Would You Buy A Used Car From A Friend Or A Dealer? Inbound Versus Outbound Marketing 

Imagine you’re at a car show. You see a car you’re interested in buying but only after you see the woman handing out flyers in front of it. She’s wearing a plastic skirt the size of a kitchen towel and her face has more paint than the Louvre. She stops you and gives you a leaflet, and you ask her whether the car can hold two children’s seats and a pushchair.
She smiles and offers you another flyer.

The next booth also has a car you’re interested in buying. This time, there’s no booth babe, but there is a stall where a woman in a suit sits next to an interactive screen showing a family enjoying a drive. You approach and after taking a virtual tour of the car, adjusting its trim and adding accessories, you ask the woman about the car seats and the pushchair. She laughs and tells you a story about how she once managed to squeeze in her three kids, their three friends, two pushchairs and the family dog. They even managed to find a place for her six-foot two husband.

This is the difference with outbound and inbound marketing. Both communicate in order to reach audiences and convert them into customers, but they do it differently.

1- Inbound marketing is meaningful and respectful; outbound marketing is… not.
Inbound marketing is about creating a long-lasting relationship with customers. It offers audiences added value, so people who consume the content do so willingly. It’s relevant to their lives and enhances them. Inbound marketing is in sync with human behavior and touches people at their core.  As in every relationship, it starts with consent, and the communication cannot be sustained if it’s one sided. That’s why Inbound marketing is always permission-based. Audiences only receive content they asked to see. Once the relationship begins, the brand will be talking to leads with a genuine interest — an audience that found  their content attractive and interesting enough to opt in.

When someone chooses to receive inbound marketing content, the ROI from that audience is much, much higher. The gap between the choice to talk to the brand and the choice to pay the brand is much smaller too.

Outbound marketers take our attention by tricking their way into our awareness. To maintain that attention they have to keep feeding audiences with more and more stimulation. They don’t ask for permission to communicate so they have to resort to  different kinds of tactics to remain a part of our lives. That’s what makes outbound marketing so loud. It has to shout to make people look.

2- Inbound marketing is a dialogue; outbound marketing Is... a monologue.
Relationships are all about communication. If we know how to talk to each other, we know how to be part of each others’ lives. Outbound marketers don’t talk. They broadcast to audiences. Inbound marketers initiate and sustain conversations.

Audiences have to feel that the company is a part of their lives, that it resonates with them and that their voices are being heard, intuitively, by a company that understands them. To create this relationship, the Inbound marketing team puts all its efforts into creating a long-lasting and engaging conversation.

Outbound marketers talk but they don’t maintain conversations between the brand and its customers. They might create a buzz so that people will talk about the campaign they launched. They’ll provoke, use humor, sell a dream or make audiences feel that their lives lack something and need a certain product to gain happiness. They’ll get people to think and talk to their friends about that need. But they won’t talk to the audiences themselves. That’s where the conversation ends. It’s one sided and it doesn’t develop. What kind of a relationship is that?  
It’s the relationship built by the old way of selling and it doesn’t work in new media.

3- Inbound marketers remain in control; outbound marketers... rent control
Inbound marketing is not only about empowering customers. It’s also about empowering the brand by creating unique tools that allow it to communicate with customers. While outbound marketers need to use and pay the media to expose their campaigns to the public, inbound marketers have the means to pull customers into their world. Of course, inbound marketers still need to pay the media to reach their audiences but the strategy is different and the budget is not focused on buying media. The campaigns are pinpointed to well-defined personas, the costs are usually much lower, and the goal is to engage them with an authentic customer experience and a meaningful conversation.

Inbound marketers remain in control of the message, of the audience database and of the distribution channels. As people opt-in, they provide information about themselves to the company. When the company wants to reach them, they have their blog, their social media platforms and a long list of email addresses that they can use to talk with their leads at any time.

Outbound marketers pay advertising bills; inbound marketers build an asset.

4- Inbound marketing is content; outbound marketing is... next to it.
Outbound marketers look for their target audience then broadcast their sales messages through advertising. That advertising today may come as a TV ad, a billboard poster, a print commercial or a web banner. They all compete for attention.

There was a time when advertising tried to disguise itself as content or placed products to implant the brands into our awareness, but audiences can smell those ads from miles away and know they’re fake.

Inbound marketing takes a different approach. It creates genuinely valuable content to engage with the customer’s interests and wants. It looks at customers’ life cycles and tries to be relevant to them so that they will make  an educated decision when they need to make a purchase.

Inbound marketing is about creating the content. That content may be made up of targeted YouTube videos, infographics and blog posts distributed and shared on social media. It’s about building a content infrastructure to hold the brand’s identity.

While outbound marketers attach themselves to content, inbound marketers are the content.

5- Inbound marketing is part of the brand’s operating system; outbound marketing is...an add-on.
Companies used to delegate their activities to different departments according to their functions. Today’s firm try to take a more holistic approach. They understand that every department affects the others, that the customer doesn’t see the difference between the various segments of the same company. To them, the brand is one entity.

While outbound marketing can only serve one function in an organization - to advertise -  inbound marketing takes part in all the corporate’s activities, delivering engaging content as part of the organization’s ecosystem.

You will find inbound marketing integrated into customer service; embedded into sales enhancement tools; in the service of different distribution channels; pulling potential customers into the corporate’s world of content to convert them into leads; and in delighting existing customers in the retaining process.

Inbound is everywhere, it touches the very heart and soul of the corporate’s communication agenda.

Inbound marketing and outbound marketing come from the same place. Each has a purpose and each has a reason for its existence.

Outbound marketing came first. It opened up the way and made everything possible. But with the development of social media and technology, marketers needed new solutions, an approach that answered the needs and challenges of audiences used to new forms of communication.

Both approaches have a place in a business’s marketing strategy. But I know who I’d buy a car from.

To learn more about inbound marketing and to understand what it can do for your business, contact us at contact@astelo.com.

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