, traditional outbound marketing has lost its significance as most people experience advertising blindness. People no longer notice advertising where marketers are trying to sell head-on, so we should turn to another approach to attracting customers by applying inbound marketing.
What is outbound marketing?
Outbound marketing has been around for a long time and is used by a large number of companies around the world. It includes cold calling, mailing, TV and radio ads, banners, and other traffic-generating methods that are used by companies to this day. This is traditional marketing, which is the appeal of the brand to the audience.
Outbound marketing examples
Outbound marketing is about attracting customers through mass messaging. It includes:
– Outdoor advertising. This is a great option to announce your company to everyone passing by, but the audience is too wide and uninterested.
– TV advertising. This is not to say that the format of such advertising is dying out, but again it is designed for an extremely broad audience and is available only to large companies with ample marketing budgets.
– Cold calls. This is perhaps the most hated advertising by people. The conversion rate for this format tends to zero.
– Email distribution. It’s unpleasant when the company in which you left an e-mail starts spamming it with everything it can. This approach mostly only evokes bad associations.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing works the other way around and offers its content to users who need it. At the same time, the task is to simplify as much as possible access to content for these Internet users. Inbound marketing trends is targeted at a narrow audience and does everything to ensure user engagement is high.
Inbound marketing examples are:
– Social media and teaser advertising. Attracting people from social media is a great idea to get targeted traffic. Content that is useful and easy to understand, such as infographics and other visualizations, is very popular.
– Contextual & display advertising. This method of driving traffic is aimed at the target audience that is interested in the company’s services or products right now.
– SEO. Search engine optimization is an important stage in website promotion on the Internet to attract relevant traffic, which can later be converted into customers. Without this, the company’s quality material will remain on the last pages of the search engine. You need to understand that SEO promotion is almost useless if a company is not actively filling its website with useful and high-quality content.
– Blog. Businesses that blog on their site, on average, get more than half the traffic than their competitors who post only sales pages on their website. By posting articles useful for potential clients on the blog, a business increases their loyalty and confidence in the company. It is definitely worth allowing users to leave comments on articles, which will help make the blog more alive. As soon as a blog reader needs a business’s product or service, he will certainly become a client, because he is confident in your competence. Also, blogging is a great additional source of traffic from search engines.
– Webinars. The essence of online video broadcasting is to provide the interested audience with useful and high-quality information that they need. After a well-run webinar, viewers are essentially most likely to become your customers.
– Email marketing. It is worth distinguishing it from e-mail spam. If the user likes the blog, he can subscribe to new articles by leaving his email in a special form. After that, by sending a letter about the release of a new article on the site, the company will provide itself with additional free traffic. The current analog of email marketing is mailing on social networks. To motivate people to sign up for the company’s newsletter, give them something of value in return. It can be a discount on the purchase or payment of a service or high-quality and unique material in your area of business.
– Word of mouth. If your customers love what you do, they will definitely tell someone else about it. This is a free and the highest quality traffic source, as people trust their friends much more than other sources.
The main difference between inbound and outbound marketing campaigns
In outbound marketing, customers are responding to the advertisements that the business delivers. It seems simple enough, but not very effective. Outbound marketing implies the spread of information, while inbound marketing is aimed at attracting the target audience.
The key difference is that inbound marketing allows a company to engage customers with value to them, instead of cluttering their attention and surroundings with another discount announcement. With the help of Inbound, the company increases customer loyalty by trying to be as useful as possible to the target audience completely free of charge through the content.
For almost any niche, you can think of many options for the development of events. Starting cooperation with a company, a person begins to trust the business and subsequently becomes its client. In some cases, a person becomes a brand follower who is ready to give money for any offer from the company, which is almost impossible to achieve by just placing ads on banners on the street, TV, radio or newspapers.
What are the benefits of outbound marketing?
Inbound marketing is a more effective way to attract customers, and here are the pros:
– High conversion of a user into a customer, since he is interested in buying.
– The channel of communication with users acquires an expert media appearance and people begin to trust the company.
– It is more profitable to invest in inbound marketing as the client price is lower here.
At the same time, inbound marketing requires a professional approach with quality content. If you cannot create high-grade content, then you should not produce mediocre content, because it will not resonate with people. To catch what the content should be, you need to understand both how the customer base and lead generation are made, otherwise, the marketing costs will not pay off.
Let’s conclude
Today, a continued presence in the digital environment is of paramount importance to all brands, without exception. Both large and local businesses cannot afford to disappear from the line of sight of their potential clients. Looking at all of the above, we can conclude that inbound marketing is a much more effective and smart way of promoting a company, as it attracts visitors interested in buying.
Inbound marketing delivers personalized offerings, and machine learning is highly efficient in terms of data processing and speed of data analysis. With the integration of AI models, the marketers are able to collect and structure an incredible amount of information, visualize it into trends, and group the potential buyers by categories, and custom segments. This way, inbound marketing provides more efficiency in every action.
A marketer does not have enough time for analyzing huge amounts of information on a daily basis, while a machine has practically no such restrictions. The introduction of advanced AI technologies is of fundamental importance in marketing because it constantly requires a person-oriented action. The proper implementation of inbound marketing is possible only with the support of advanced IT practices.
