Inbound and Outbound Marketing

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Digital marketing uses two main strategies to engage with customers:

• Outbound marketing (Push strategy)
• Inbound marketing (Pull strategy)

Outbound marketing

Outbound marketing is known as a push strategy. This means that content is pushed out towards potential customers to get their attention.

With outbound marketing, the engagement begins when you try to generate demand and begin driving awareness by showing ads or content to people and audiences because they fit a certain profile. Content and ads are pushed out in front of your audience, in their social feeds, before YouTube videos, and as banners on websites. Then, if your ads are interesting enough, the audience might notice and engage with them.

It’s like you’re waving your ad in front of them in the hope they’ll see it. If advertisers show their ads enough times to a relevant audience, those people will become aware of the business, their sales and offers, products, and marketing message. If and when the audience is ready to purchase, take action, or convert, they are likely to recall and consider your offering, thanks to the number of times they have been exposed to your ads. This is called product or brand recall.

When ads or content appear in places like your social media timeline, or as YouTube pre-roll video ads, it is because you fit the audience profile that the advertiser wants to target. So, next time it is raining outside and you see a banner ad or a video about raincoats, this is because your geographical location matches the current weather criteria that the advertiser wants to reach. You are part of their target audience.

Example: Paramount Studios

For example, Paramount Studios used push marketing on YouTube to promote the new Scream movie in their Scream x MTV Cribs campaign. They created a special edition video tour of the infamous Prescott House, in the style of MTV Cribs. The core insight here was that by combining two much-loved entertainment phenomena from a similar period, they could reawaken the audience’s desire to engage with the Scream movie series.

The five-minute creative was launched via the MTV Vault profile on YouTube, and then seeded across other Paramount properties, including the MTV Facebook and Instagram pages. This helped to consolidate value within the main MTV profile on YouTube, while also taking advantage of Paramount’s wide-ranging portfolio of brands to increase reach.

This collaboration tapped into viewers’ nostalgia and raised awareness of the new movie among an audience that may not have known the franchise was returning. It attracted 215,400 organic impressions on YouTube and helped propel the film to the number 1 spot on its opening weekend.

Challenges of outbound

The major challenge of outbound marketing is the audience mindset. With outbound, the audience is not actively looking for products or brands. They have certain characteristics that you as an advertiser want to target and you’re actually interrupting their day with your ads. So the audience is very likely to ignore your ads. This, in turn, means that you have to show your ads thousands of times for them to have a chance of being noticed. With this in mind, you might focus on frequency (which measures how often you show your ads to a single person) as opposed to reach (which measures the total size of the audience you target regardless of how often they saw your ad). With outbound, repetition is key.

The purpose of outbound marketing is to drive awareness and start people on the customer journey. Because outbound marketing typically starts the customer journey and there may be many steps before the person buys or takes action, it usually has a smaller part of the overall marketing budget compared to the inbound channels in your digital media mix.

Inbound marketing

Inbound marketing is known as a pull strategy. Potential customers are already seeking out your brand, and you use digital marketing strategies to pull them towards your website or app.

The engagement begins with the consumer who is actively seeking out products, services, content, or information to help them decide or take action. When people search online, they are taking inbound actions, by doing a search on Google or hashtag search on social media, for example. In other words, they are actively seeking content, brands, or products. They are looking for products, answers, or solutions, and are likely to take action when they find what they are looking for.

When you know what your audience looks for when they’re in the process of buying or taking action, you can add the hashtags they follow to your social media posts or create the type of website content and themes they search for on Google to help them decide. Then, when they search, they are likely to find you as the solution because you’ve included the hashtags they search for on social and created the website content they need to help them take the next step. For example, if you were searching for Paris travel guides and you might also see paid search ads for the best hotels in Paris. That’s because the marketer has anticipated your travel needs and thought that you’d also be interested in hotels since you’re searching for travel guides. 

The purpose of inbound marketing is to drive action and help people to make a decision, take the next step in their journey, and ultimately buy from you. As inbound marketing typically drives sales, leads, and valuable actions, it usually has a larger part of the overall digital marketing budget assigned to it.

Example: Funky Pigeon

The UK retailer Funky Pigeon, for example, used inbound marketing to great effect. It used the latest celebrity news as the source for a reactive content marketing campaign. When Adele announced her long-awaited album 30 in 2021, Funky Pigeon’s SEO agency Impression Digital knew it had a limited period of opportunity to capitalize. It quickly created a series of Funky Pigeon greeting cards about divorce and break-ups, the central themes of Adele’s new album. The creative strategy tied in neatly with one of Funky Pigeon’s main product categories: personalized greeting cards.

This landed the company some great national press, and it used these 183 backlinks to power SEO rankings. Funky Pigeon moved into the top three positions for all its focus keywords, meaning it was in prime position when customers searched for ‘personalized greeting cards’.

This shows how outbound and inbound methodologies can be mutually beneficial in a marketing strategy.

Challenges of inbound

The major challenge of inbound marketing lies in its complexity. You need a comprehensive understanding of your target customers and their search behavior to be able to anticipate their searches and needs. You also need to engage in ongoing keyword research to anticipate the problems your customers are trying to solve and create new hashtags, website SEO content, and paid search campaigns around evolving consumer needs.