Bringing customers in

Similar to paid media, outbound marketing is broken. Today’s consumers know their rights, and they don’t like to be assaulted by outbound “push” marketing. Consider the following:

• A whopping 94 percent of the links clicked on by search users today are found (organically) rather than paid for.

• Eighty-six percent of people skip through television commercials.

• Eighty-four percent of 25-34-year-olds have clicked out of a website because of an “irrelevant or intrusive ad.”

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Paid links, television commercials, and website ads are more than just paid media. They are examples of outbound marketing, which pushes information on “targeted” prospects via purchased media, cold-calling, direct mail, radio or TV advertisements, sales flyers, spam or telemarketing. Although outbound has long been the crux of marketing, those days are now over.

In the days of yesteryear, brand marketers could directly shape the prospect’s discovery experience from start to finish – as willing consumers reacted to the stream of ads and sales pieces coming at them.

However, today’s self-directed consumers are firmly in control. The typical B2B buyer is anywhere from 57 percent to 70 percent through the online research process before making first contact with a potential supplier.

These informed consumers are more opinionated than ever. Armed with new blocking techniques such as spam filters and TiVo, they can simply ignore outbound marketing. This means that outbound marketing comes at an increasingly high cost with an increasingly low yield. Instead, you need a strong inbound marketing program to make your company stand out.

Inbound “pull” marketing has become a more effective method for capturing new business. Involving a wealth of promotional options, inbound marketing can take the form of blogs, podcasts, videos, eBooks, newsletters, whitepapers, SEO, social media marketing, content marketing and more. It draws visitors to your company by building a reputation for superior and helpful content. Simply put, customers today prefer to find you than be targeted.

Inbound marketing shouldn’t replace traditional outbound advertisements entirely. However, it should certainly be given at least equal priority.

As famous marketing guru Guy Kawasaki said: “If you have more money than brains, you should focus on outbound marketing. If you have more brains than money, you should focus on inbound marketing.”

In order to have the greatest impact, your inbound marketing efforts must be reputable and relevant. Website content is far more likely to engage and convince someone who is doing a comparative analysis than a flashy paid advertisement – but only if it’s clear and credible.

Do an audit of your current marketing channels. Even if your means of tracking metrics is not perfect, you should be able to identify at least one outbound marketing tactic that is a huge drain on your budget for a questionable return. As a test, reallocate some of that budget to support your internal content marketing efforts. This budget could help you hire additional staff or freelancers, or invest in new content such as video or designed infographics. Best of all, focusing more attention and resources on content marketing will naturally improve your search-engine rankings over time. •

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