Marketing typically balances testing new strategies with sticking with what works. There’s always a shiny new object in the form of a marketing channel, buzzword, or trend.
An apparent constant, though, is the unspoken rivalry between inbound and outbound marketing. Some marketers swear by inbound for the relationship-building opportunities, while others are loyal outbounders touting the value of volume by generating leads.
Marketers often become experts in a specific channel or marketing strategy and the resulting comfort level creates an unintended bias. But by limiting your marketing tactics to your tried-and-true tools, you could inhibit the full potential of your company’s marketing strategy. In the incredibly dynamic marketing world, your team must have a balance of inbound and outbound strategies that work for your business.
The Shortfalls of an Inbound-Only Strategy
Imagine your business is a brick-and-mortar bakery, and your marketing strategy is built upon offering free samples to local pedestrians who happen to walk by the front door. Think about all the customers shopping at the mall around the corner who won’t show up on your doorstep because they don’t know you exist. Think about how much traffic you’d miss! With an inbound-only strategy, your business is limited to customers who find you by a stroke of luck – through search, social media, or otherwise.
Inbound marketing is built to nurture sales ready leads and guide your target prospects toward a buying mindset, but you need to find those prospects first.
The Shortfalls of an Outbound-Only Strategy
When executed effectively, outbound marketing is a lead gen machine. But what happens once you have those leads?
Gone are the days when marketing teams generate leads through an outbound strategy, only to hand them over to sales. You can survey your prospects to figure out what they’re looking for but if you immediately overwhelm them with a sales pitch, you’ve missed an opportunity to win a new customer. Enter inbound marketing, which is meant to nurture your prospects with content funnels and keep your company top-of-mind until they are ready to buy.
The Best of Both Worlds
When you look at the core intent of inbound and outbound marketing strategies, it’s easy to see what they do well (and what they don’t). Outbound marketing builds your sales pipeline, providing your team with sales intelligence to determine which leads have the potential to materialize into customers. Inbound marketing is the catalyst for priming your prospects and guiding them deeper into your sales funnel until they are ready to purchase.
This critical balance is the crux of integrated marketing, and it can drastically change the direction of your marketing ROI.
If your team is constantly pushing existing prospects and customers for new business, it may be time to source new leads through outbound marketing and expand your customer base. On the other hand, if your funnel is top-heavy and you struggle to engage prospects through closing sales, your inbound strategy needs some work to tighten up the process and squeeze more return out of your lead gen strategy.
Get the sales intelligence your team needs to effectively generate leads and nurture them by engaging in one of our survey programs.