Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing: Get the Best of Both Worlds

In the battle between inbound vs. outbound marketing, there are two main groups. Some people will tell you outbound is dead and inbound is the future. Other people will probably tell you the opposite.

The Truth About Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing

In fact, both marketing strategies are alive and well. Savvy marketers and salespeople use both approaches (or partner with people who can execute both) to generate leads and close sales.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Basically, inbound means the leads are coming to you because you’re providing value that they’re seeking. Maybe you’ve written a guide to teach them how to do something they need to do. Or maybe they need your product or service, and they found you through a Google search.

What is Outbound Marketing?

The outbound lead generation process involves you going to your prospects (e.g. cold calling). I think one of the reasons so many people are eager to declare outbound marketing dead is because they hate doing it.

Knocking on doors, cold calling, cold emailing, it all kind of sucks. But there’s a reason people still do it. It works!

Inbound AND Outbound Marketing

So your ideal approach is to marry the two strategies together. Here’s how:

1. Create AMAZING content for your inbound efforts.

You know the drill. High value content that increases your brands credibility.

2. Share that content with sales so they can share it with their prospects.

The content exists, get as much value out of it as you can. Repurpose blog posts into downloadable offers, or just let sales share the posts.

3. Use audience segmentation to advertise contextually relevant content to prospects

I call it inbound advertising. Warm up your sales teams leads and try to get them in your funnel the inbound way. This will increase your conversion rates for you, because you’ll be targeting people who have started to develop a one-on-one relationship with your brand through a sales rep.

It will increase sales velocity and close rates for them, because you’ll be serving up content that drives their prospects down the funnel, and because you’re warming up their leads.

The Inbound Sales Funnel

Building an Inbound Sales Funnel will take care of all the above. Read The Saas Marketing Funnel for a complete lead generation strategy that applies to any and every industry.