Inbound marketing is gaining traction among a variety of businesses. Whether you’re big or small, B2B or B2C, if you’re classified as ecommerce or you own a brick and mortar company, many of you understand and are taking advantage of the benefits that inbound marketing can afford your business.
Businesses and marketers who are employing inbound marketing techniques such as search engine optimization, blogging, social media, etc. are having success with these tactics and are therefore allocating more and more of their marketing budget to inbound marketing. They’re experiencing business benefits that include a 62% lower cost-per-lead average from inbound marketing compared to traditional outbound marketing.
With inbound marketing channels projected to only grow in usage over the coming years, marketers not yet using inbound marketing to their advantage are missing out on a powerful addition to their marketing mix. Don’t fall behind your competition because you’re too wary of online marketing channels. You should be convinced of the value of inbound marketing now more than ever. And hey, the proof is in the pudding.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Inbound Marketing and its opposite Outbound Marketing have various meanings depending on the context.
One pair of definitions are:
- Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on getting found by customers. This sense is related to relationship marketing and Seth Godin‘s idea of permission marketing. David Meerman Scott recommends[3] that marketers “earn their way in” (via publishing helpful information on a blog etc.) in contrast to outbound marketing where they used to have to “buy, beg, or bug their way in” (via paid advertisements, issuing press releases in the hope they get picked up by the trade press, or paying commissioned sales people, respectively). Brian Halligan, cofounder and CEO of HubSpot, claims[4] he coined the usage of the term in this sense.
- Antonym for this usage: Traditional marketing (outbound marketing) is a marketing strategy that focuses on finding customers by building brand awareness through advertising and promotion. In contrast to “permission marketing,” a pejorative term for this type of marketing is “interruption marketing.”
- An older pair of definitions[5]are:
- Inbound marketing is market research. In contrast to the above, pieces of information about customer needs and interests, not customers themselves, flow into the company. Knowledge of customer needs drives future company offerings, and product or service capability. This sense is related to the term product management (product ownership in Scrum). Peter Drucker believed[6]this to be the quintessence of marketing.
- Antonym for this usage: Outbound marketing is marketing communications. In this sense, information about finished product capability flows out to prospective customers who have a need for it. This sense is related to the term product marketing.
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