The Perfect Marketing Mix: Combining Inbound and Outbound Marketing
You may have read articles, watched videos or attended seminars where people compared differences between inbound and outbound marketing; showcasing why businesses should focus their efforts on an inbound marketing strategy. The reality is there are benefits to both, to creating a 'marketing mix', utilizing inbound and outbound marketing strategies as part of a complete plan.
What is outbound marketing?
Most of your traditional marketing channels (i.e. TV ads, radio, newspapers, magazines and mailers) fall under outbound marketing. The concept is to reach a wide audience, regardless of interest in your product or service, in hopes of enticing someone to buy. Outbound marketing can often be considered disruptive in nature because ads are at times irrelevant to the content an audience is consuming.
How does inbound marketing work?
In contrast, inbound marketing focuses on marketing channels that attract customers at various stages within the buying funnel. Inbound marketing reaches consumers looking for specific information or those who have shown interest in your product, brand or service. Inbound marketing usually refers to blogs, newsletters, social media and other forms of content marketing.
How do you combine inbound and outbound marketing?
Relying solely on outbound marketing can work for some business industries and business locations; however, in most cases, it lacks appeal to the masses and impacts your rate of sales growth. With available data and the ability to highly target consumers based on special interests, demographics and geographics, by adding targeted inbound marketing initiatives you will see higher quality leads, sales and prospects. Used together as part of a sound marketing campaign your conversion rates will be greater.
Combining inbound with your outbound strategy you educate consumers who displayed interest and build brand identity, further driving conversion. A complete strategy utilizes email newsletters, social media, one-on-one text marketing, blog content and more. Used together you have the ability to capture data, increase leads, re=target leads and move consumers through the purchasing cycle.
What is the perfect marketing mix?
Every industry and every business is different. Determining the right marketing mix for your business is based on several factors.
- Frequency of the consumer purchasing
- Margins generated from the sale of products or services
- Length of time it takes a consumer to go through the purchasing life cycle
- Maturity of the business in moving customers through the buying process
Finding the perfect mix requires testing various marketing efforts. Research, plan, execute, build your digital footprint, study detailed data reports and improve your combined strategy based on data. If you are connecting and engaging consumers on a personal level with a sound strategy you can't lose.
Contact us today to discuss ways we can execute measurable reach in your market.
