Inbound and Outbound Marketing

Inbound and outbound marketing are two types of marketing that you can use to bring users to you.  Inbound is where your tactics and methods bring the users to you whereas outbound revolves more around buying ads, buying spots on email lists, buying sales leads and then reaching out to those people.  Both are effective at reaching your target audience and we’ll discuss briefly both.

Inbound marketing is here to stay and often comes across as more genuine.  One method for inbound marketing is content marketing.  This doesn’t mean needing to buy an ad, but would require time spent on behalf of the marketing person writing content say for a blog or paying someone to write the content.  This written content would be things like seo, email newsletters, blog posts, whitepapers, and case studies.  This customer progression would look something like: Read some articles/blog posts -> Sign up as a subscriber -> Purchase product.  

Outbound marketing is more of a traditional approach to marketing.  Typical examples of this would be buying ads on Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.  Another option would be using affiliate marketing where someone works to sell your product for you and they take a cut of each sale sent to you.  The goal with either channel of marketing, but especially outbound marketing is to make sure that the cost of acquiring the customer is less than the lifetime value of the customer else it doesn’t make sense to continue that paid service.  If you spend $1 to get a customer you want to earn more than that $1 over the life of working with that customer.