The companies in this world of technology are showing drastic changes in remodeling their marketing strategies. Before the Internet was born in the 1990s, outbound marketing, or traditional marketing, was holding its flags high in promoting the products to the customers, but the Internet has brought in remarkable changes to the marketing landscape with Inbound Marketing* becoming popular among the companies. At present, according to research done by HubSpot’s 2013 State of Inbound Marketing, 60% of companies have adopted some element of the Inbound Marketing methodology into their overall strategy (read more about the difference between traditional marketing and Inbound Marketing).
Companies are taking wide steps in analyzing the needs and wants of the population to build a stronger relationship. Besides this, companies are adopting a pull rather than push marketing strategy to promote their products in a better way possible to reach the targeted customers in a short period of time. These are the things that can be done by Inbound Marketing and not Traditional Marketing.
Not to say that Traditional Marketing is dead. Evidently, we can still see outbound marketing being used around us, and companies are using it for various reasons as listed below.
- Quick Return on Investment (ROI) and test of nurture sequence
- Low ongoing content creation costs/time
- Potentially greater control over targeting
- Direct leads to landing pages of your choice
- Reaches a large number of people
- Familiarity of the media: Television, Newspaper, etc.
Television and print advertisements are everywhere and are constantly being seen. They have been around for a long time and people are familiar with them compared to some of the newer and more technologically reliant ways of consuming inbound content. A huge chunk of potential customers may not be looking at blogs or e-books for answers and could be relying on a strong outbound message to alert them to your product.
But as consumers of the 21st century continue to customize their information channels, it becomes more feasible to combine outbound with Inbound for a better marketing strategy. For example, emailing is usually considered an outbound strategy, but if the email were to contain relevant content that answered a customer’s questions, it would be a good blend of the two. A social media strategy using something like promotional tweets that linked to the content on your site could also be a good strategy that integrates the two strategies. The important thing to remember is that it needs to provide value to the customer in some way. Make sure that the content is relevant and useful, just as your inbound strategy is and they will work well together. If you don’t have an inbound strategy in place however, now is a great time to do so.
Instead carrying the perception that Inbound Marketing and Traditional Marketing cannot coexist, look at them as complements helping each other reach a common goal.
* Inbound marketing is a form of digital marketing that involves SEO, social media, blog and landing pages to generate sales leads.
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