Marketing was created to meet the market needs, involving personal and business satisfaction. In a simple way, Marketing is a way to promote people, products, and services.
Internet development brought a new life for marketing and changed the way consumers behave. Today customers look for what they want and compare different product/service providers before they purchase anything. Before this technological era, Marketing worked in a bulk, while today’s Marketing cares about increasing the relationship between brands and customers. Today’s companies are constantly concerned about their customers’ desires, trying to innovate and create ways to maintain them satisfied.
There are two types of Marketing Strategies: Inbound Marketing and Outbound Marketing. In this article, we will see what characterizes both of these strategies and why Inbound Marketing should be a priority to companies.
Inbound marketing
The rapid expansion of the internet brought the need for individualized marketing. Top marketers believe in returning to marketing practices of more than a century ago, in which the warehouse owner was the personal purchasing agent, and resale was both a brand and a trusted companion. The owner knew his customers fully, knowing tastes and customs (Patrutiu-Baltes, 2016; Aguiar & Bastos, 2016).
The main objective of Inbound Marketing is to attract and retain customers – its main idea is not to go after the customer but to arouse their interest so that he comes to the company and is interested in what it can offer him. Basically, Inbound Marketing is about being found by the public instead of being the company to find it (Patrutiu-Baltes, 2016).
The attraction of potential customers is made by the creation of quality content, this being the main fuel for this type of marketing. Since the idea of attracting the public and arousing interest in the services and/or products it has to offer, it is necessary to understand who is the target audience – it is necessary to know what are their interests, doubts and challenges, so you can offer content that helps them solve the problems they have or make them think of a good opportunity, where the solution is exactly the service and/or product that your company offers (Patrutiu-Baltes, 2016).
- Sales funnel
Sales Funnel is the name given to the inbound marketing path, in which the goal is to get to the bottom of the funnel to effectively originate new customers. The strategy aims to offer the target audience what they are looking for, avoiding the use of unsolicited and disruptive messages (Patrutiu-Baltes, 2016).
The Sales Funnel has five steps:
- The first one is “Attract” – it is focused on actions to attract visitors, where there is the production of quality content. Some of these steps involve creating persona, creating persona-based content, planning publications, publishing blog content and social networks, as well as applying SEO techniques to content.
- The second is “Convert” – it is focused on visitors who leave contact information in exchange for some benefit – it happens when visitors are converted into leads and enter the sales funnel. This step involves the production and planning of offers for each step of the funnel and the creation of landing-pages.
- Next comes “Relate”, which is focused on the transformation of leads into customers, establishing relationships with them. It involves lead nutrition, email marketing creation.
- This will lead us to the “Sales” stage that materialize the sale of the service and/or product to potential customers.
- Finally, it is always important to “Analyze” to verify the performance of the actions performed in Inbound marketing, through the defined goals, strategies performed, and results obtained. Since the goal may be to convert to sales and increase revenue, the focus is not on the product, but on the customer.
Outbound Marketing
Traditional marketing, also called Outbound marketing, aims to bring customers by offering services and/or products. In this case, the idea is to go after the customer and not necessarily generate the interest of that possible customer in the service and/or product. This type of marketing has grown with the use of radio, television, newspapers, magazines, posters and sponsorship of events. In addition to these means, Outbound can also be present in digital marketing, such as banners, email marketing and pop-up (Patrutiu-Baltes, 2016).
Outbound marketing vs. Inbound marketing
It is very normal to adopt both methodologies in a company. What should be considered is the return on investment, because this is what will say in which channels it is worth investing the money and time (Aguiar & Bastos, 2016).
Investing in digital marketing is easier to measure through clicks, conversions, and sales. What will facilitate the integration of Outbound and Inbound, is mainly the profile of your customer, the purchase journey, the average ticket of the company, the internal functioning of the marketing and sales team and finally, the management model of your organization (table 1) (Patrutiu-Baltes, 2016).
| Outbound Marketing | Inbound Marketing |
| – Focus on active advertising and direct dissemination of the product; | – Focus on content, educating and entertain the audience; |
| – Company seeks customers; | – Customer comes to the company; |
| – One-way Communication; | – Double communication, listen and understand the potential client; |
| – Active prospecting via billboards, flyers, calls, spots, and ads in the Media; | – Clients attracted by search engines, references, and social media; |
| – Little or no value added; | – Driven by creativity, talent, and effort; |
| – Interruption Marketing; | – Marketing permission; |
| – Untargeted lists; | – SEO and Segmented lists. |
| Advertisements that often do not generate value for the customer. | Content relevant to the persona |
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