Before knowing if inbound marketing is really better than outbound marketing, it is essential to know the difference between the two.
Outbound marketing is a “traditional” marketing strategy. It all starts when a message is sent in the hope of attracting an audience that has a specific need related to your product or service.
The media where we usually see outbound marketing strategies are mainly television, radio, newspapers, etc.
For example, imagine you are watching a movie on television and suddenly it is interrupted to make way for an advertisement. For this reason, one of the strongest outbound marketing visibility strategies is precisely to interrupt an activity that the consumer is carrying out to present a message.
On the other hand, Inbound marketing was officially born in 2007 thanks to the American company HubSpot, which analyzed and studied a completely innovative strategy to attract new customers without being too invasive.
In fact, the goal of inbound marketing is not to attract the right consumer from a large audience, but to reach the right user and gain their loyalty after a long process.
But specifically, how are they different?
The communication
For outbound marketing, the message launched must be impressive enough to force the consumer to want to know the product thoroughly. While in the case of inbound marketing, it is the communication style adopted in the online platforms where you have a presence, which has an impact.
The inbound marketing strategy begins with an in-depth study of the Buyer Persona and later, generates a path that allows the user to continue in their decision process towards the purchase.
The media
In inbound marketing, most of the strategy is developed around the web, therefore, at a graphic level, everything must be designed so that we can guide the user towards the route that we want.
For this we will see call to action, buttons that literally “invite the user to perform an action”, and landing pages dedicated to forms for downloading documents.
Other means where inbound marketing is applied is in social networks, newsletters,
online paid advertising
On the contrary, outbound marketing is used in “traditional” media: television, newspapers, radio, brochures, with the disadvantage that by presenting it in a more invasive way, the user may lose attention and interest.
Budget
Assuming that any marketing strategy, whether traditional or innovative, implies the presence of a budget, let’s see what are the main differences between inbound and outbound marketing.
Although before we talked about the media where these two strategies are usually worked, the channel where a message is going to be broadcast will make the difference in our entire budget. In fact, the costs of advertising on television vary drastically from advertising online.
Therefore, we can say that as a general rule, outbound marketing budgets
They are usually higher than those of the inbound.
Conclusion: Which is better?
Another very important point to consider is the measurement of results. Inbound marketing, being developed completely online, allows results to be measured at all times, while in outbound marketing this is not possible until the campaign is over.
Is this a valid reason why inbound marketing is better?
Not necessarily, it all depends on the budgets and timing to achieve results, since placing a spot in peak audience time and on a famous channel will continue to give us more immediate results than placing an online ad.