The fundamental strategy in traditional marketing to sell more has always been to compete for the maximum attention of potential customers.
The competitive pressure derived from this has been reflected in positive things such as creativity in advertisements, but also in negative aspects such as increasingly aggressive and intrusive advertising.
As a consequence, both in traditional media (TV, etc.) and in digital media, this has led to behavior such as “banner blindness”, which is reflected, for example, in click-through rates as low as 0.05% in many cases.
It was clear that a very serious problem had gradually formed here, with users becoming fed up with and rejecting the traditional way of understanding marketing, particularly advertising, which is clearly perceived as something annoying and a negative experience.
This provoked many reflections, including the one presented in 1999 by Seth Godin as his vision of “permission marketing”, a type of marketing where, as the name implies, the customer gives prior consent to receive advertising about a particular brand or product.
The big problem was that this was not easy to implement in traditional marketing, even more so with the burden of the negative perception of traditional marketing (what Seth Godin also called “interruption marketing”).
However, a few years later, something happened that changed everything: Web 2.0 media appeared; social networks, blogs, later YouTube, etc.
These tools were true digital media, with a huge advantage: their free or very low-cost nature. This made viable the idea of large-scale permission marketing which is now known as inbound marketing and which has revolutionized the way marketing is done.
Let’s see exactly how it works.
What does inbound marketing or attraction marketing mean?
The English term “inbound” is usually translated into Spanish as “entrante”.
The term “inbound marketing” is used in the sense that you do not interrupt a potential customer to get his attention, but try to get him to come to you of his own free will.
To do so, you try to attract them in a natural way, which coined the Spanish translation of “inbound marketing” as “marketing of traction”.
The term as such was conceived by Brian Halligan, president of the American company HubSpot, in 2005 and is based on the idea of attracting the customer. We could say that it is about seducing them instead of shouting at them.
As we have already said, achieving this in traditional marketing is not easy. Normally, it requires very important economic investments and working hours, something that complicates this type of marketing for small professionals and companies with limited budgets.
Inbound marketing vs outbound marketing. Differences
When talking about inbound marketing you will also hear about outbound marketing, which is simply the name now used for “old-fashioned” marketing, the one that interrupts the user to get his attention with ads, cold calls, etc.
However, this does not mean that outbound marketing is dead. It is still widely used by companies, despite its more than questionable effectiveness in many cases.
According to HubSpot’s “State of Inbound” report, for example, print and broadcast advertising strategies are completely overrated.
In inbound marketing, we want the user experience to be a positive one.
Therefore, here we will not put the product first, but try to capture the customer’s interest by simply providing value, albeit in a product-related way, because we cannot forget the goal of selling. The sale remains the ultimate goal.
For this, there is nothing better than something free that brings the maximum possible value to that person. This combination of the useful and the free will be an offer that, if it is of quality and reaches the right person, he or she will find it hard to refuse. And that will allow us to get the customer’s contact (typically, via email).
Inbound marketing online with social media, blogs and video (YouTube, etc.)
The emergence of blogs, social networks, YouTube, etc. fitted perfectly with this idea of obtaining the user’s permission by offering “something” of added value, because they made it possible to offer free content, but of great interest to users.
At the same time, this type of content is very easy and cheap to produce compared to traditional marketing campaigns. So much so that this type of marketing can be done very effectively by simple private individuals.
In fact, this is exactly our case: Citizen 2.0 started as a hobby that has become in a few years a whole business and livelihood for Raquel (my wife) and me.
And our case is just one of many of a whole new generation of online entrepreneurs who have been able to do what they have done, in short, thanks to inbound marketing.
But… So is it bad to do outbound marketing?
It is easy that, after reading the previous paragraphs, you have come to the conclusion that outbound marketing is a bad thing.
That’s why I want to emphasize that outbound marketing is not bad in itself, the bad thing is to abuse it until the user gets fed up with it. That is when it becomes counterproductive.
In fact, in reality, the best thing to do is to combine outbound marketing with inbound marketing.
This is for a simple reason: inbound is slow because it is based on a process of creating a relationship of trust with the consumer by providing continuous value. In addition, to get it going you need visibility, you need people to find your content, and that can’t be done in two days.
However, outbound marketing achieves quick results that can make up for the initial “dry spell” in your inbound marketing strategies.
On the other hand, thanks to the Internet and its platforms, outbound marketing techniques have improved a lot, since the Internet allows a much more respectful outbound marketing with the consumer.
A good example is the much more precise segmentations of the public that you can get thanks to the web and the data it has on its users.
In this way, ads can be made much more relevant to the interests of users. Users will reject them less and, sometimes, they will even find them really interesting.
Inbound marketing vs. content marketing
In the previous paragraphs I have talked about content in blogs, podcasts or YouTube as a way to attract potential customers. It is by far the most used type of attraction marketing and it has its own name: content marketing.
Many times content marketing is understood as a synonym for inbound marketing, but this is not the case. Content marketing is simply a widely used way of doing inbound marketing.
