Thanks to revolutionary thinkers like Seth Godin who in fact reimagined inbound marketing with reference to digital marketing by demanding that permission marketing be the key; most marketers assume that it’s antithesis, outbound marketing may be slowly making its way out of the door. This may not be entirely true however. The point is to understand the two strategies separately and what each involves.
Inbound Marketing is all about bringing consumers to you instead of having to go out to them. This means using social media marketing, blogs, eBooks, podcasts, videos etc. that pique consumer interest enough to have them seeking you out for more. Outbound marketing, on the other hand, is now being referred to as cold calling because they use media that is not entirely interactive such as print, television or radio ads. Outbound marketing requires very little information on consumers to be able to disperse in fact; in most cases their media consumption habits by segment would suffice. Inbound Marketing however is harder to maintain as a strategy without continuous data gathering because it also allows you to pin-point very specific people.
In that sense, it is important to know which types of brands need which type of communications – and at which point in their business life cycle. For one, it is recommended that most brands either adopt both inbound marketing with outbound or at least only inbound as a stand-alone strategy. Mass brands like soft drink giant Coke has never seemed to stop using outbound marketing while still being vigorously active on digital platforms as well. They want to get through to mass audiences in as many ways as possible and do so using all the tools available to them.
Other brands that don’t require mass sales should ideally use outbound strategies at launch stage of the business lifecycle ideally in order to get mass PR for a brand that may not necessarily be for mass audiences. The PR aspect at launch stage is ideally your reasoning why – but it also means your outbound marketing is not your primary medium but merely a time based one for the early stages of your business cycle. This means you don’t necessarily have to maintain the high costs of production for this medium anymore and should be able to demand more creative agencies to be able to develop low cost production options for a medium that isn’t your primary focus anymore but none the less important to your brands life cycle.
Understand your brand’s DNA and the habits of your consumers so that that you can identify what you want to achieve at each stage of your product’s life cycle. This is your first step. The decision of which strategy to implement, whether it be inbound or outbound will be depend on being able to identify these key points first.
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