Inbound vs Outbound Marketing: The Differences Between the Two Made Clear

With the right message delivered through the best channels, businesses of all sizes can achieve lasting, repeatable success. 

But things are a bit more complicated than simply crafting a catchy Google ad, posting an interesting blog, or creating a viral-worthy video on social media. 

In fact, before you do any of these, you’ll need to work out which type of marketing approach you should be using. Specifically, we’re talking about inbound marketing and outbound marketing. 

If you’re keen to find out more about inbound vs outbound marketing, including benefits, challenges, examples, and which one to choose for your business, keep reading our comprehensive guide.

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What is outbound and inbound marketing?

Let’s define inbound and outbound marketing to help you get a clear understanding of what we’re going to be talking about.

Outbound marketing

When we talk about outbound marketing, we refer to a more traditional type of marketing that aims to push specific messaging out to potential leads—who might become future customers. 

Generally speaking, this method is more expensive and delivers a lower marketing ROI than inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing

Inbound marketing refers to a marketing approach that’s entirely focused on enticing new potential customers to your company through appealing content and communication.  

When considering whether marketing inbound or outbound will work best for your business, keep in mind that inbound strategies often offer a more cost-effective way to build meaningful relationships with customers.

What is the difference between inbound and outbound marketing?

We’ve answered, “What is inbound and outbound marketing?”, but now let’s look at some of the many differences between the two.

To make things simpler to understand and remember, check out the table below:

Inbound vs outbound marketing examples

To understand these differences better, take a look at some practical, real-life examples that you might have even come across in the past: 

Inbound marketing examples

As inbound marketing relies heavily on digital content, some of the most common examples include blog posts, social media content, videos, podcasts, infographics, and other visual content shared online. 

A typical example of (successful) inbound marketing could be a short, catchy, and educational video. Let’s imagine you’re a SaaS company selling invoicing software to small businesses and solopreneurs. 

Your ideal customer is currently searching for a better, speedier, and more cost-effective way to manage their invoices. They find your quick guide “Invoicing made easier” by putting some keywords into their Google search.

The video—a playful animation that keeps things short and sweet while also delivering plenty of useful information and great value—entices the customer to check out your website.

Here, they’re presented with a range of tools, pricing tiers, and payment options, as well as a friendly chatbot ready to answer any questions they may have.

Plus, your stellar—and fully verified—customer testimonials are very prominently displayed on your homepage, further strengthening your brand image and encouraging your lead to stick around. 

At this point, your lead might be truly interested in trying out your product, but they might not want to commit to a full membership yet. Luckily, in exchange for their email address, you offer a free, no-commitment 14-day demo, which they happily download. 

The demo works great, everything goes smoothly, and your lead is now convinced that they’ve found the invoicing software solution they were looking for—yours!

Outbound marketing examples

Most outbound marketing, as we mentioned, is non-digital, which includes things such as direct mail; posters and billboards displayed in public places; cold calls and emails; and TV and radio commercials.

A typical instance of outbound marketing is seeing a poster for a newly launched product or service—it could be anything from a streaming service to a high-protein snack—while you wait at the bus stop. 

Hundreds of people wait at that same bus stop every day, but only one or two might be genuinely interested in purchasing the product or service advertised on the poster. 

Even if a person finds that product or service interesting or useful, the chances are that they might soon forget about it as they get on with their day. Nothing about the ad was personalized or enticing enough to encourage them to find out more.

However, in the digital realm, you can use intent data and ideal customer profiles (ICPs) to target display ads and more effectively reach the audience that will be interested in your product. 

Benefits of inbound and outbound marketing

Now that we’ve clarified the main difference between outbound and inbound marketing, as well as looked at some inbound marketing vs. outbound marketing examples, it’s time to consider the benefits of each of these approaches.

Whether you're planning marketing inbound and outbound campaigns separately or combining them for a more integrated approach, each has its unique advantages.

Inbound marketing benefits

As you might expect, there are many benefits to implementing an inbound marketing strategy for your business. 

They include:

• Better cost-effectiveness: There’s no way around it—physical marketing and advertising is more expensive than digital content, which is why inbound marketing is a lot more affordable, especially for bootstrapped businesses or nimble start-ups.

• Higher value for your audience: Because it’s not pushy, salesy, or invasive in any way, inbound marketing offers more informative, educational, and interesting content to your audience, who, in turn, receives higher value from it.

• Easier to quantify: By using digital marketing software equipped with analytics functionalities, you’ll be able to work out how your inbound marketing efforts are performing over time and whether or not you should be implementing any changes to improve its chances of success.

• Faster ROI: With inbound marketing, you’re speaking directly to your target audience—people who you know are already interested in your product or service. This means that you’re much more likely to turn leads into customers more quickly, thus achieving a faster return on your investment.

Outbound marketing benefits

While outbound marketing is less popular with forward-thinking, digital-savvy marketers, it’s undeniable that it still has a few advantages—especially if you use it in conjunction with inbound marketing.

• Brand awareness and visibility: Whenever you put your brand’s name, products, or services in front of people—whether that’s at a train station, on a radio channel, or via snail mail—they instantly become aware of who you are and what you sell. Sure, that doesn’t mean they’ll buy from you, but having higher visibility is a good start.

• Potentially fast ROI: While most of the time the ROI from outbound marketing is quite unpredictable, it’s also true that you might be lucky and achieve almost immediate ROI if your message happens to be seen by the right person at the right time.

• Potentially more trustworthy: Old-school channels, such as radio, TV, and printed media, have a much longer history with consumers and, therefore, can be seen as more credible and reliable. This might mean that customers could be more inclined to check out your offering as they see your brand as trustworthy.

Challenges of inbound marketing vs outbound marketing

Now, for the challenges of inbound and outbound marketing. What are the main hurdles of each? Let’s find out.

Inbound marketing challenges

These are the main disadvantages of implementing a marketing strategy that exclusively relies on inbound marketing:

• It can be more time-consuming: Putting together a solid, well-performing inbound marketing strategy is far more complex than it seems, especially in terms of timing. 

In fact, before posting a piece of content, you’ll need to do lots of research into your market, customers, and competitors and test a range of content strategies to figure out which one yields the best results.

• It requires ongoing checks and maintenance: The digital world moves at a lightning-fast pace, which means that your content must always be fresh, accurate, and relevant. 

For this reason, you’ll regularly need to keep a close eye on what you post and, whenever needed, be ready to adjust or make more substantial changes to it.

• It needs to be implemented across different channels: If you want your inbound marketing plan to succeed, it’s not enough to bank everything on writing a couple of blogs a month or a few social media posts here and there. 

You need a much better-structured strategy that involves the use of an array of channels—blogs, socials, videos, visuals, website, etc.—in order to create cross-channel campaigns. 

Outbound marketing challenges

In terms of outbound marketing, these are some of the main drawbacks that you may find if your entire marketing strategy only focuses on this approach:

• It’s too generic: Because it doesn’t zoom in on a specific audience or segment, outbound marketing tends to be a lot more generic and less personalized than inbound marketing. This means it can end up being seen as irrelevant, intrusive, and annoying.

• It’s much harder to measure: Other than using manual tools and observance, it’s practically impossible to determine whether your sales are coming from the poster you put up on the highway, the direct mail messages you’ve posted to thousands of people, or something else. 

• It’s more expensive: Buying billboard spaces, printing thousands of flyers, or putting together an entire crew for a TV commercial are all things that will cost you a lot of money—and might not even generate the expected results.

Inbound vs. outbound marketing strategy: which method is right for your business?

With all the info we’ve given you so far, you’re probably thinking, “Surely, opting for inbound marketing should be any business’s best bet.” However, as with most things in marketing, the answer is more complicated and multi-faceted.

When planning your marketing approach, having a clear understanding of the inbound/outbound meaning will make it easier to match the right strategy with your specific goals and resources.

B2C companies tend to be better off with inbound marketing, especially when customers are already familiar with your brand and what it offers. Creating interesting blog posts, catchy social media content, and educational videos can work wonders to turn leads into customers.

As far as B2B marketing is concerned, some outbound marketing could work well. This is particularly true for companies that want to reach out to new business streams or break into new markets. 

Because these companies deal with other businesses and, often, need to climb up a hierarchical internal ladder to finally close a deal, things like traditional commercials, printed media, and even cold calling might have the desired effect.

However, the field is rapidly evolving thanks to the integration of new technologies like AI in B2B marketing, which can help businesses personalize outreach, improve targeting, and drive better results from both inbound and outbound efforts.

Ultimately, it really depends on the type of company you are, the budget you have, and the goals you want to achieve. 

Usually, employing a combination of inbound and outbound marketing is what works best for many companies. 

Elevate your inbound and outbound marketing today

Understanding whether to use inbound vs outbound marketing for your company is easier said than done. As we’ve seen in this article, there are several benefits and challenges to each approach, as well as cases in which it might make more sense to use one instead of the other.

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