As our daily life Internet gains prominence in our physical world, companies selling products and services are increasing their online presence. To do so, they resort to strategies and tactics that ensure their omnipresence in both worlds, with the main task of attracting and retaining customers who buy their products.
In this race for customers' attention, strategies such as Inbound Marketing and Outbound Marketing have emerged as protagonists and although they are radically different in their forms, both techniques have found in online communication an ideal medium through which to achieve their goals.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound Marketing is based on attracting customers through non-intrusive techniques that use content related to the needs and interests of our target audience to attract them to our brand and products.
Inbound Marketing Strategy
In Inbound Marketing, content is the king and the strategy to get the user to approach the brand is to create, through these contents, links with the customer and establish a relationship of trust and support that favors their interest in our products and services, as well as their loyalty.
To achieve this attention on the contents, it is basic and essential to optimize the SEO search engine, which makes our website, our contents and brand visible, makes us relevant and also contributes to our authority.
To achieve this optimization and positioning, SEO will be in charge of indicating which words are trending in searches related to our content, will improve the structure of the web to allow a correct user experience, will implement a good strategy of referral links or link building and will take care of other aspects such as the integration of CRM tools or user metrics.
All this will make it possible for our content to be positioned and that in a totally "natural" way and without any intrusion, all those contents written according to the interests of a certain group of customers, awaken their interest and attract them to our brand.
Inbound Marketing Tools
- Throughout the whole process of customer attraction and loyalty, the Inbound Marketing strategy has a wide variety of tools to achieve its goal:
- Blogs
- Landing page
- Lead Creation
- Calls to action
- Intelligent content
- Workflows, ...
What is outbound Marketing?
Unlike Inbound Marketing, outbound Marketing is based on a totally traditional commercial approach, in which the product or service being sold is the only protagonist of the communication.
Outbound Marketing Strategy
To reach the public, outbound strategies use invasive methods that address broad audiences, without a specific target, with the intention of reaching the maximum number of possible interested parties.
Outbound Marketing strategies are based on one-way communication, from the brand to the customer. The company shows the value of its products and services and tries to convince the public to buy them.
All this operation is implemented without the customer's request, even before he has made a search or has shown previous interest in a specific product or service.
Outbound Marketing Tools
In Outbound Marketing, since there is no specific target audience segment, the communication reaches many users, although it may not be of interest to any of them. To achieve this massive distribution, companies use resources such as:
- Pop-ups
- Advertisements inserted in videos
- Banners
- Email campaigns for which companies use powerful email marketing software in Spanish, with multiple integrated tools that allow from automating mass mailings to A/B testing, comprehensive monitoring of the actions of each recipient (open rate, clicks on links,...) or even advanced segmentation based on interactions and / or user behavior detected in previous actions.
Newsletter, inbound or outbound marketing?
Now that we know the differences between Inbound and Outbound Marketing, we will finish by looking at a very useful and versatile tool that, unlike those previously mentioned is used interchangeably by both strategies. We are referring to the Newsletters.
If we look at the Newsletter of Which is my IP, for example, we would be talking about an Inbound strategy, because to receive the electronic newsletter you must first register (by the way, if you have not done so yet, do not miss it and you will receive timely information on news and updates to get the most out of your Internet connection).
On the other hand, if we look at newsletters like the ones we have all surely received at some time, in which we are offered, for example, a telephone offer from a company that is not our own, we are dealing with an electronic newsletter included in the marketing plan of an Outbound strategy.
At this point, we can only conclude that knowing our priorities as a company, analyzing the degree of knowledge we have about our target and assessing our objectives, we will have all the necessary answers to start working and designing our digital marketing strategy.