Like chefs, marketers regularly combine a variety of "ingredients" to achieve a desirable result. Unfortunately, two of those ingredients—inbound and outbound marketing—are routinely set up as competitors even though they're actually complementary, like salt and pepper.
The difference between inbound and outbound marketing lies in where you direct your efforts:
- With inbound, prospects tell you that they're interested: The volume of leads is related to the amount of effort you put into making your message accessible across multiple channels.
- With outbound, you ask prospects whether they're interested: You reach out to a larger volume of potential prospects through one or two channels.
So, how do they work together? Consider email. An outbound marketing email will point people toward your brand, but without inbound marketing, such as website content relevant to what you're offering, you risk recipients' leaving your message to die in the inbox.
Neither inbound nor inbound can flourish alone.
Corresponding Marketing Efforts
Inbound marketing is generally seen as the gold standard for the demand generation. Because intent plays a huge part when converting leads to sales, marketers use both intent and behavioral information from assets deployed across marketing channels to help prospects find their solution. After all, 85% of consumers research purchases online before buying.
Although most B2B organizations use it, outbound marketing often gets a shady reputation. Outbound marketers use ideal customer profiles, firmographics, and other cold prospect data to cast a wide net for potential buyers. Most platforms have responded to the lockdown on consumer data by blocking access to users that haven't shown intent, thus reinforcing the inbound method and creating a vacuum for outbound resources.
But an outbound campaign doesn't have to feel invasive. After all, it's a familiar way of learning about brands and merchandise; we're all comfortable with billboards and TV ads. Outbound efforts such as emails and cold calls point people to solutions they might never have been exposed to. Outbound gets your funnel started and turns on a constant flow of incoming traffic without requiring high overhead costs.
Inbound and outbound are really two sides of the same coin. Both are powerful lead generation tools that guide prospects toward resources they might find helpful. As marketers, we can pair those channels together to create a strategy that's stronger than either one when used alone.
How to Use a Combined Strategy
Ready to put both inbound and outbound marketing to work? Take the following four steps.
1. Adopt a push-pull approach
Again: outbound marketing pushes out information to potential customers, whereas inbound marketing pulls in interested customers. Make use of both forces by using one to improve the other.
