What Is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a strategy that focuses on attracting customers through helpful and relevant content tailored to the needs of a targeted audience.

It’s called “inbound” because it attracts people and brings them in, as opposed to outbound marketing or “push marketing,” which pushes messaging to as broad an audience as possible.

Key Takeaways (TL;DR)

• Inbound marketing pulls customers in rather than pushes messaging out.
• It uses helpful, engaging content to connect with an audience and establish trust.
• The message is customer-centric and two-way, in contrast to one-way outbound messaging.
• Inbound marketing is better at forging customer relationships, but outbound marketing is excellent at raising brand awareness among a large audience.
• An integrated plan of inbound and outbound marketing is a strong approach.

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How Inbound Marketing Differs From Outbound Marketing

These two classifications of marketing strategies are notably different. 

The main differences are in the audience, messaging, type of content, and format of the marketing. Let’s take a closer look:

Inbound marketing

• Audience: Targeted, comprised of people actively searching for information .
• Messaging: Topics tailored to the target audience’s search intent.
• Type of content: Educational, entertaining, intended to engage and inform, search-engine-optimized, two-way.
• Format: Blogs, websites, social media stories, targeted email, newsletters, podcasts.

Outbound marketing

• Audience: Broad, the wider the audience the better.
• Messaging: The company’s message.
• Type of content: Sales pitches, promotional copy, one-way.
• Format: Cold email outreach, direct mail, ads (print, TV, radio, social).

Inbound marketing is typically much more personalized and specific to a particular audience. 

While the end goals of inbound marketing may be similar to those of outbound marketing (lead generation and sales), the goals and path of the inbound marketing journey are different.

What Is the Purpose of Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing seeks to develop a relationship with potential customers. 

While outbound marketing might broadly send direct mail to an entire zip code with postcard mailers to raise brand awareness, inbound marketing wants to provide an experience that creates longer-lasting engagement. 

In large part, inbound marketing intends to meet today’s audiences where they are. 

They are searching online for information — and researching products and companies before considering a purchase. 

During a customer’s search and research phase of the customer journey, a brand can provide helpful, relevant information to attract and engage the customer. 

Should You Focus on Inbound or Outbound Marketing?

When you are deciding whether to focus on inbound or outbound marketing strategies, it’s important to recognize that they both have benefits and strengths. 

For instance, mass mailing a branded postcard has an advantage when it comes to brand awareness, as it reaches a large population and puts the brand in front of them. 

Then, if a company wants to establish itself as the authority on an industry-critical topic, inbound marketing is the way to get there. 

Advantages of inbound marketing

Here are some of the areas in which inbound marketing excels: 

• Customer-centric approach. When customers seek out and find information that helps them, they are receiving something valuable.
• Engagement. Inbound marketing creates and sustains user engagement.  
• Builds brand trust and credibility. Quality content that is helpful, comprehensive, engaging — and free — builds trust-based relationships with potential customers.
• Generates high-quality leads. Targeting an interested audience makes the leads gained through inbound marketing more likely to convert to customers.  
• Measurable results. It’s easier to track the results of inbound digital campaigns with engagement numbers, website visits, lead collection, etc. 
• Cost-effective and sustainable. Attracting customers organically through great content can build long-term brand loyalty. 

Outbound marketing has its perks, too

Outbound marketing has its own goals that have made it successful over time. Outbound marketing's widespread reach can kickstart brand awareness among larger audiences. It can also help a brand enter new markets to reach people outside its target audience.

It can also reach places where inbound marketing typically isn’t: direct mail, billboards, radio, and TV. 

Final Thoughts

Considering their different strengths, inbound and outbound marketing can work well together in an integrated marketing plan. 

Depending on your brand, a blend of both or a “push-pull” strategy can work very well to engage an audience broadly with advertisements while engaging a target audience with engaging content that encourages them to form a more personalized connection to the brand. 

Discover a best-in-class suite of tools to complement your content marketing strategies with the Originality.ai AI Checker, Plagiarism Checker, and AI Grammar Checker.

Then, get tips and best practices to improve your marketing plan with our top guides:

• How to Increase Brand Awareness With Content Marketing
• How to Choose a Digital Marketing Agency
• 7 Best Content Editing Tools for Content Marketers
• What Is GEO? An Overview of Generative Engine Optimization