Inbound Marketing | Outbound Marketing |
Definition: It focuses on attracting prospects and potential customer towards the brand by creating relevant content and educating them about their products and services. | Definition: It involves pushing out promotional messages to the wide audience hoping they would engage with the brand and make purchase. |
Permission based: Only those potential buyers who are interested to know more about the products and services are reached out by the brand. Inbound Marketing is non-intrusive form of marketing which doesn’t reach random audience or irritate them unnecessary messages. | Interruption based: Being intrusive in nature, outbound marketing often end up annoying the target audience. In this era of digital advancement, users are often bombarded with all sorts of advertisements which tend to irritate the users which results in their ignorance towards the advertisements. |
Pull: It’s the customers who reach out to the brand when they are willing to engage with them. | Push: Brands try to reach out to customers, all form of advertisements (banner, tv ads, emails) are broadcasted in search for customers. |
Two-way communication: It involves customers interacting with the brand either via social platforms or commenting on the blogs. Brands get an opportunity to connect with their prospects and are able to serve their customers better. | One-way communication: Audience has no medium to interact with the brand. Communication is always one-sided which makes it extremely difficult to measure the performance of advertisements. |
More Effective: Techniques like Keyword bidding; content marketing or search engine optimization makes inbound marketing extremely lethal when it comes to targeting the right audience who are more likely to make a purchase. Ad show up only when someone searches for the keyword that was bid. | Less Effective: Generic messages are being sent out which often fails to grab the attention of the users. Also, with the availability of applications like Ad blockers and spam filters more than 50% of the users never receive the message. |
Higher ROI: by reaching the right audience at right time with relevant content, potential audience gets attracted to the brand more often which adds value to the organization. | Lower ROI: Due to lack of clarity on the target audience, outbound marketing requires more capital in running all sorts of campaigns but usually doesn’t deliver the desired numbers as it doesn’t target the specific audience. |
Opt in email Marketing, Blogging, Seo, Landing pages, keyword marketing are few elements of inbound marketing. | TV ads, Banner, Bulk Sms , Emails are few ways of doing outbound marketing |