In or Out? (Marketing)

Today's blog seeks to dig into two marketing paradigms; inbound and outbound marketing. Inbound marketing is marketing that is designed to cause potential customers to reach in to you. This can be done with search engine optimization, blogging, or other methods that entail giving potential customers information or samples that get them excited about your product or service. In a way, it is advertisement via providing value to prospects. Outbound advertising is more disruptive in that it reaches out to customers and attempts to get their attention and move them through the prospect to customer life cycle.

So Why Not Inbound Only?
Just as man can not live on bread alone, a company can not successfully market itself with a marketing strategy that is solely inbound. The reason that inbound marketing alone is flawed is that it lacks outreach. Compare a venus flytrap with a cheetah,the flytrap has to make itself attractive to insects and wait for one foolish enough to land on its maw. A flytrap's success is predicated on a chain of events in which it is only a passive participant, it must bait its trap and then it must successful capture flies that choose to land upon it. Contrast this with a cheetah. Cheetahs have to go out and capture their prey, cheetahs are active participants in the chain of events that determines their success. A company with the best site, the more interesting articles, the most fascinating videos, the most informative white papers, and so on can not draw in the prospects unless they somehow become aware of them. A company that that is solely dedicated to inbound is like the flytrap that makes itself irresistible to flies, the problem is, the plant is located in one room and the flies are in another. The flytrap is unable to move into position to capture the flies' attention, it has to wait passively and hope that some curious flies happen to fly by and notice the irresistible trap. A company that heavily leverages outbound marketing, like the cheetah, would bolt from room to room until it found its prey. In this animal example, the cheetah is much more likely to feed, even if it has to go through a ton of rooms to do so.

Taking a step out of the animal kingdom, the drawback to inbound marketing is its core appeal, and that is the passivity. Success does not come knocking, and if it does, it may take a long time to get there. While the upsides of inbound marketing are numerous, e.g. less cost per acquisition, it is the passive nature that makes those acquisitions take longer and renders them less predictable. If the average mail campaign converts 2% of recipients, then you know for certain that you can print 100,000 mailers and convert 2,000 customers on average. You can also observe that a blog converts approximately 5% of its viewers into customers, thus you would only need 40,000 viewers, but how do you get those viewers? Sure you could try to use search engine optimization, but so can your competitors. Mean while the outbound direct mail approach has concrete metrics, you just need addresses. With databases and "big data" the failure rate of outbound marketing is going to improve, again this is proactive research and refinement that is much harder to accomplish with inbound marketing since the customers are not necessarily identified until they are already at the mouth of your "customer funnel", since by definition any effort to lure people towards the funnel starts to become outbound marketing.

Why Outbound Marketing?
Outbound marketing is proactive. A huge outbound campaign can function on its own with a best estimate success rate or it can catalyze your inbound marketing's prospect awareness. Imagine our hypothetical company above that has the perfect inbound marketing campaign but does no outreach. Now imagine this company doing something aggressive like a billboard in Time Square. This outreach immediately forces an awareness, this awareness allows the inbound marketing elements to "go viral". Word of mouth is the most critical element of marketing, you need a way to get your brand, your "word" into some mouths, outbound marketing is a critical element of this.

Just as Inception dealt with injecting ideas into people's subconscious so too can your outbound marketing inject an awareness of your company into the masses' collective subconscious. Once your foothold is established, then the inbound elements can lure people in and convert them.

Alternatively, outbound marketing can be utilized as a closer. The metaphor of the customer "funnel" is particularly apt here. The inbound elements provide value to prospects, they come to learn from your site/blog/etc and these lessons cultivate a rapport, a trust, and a curiosity. These three elements help get your prospect to enter the funnel. Once in the funnel there are two outcomes, conversion or non-conversion, falling through the funnel or escaping the funnel. Why not grease the walls of the funnel with outbound marketing once a prospect has willfully entered? There is a difference between being passive and appearing apathetic. How many potential customers are really going to climb down the funnel intentionally? How many are that desperate to buy your product or service that you can sit there and wait for them to wave their check books in your face? Is your product or service that special? Is your value proposition that powerful? Chances are there is nothing that is so good that passivity as a primary strategy can work in perpetuity, so why continue to be passive? Once a prospect reaches in, e.g. signs up for an email list, they are signalling a willingness to consider your product. Chase them down! This is like a gazelle sauntering up to a cheetah, it wants to be eaten but it certainly is not going to put its neck in the cheetah's mouth.

It's The Combination!
In another class I had to view a lecture series by Dr. Ackoff who stressed the importance of managing interactions, not actions. This is a perfect way to encapsulate the role of both outbound and inbound marketing. A company that solely focuses on one and not the other is losing out on the synergy, on the interaction. Further applying this lesson, a company that does both but does not integrate the two is also wasting resources. The ideal marketing strategy combines both inbound and outbound, not as two disparate entities, but as a cohesive one-two punch at both ends of the prospect-customer spectrum. Lure them in and close the deal, inject yourself into their subconscious and get them to wander up to your funnel, and so on.