If you are aware of digital marketing trends, then you must have heard people use the terms inbound marketing and outbound marketing. But do you know what they mean?

Today we will discuss these two business methodologies to help you create valuable content and experiences for your next marketing strategy.

What is Inbound Marketing?

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Inbound marketing comprises strategies focused on building meaningful and long-lasting relationships with customers, consumers, and prospects for the growth of an organization. The purpose of inbound methodologies is to attract, engage and empower customers by providing them with insights, solutions, help and support.

By creating successful relationships with customers, businesses create a self-sustaining loop that allows them to build momentum, attract more prospects and eventually increase sales.

Let’s take a look at a few of the most effective inbound marketing strategies to grow your business.

Study and Understand Your Target Audience

Understanding your audience is perhaps one of the most critical steps when it comes to designing an effective marketing strategy.

According to The Marketo Engagement Gap report, 56% of consumers believe businesses need to have a deeper understanding of their needs (Source: Social Bakers).

It is knowing your target audience as a crucial marketing strategy because it will allow you to create meaningful and relevant content. The goal is to appeal to your particular viewers.

Understand the communities on social media platforms, survey your leads and customers, and conduct in-depth interviews to analyze your market.

Creating Outstanding Content

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When it comes to digital marketing content is king. Your content should communicate your business ideology, market your brand, educate your readers and persuade them to purchase your product and services.

The quality of your content will also have a massive impact on your inbound marketing strategy.

Content marketing gets three times more leads than paid search advertising (Source: Weidert Group)

So, create unique, diverse, and keyword-rich content creating blogs, articles, videos and social media posts with your potential customers in mind.

Keep these points in mind while creating content for your brand:

1. Include long-tail keywords.
2. Use compelling CTAs that are closer to your user’s purchase decision.
3. Start with great headlines.
4. Creator relevancy and engagement for clients.
5. Optimize for search engine optimization using friendly keywords.
6. Add backlinks.
7. Create blog posts with your user’s needs in mind.
8. Keep updating content consistently.

Increase conversion

Different factors impact conversion rates; however, the ultimate solution is to have a user-friendly website. If your site is not attracting any visitors, then how do you expect to convert people into long-term customers?

Having traffic to your website is good, but it’s useless if you cannot retain the visitors.

Did you know? It takes about 50 milliseconds (that’s 0.05 seconds) for users to form an opinion about your website that determines whether they like your site or not, whether they’ll stay or leave. (Source: Forbes)

So, make sure you design your website to convert your traffic into a lead generation machine.

Your website should be quick, mobile accessible (Google now uses a mobile-first indexing system), user-friendly, engaging and attractive enough to keep the visitors coming back.

Now that we know what inbound marketing strategies are and how they can benefit your business, let’s take a look at how outbound marketing works.

What is Outbound Marketing?

Outbound marketing is also known as traditional marketing. The goal of outbound marketing is to advertise and push a message out, with the hope that it will resonate with a more widespread audience. It includes more traditional forms of marketing, like physical engagement activities, seminars, corporate social events, telemarketing, cold calling, radio ads or trade shows.

However, in today’s digital age, outbound marketing techniques are getting less effective over time.

30% of marketers think traditional outbound marketing tactics are overrated (Source: Weidert Group)

The reason being that on average we as humans are being bombarded with thousands of outbound marketing interruptions in a day and have many creative blockages (such as spam filtering, caller ID etc.) to ignore these interruptions.

Another reason why outbound marketing is losing its touch is the penetration of the internet and portable digital devices. Most people nowadays prefer to digitize their experiences using the internet (blogs, search engines and social media) instead of going out in the field only because it saves you time, effort and money.

Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing

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Both inbound marketing and outbound marketing remain crucial elements of an effective marketing strategy; however, in today’s digital age, inbound marketing takes the upper hand.

Outbound marketing is harder to track and costs much more with a more inferior return on investment as compared to inbound marketing.

According to Hubspot’s State of Inbound 2018 Global Report, 84% of global respondents admitted that their outbound marketing efforts didn’t give them a higher ROI! (Source: Digital Media Stream).

Tools such as email marketing function as inbound and outbound and can help complete your marketing strategy, using inbound email strategies to target and retain potential customers in a cost-effective and successful approach for your business.

Moreover, outbound marketing is much slower when it comes to attracting consumers, whereas inbound marketing allows customers to find you when they need you the most.

While outbound marketing pushes its message to everyone, inbound marketing is more streamlined and focused towards interested buyers. Inbound marketing opens two-way communication between the customer and the brand, whereas outbound marketing relies upon one-way communication to advertise the product/service to everyone.

In conclusion, Inbound Marketing is more cost-effective, more straightforward to design and implement and gives a quick ROI.

Besides, having a robust inbound marketing campaign is crucial to survive and grow in today’s competitive online market.

Originally published on medium.