Inbound
Inbound marketing helps bring customers to your company. The company goes directly to the customer. Most of the time, this is done through various prospecting campaigns, mailings, LinkedIn and social networks in general.
Outbound
Outbound represents traditional advertising. Its aim is to make your product or service known to as many potential customers as possible. As a general rule, therefore, it’s more about volume on a broad target, whereas inbound has a lower volume on a precise target. The most common form is the marketing campaign. The idea is that you make it easy for prospects to find what they’re looking for and convert into customers.
When and how to use them?
Inbound is favored by small and new businesses because it is often less costly and more accessible than outbound. Indeed, thanks to the many digital tools available, it’s very easy to implement inbound marketing strategies. The players “specialized” in this type of approach are business developers and growth hackers.
They use digital tools as effectively as possible to generate the maximum number of leads interested in the product or service in question. Being an inbound marketing strategy: the inbound approach is based on “quality” rather than quantity; it doesn’t really matter how many potential customers you come into contact with if none of them are really interested in your products and services. In concrete terms, it will be much more effective to target startup CEOs to sell consulting services to SMEs than to target all CEOs in France.
Once a company is using Inbound to its full potential, or has reached a certain size, it’s often a good idea to implement an Outbound strategy in parallel. The most common type of outbound is direct marketing. This strategy focuses on developing a one-to-one relationship with the customer, starting from the moment they first interact with the company’s product or service. Most of the time, this strategy takes the form of “ads”, i.e. targeted advertising campaigns. This advertising will be distributed on search engines, social networks and selected sites, depending on targeting.
Inbound and outbound have their advantages and disadvantages, but in the end, there can only be one winner. Which do you think would be most effective for your company? If you have an idea in mind but would like to benefit from Stepward‘s expertise, call on us!
