The shift from outbound to inbound marketing

The end of interruptive marketing

For many years companies have been pounding their market with outbound marketing:
- Direct mailing campaigns
- Cold calling call-operators
- Email marketing

People have had enough and are getting immune to these messages.

People just don’t open direct mail letters
Occasionally they do if the packaging is different: but those are expensive campaigns.

People just don’t want listen to a call operator asking questions from a script.
The script doesn’t engage into a conversation as the knowledge of the caller on the subject is limited.
Some people have even been getting so annoyed that they thought up ‘anti-telemarketing counterscripts’.

People just don’t open (spam) emails.
Many of these emails get filtered out by the spam filter before reaching their inbox
These emails get a spam scoring in the subject line.

People just don’t like to get pushed anymore.
People don’t want interruptive marketing.
People have become educated enough in using the Internet to pose questions, search, find answers and solutions on a multitude of platforms.
This is making spending large amounts of money on outbound push marketing less and less evident.

Social media

The last few years have seen an explosion of social media. Not solely on interests and subjects that matter to the consumers, but also for business people:
- Blogs
- Forums on industry specific websites
- Specific section on professional websites like Answers on LinkedIn.

Companies can have an almost infinite number of “findable” touch points in every area or segment of the Internet.
Thus the direction of marketing is shifting towards inbound marketing as the people of the target market have moved to these sites and as it offers much more opportunities.

The shift to inbound marketing

The shift from outbound marketing to inbound marketing will become more and more important as marketers will need to follow and adapt to the people and their habits on the Internet.

The definition of inbound marketing is a combination of:
- Getting found on the Internet
- SEO: Search Engine Optimization
- SEM: Search Engine Marketing
- Blogging
- Micro blogging like Twitter
- Being referenced in blogs
- Social media in general

The inbound marketing problem

People will visit your website. Thus your leads are already on your website.

The problem inbound marketing poses is the fact hardly anyone of the visitors will ever contact the company, register for a white paper download, a web seminar or a pod cast: you don’t know who they are and probably never will.
Only 2 to 3% (4% according to some sources) of your website visitors will give you their name and email address. From those 2 to 3% a significant part will even use a generic web email address like Hotmail, Yahoomail, GMail, …

Solving the inbound marketing problem

In order to solve the problem of the incognito visitors, a way of revealing the company names of the website visitors is key.
Additionally the interest and the level of interest is required for scoring of the visitors leading to qualification of the visitor into a lead.
Once you know you have a lead, you can start approaching the ‘warm’ company with ‘warm’ (instead of cold) calling as there is obvious interest in your solutions, products or services. According to the inbound marketing purists this might not be 100% pure inbound marketing, but who cares if it works!

Look at it this way: if you only contact 4-5% of the most interested visitors who aren’t contacting you by themselves, you have a big chance of doubling your amount of leads. And you’ll only be contacting people who have shown an obvious interest in your service or product.

In today’s recession economy, can you afford not to try?

Are you ready for the shift from outbound to inbound marketing?

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