Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing

Outbound marketing is where a marketer pushes his message out far with the help of trade shows, seminar series, email blasts, internal cold calling, outsourced telemarketing, and advertising. Inbound marketing is where one attracts visitors naturally through search engines, through the blogosphere and through the social media sites.

Outbound marketing is getting less and less effective over time for a couple of reasons. First, you are bombarded with over 2000 outbound marketing interruptions per day and you as a consumer is figuring out more and more ingenuine ways to block them out that includes avoiding them, by installing a caller id, spam filtering, changing media channels or simply ignoring them. Second, the cost of coordination around assimilating knowledge about something new or shopping for something new by using the internet through search engines, blogs, and social media sites is now much lower than attending a seminar in Five Star Hotel at the Taj or flying to a trade show in Delhi.

Rather than indulge in outbound marketing to the masses of people who are trying to block you out, "inbound marketing" is an intelligent way where you help yourself "discovered" by people already learning about and shopping in your industry. In order to do this, you need to set your website up like a "magnet" for your industry that attracts traffic naturally through the search engines, through the blogosphere, and through the social media sites. I believe most marketers today spend 90% of their efforts on outbound marketing and 10% on inbound marketing which in the near future would see a major shift.