5 Reasons Why Inbound Marketing is Better Than Outbound

There is a war happening right now, it is a world war, it is one of the toughest and most fierce wars ever fought on this planet. Can you guess what it is? You probably guessed it, inbound marketing vs. outbound marketing.

Most successful companies have a mix between the two, some hire sales professionals to do outbound marketing and others hire a marketing team to do the inbound marketing, but what if I were to tell you that you can take your company to new levels of revenue that you have never thought of making by simply spending most of your time and your employees’ time doing inbound marketing?

Many myths that come up about inbound marketing is that it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of work, it’s too complicated, it can’t be measured, it’s not as good as ads, BS, BS, BS! I’m here to tell you that those are just lies and misconceptions. According to a study by Invesp, inbound marketing is 10X more effective in generating sales than outbound marketing!

Let’s say you’re making $250,000 a year in your business with mainly outbound marketing, well according to studies made by the same study in this example, if you flip the tables and instead do mostly inbound marketing, you’re company could be making $2,500,000 a year (assuming you have a good sales system in place already) and that number would not be stopping!

Here are 7 reasons why inbound marketing is better than outbound marketing:

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a type of marketing that involves no outreach, but instead gets customers to come to you through blog content on Google & Bing, videos, social media, events, etc. Inbound marketing is proven to be an effective method for getting new clients for your business.

In simple terms, you’re asking for the attention of your audience in an indirect way versus shoving a bunch of ads of your company into your audience’s face.

This is another reason why inbound marketing is better than outbound. With inbound marketing, you are building the customer relationship before they buy from you.

With outbound marketing strategies like billboard ads, you can pay a lot of money for it and sometimes it won’t work because it doesn’t exactly attract your ideal customers the same way inbound marketing can.

Inbound marketing allows you to begin the customer relationship before making a decision to purchase your product or service. Thus, it will make it easier for your business to gain more sales in the long run.

With all of that said now let’s get into what outbound marketing is:

What is Outbound Marketing?

Outbound marketing is one of the oldest tricks in the play book of marketing for gaining more customers. Some outbound marketing strategies include mail advertisements, cold calling, email marketing, radio ads, and billboards.

Outbound marketing can give you a significant amount of business in a short amount of time compared to inbound marketing. Outbound marketing can be done by almost anyone and can be a lifesaver at times of financial distress. If your business is in dire need of money, then outbound marketing is a great strategy to use.

However, it is not such a good strategy to use in the long run. In this article I’m going to explain to you why inbound marketing is better than outbound and why you should probably consider doing more inbound marketing and less outbound for your business.

Inbound Marketing is Hyper-Personalized

If you’re trying to rank your website on Google, being the most relevant Source can really help your website rank on the first page of Google but not only will help you with your SEO, it will help you to gain higher quality leads. With outbound marketing, it is more disruptive and broad, which doesn’t exactly get you to target specific people.

Inbound marketing is mainly driven by relationships and building them with future prospects through custom content (note that the content has to be specific to the type of audience you’re targeting). Most people nowadays love that and it’s very engaging and it’s super relevant versus getting bombarded with advertisements every 5 seconds.

2) Inbound Marketing is not Aggressive

Direct emails billboard such as the one above cold calling letters in the mail, etc. are the most common outbound marketing strategies and if you think about it, it’s kind of aggressive. It can give out sort of a bad vibe to people you were trying to target, but with inbound marketing you’re not exactly disrupting people’s daily life.

In fact, you are helping them, so why wouldn’t they have your attention if they learned something from a recent blog you posted?

Outbound marketing is all about pushing messages throughout different channels in the hopes that a potential customer will hear what you have to say and might consider going with you. Inbound marketing is not forceful at all but instead gains the interest of your audience who are looking to solve a specific problem.

3) Inbound Marketing Cost Less Than Outbound

Ever wonder what will happen to your business as soon as you turn off any ads? You might start to feel worry or doubt, but not with inbound marketing! Inbound marketing is a long-term approach to growing your business exponentially. Exponential growth does not happen overnight and this applies towards inbound marketing.

Once inbound marketing starts to really kick in, the cost per lead is going to go down significantly than outbound. If done correctly, you’re going to start attracting more higher quality prospects that are almost ready to buy from you.

According to HubSpot it is shown that inbound marketing costs per lead are 62% less than outbound marketing. Along with being more cost-effective, this also means that inbound marketing will bring you a more positive ROI (Return on Investment) than outbound.

4) Your Customers will Trust You More

The average closing ratio according to Prospect Experience for leads obtained from outbound marketing is about 4.2%. With leads obtained from inbound marketing, the average closing ratios are about 20%! That means for every 100 leads you get from inbound marketing you are likely to get 20 customers versus only 5 customers with outbound marketing.

These stats prove that people nowadays don’t like to be interrupted with pushy marketing tactics. Who likes to get bombarded with 10 email advertisements every week by the same company? Not me!

With interruptive tactics such as email blasts and cold calling, your customers could get angry and look down upon your brand (Not a good idea!). When you attract customers with inbound marketing, they already have extracted value from your company, therefore they are going to trust you more than anyone else.

5) Inbound Marketing Doesn't Stop

If you posted a helpful video a year ago, people are still going to be able to access it and still see the value of your company, versus an advertisement that you made a few months ago may not work as effectively now. You have to constantly refresh and refine your outbound marketing strategies in order for them to be somewhat effective.

In outbound marketing, you constantly need to reinvest again into advertising over and over again, whereas once you created great content, it’s done and ready to go. Content that you posted six months ago can still be very effective in attracting your business high quality leads. That is why when you focus your efforts on inbound marketing, your efforts can exponentially help you attract a lot of customers.

6) Inbound Marketing Isn't as Time Consuming

Traditional marketing tactics such as trade shows, ads, and mail require a lot of time, energy, and resources in order for it to work. With inbound marketing, you can easily automate the process and continue to grow.

You can take out your phone and record a certain product you are making or a helpful insight, this will surely start to gain the attention of your audience. No need to keep going back to an ad that you made last week and seeing which ad set works best in getting you leads.

7) One Flaw of Outbound Marketing

Did you know that the average person gets more than 5,000 advertisements everyday? That’s an insane number to think about! That number includes emails, billboards, mail, digital ads, etc. The graph below from Sales Artillery shows the effectiveness of newspaper ads (one type outbound marketing tactic) over time:

As you can see, the effectiveness of outbound marketing is slowly going down. People are tired of getting annoyed with ads and because of this, we tend to ignore these ads without thinking about it. The reason outbound marketing is not a good strategy to use anymore is because it doesn’t provide people any value anymore, even with all the data that some companies such Facebook has on their users, people are most likely going to ignore them.

A common question that we ask ourselves when reading an ad is “What’s in it for me?”, and if it’s something that you’re not actively interested in, you’ll probably ignore it.

Now that you have learned the 5 reasons why inbound marketing is better than outbound marketing, why not share this post with your friends?

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