Traditional Marketing vs. Inbound Marketing

Have you ever received a call from a business offering you a service or product? Did you see a sign or advertisement on your way to work? Have they offered you products that will solve all your problems?

If you answered "yes" even to one, then I can ask you: Did you enjoy that experience?

I could bet that you didn’t, we consumers are tired of businesses invading our space to sell us products or services that we are not looking for and we're not interested in buying.

Why? Because the way consumers buy has changed.

Content in all its types, the accelerated change in technologies, and the excessive use of social networks have caused consumer behavior to be transformed. Factors as immediacy, over-information, conscious consumption and being connected al the time makes their options multiply and therefore they are less loyal to the brands. Consumers nowadays trust more in the experiences and opinions of others than in what a seller can offer them, but above all, they LOVE to BUY, but HATE being convinced.

Therefore, if the way consumers buy has changed, the way to reach them must also change. That is why today I bring you five differences between outbound or traditional marketing and Inbound Marketing, who uses as its main fuel THE CONTENT.

Segmentation:

In Inbound Marketing, creating the Buyer Persona is the first of the 8 pillars to create a successful campaign, and there is no doubt that segmentation is the basis of the success of any sales strategy. By studying the interests, purchasing behavior, specific demographic characteristics and the way our clients learn by themselves or seek information, we can create valuable content that can be consumed at the right time.

Furthermore, traditional marketing has always been known as mass marketing. For many years, broad profiles that targeted efforts to large numbers of people with fewer specific characteristics, were created through surveys and other studies. This ultimately resulted in our content also reaching the wrong audience.

The communication:

Communication while using Inbound Marketing is bidirectional. Both the brand and the consumer have active communication and the user can provide opinions that will help strengthen our product, just as we can provide valuable content creating an environment of trust between the company and customers.

For traditional marketing, communication is unidirectional and linear. The user does not actively interact with the brand nor have the ability to generate a response. The strategies are product or service oriented using techniques that are intrusive to the user.

Positioning

The visibility of a brand has always been one of the key points when carrying out a campaign. For traditional marketing it was always about showing up in the best physical space or at the best time. However, in inbound marketing we reach our consumers digitally without space or time restrictions, with active campaigns 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Quality content for our consumers is like honey to Google, but what´s the way to be first on the Google search page? Create valuable content periodically. Each post you upload to your page will be a new page indexed in the search engines and every time you publish, you will be warning search engines that your page is active and that they must check your site frequently to detect fresh content. So, start writing! Some of the traffic that generates good positioning often ends up turning into sales or other conversions.

The measurement

Throughout the years, companies have been paying large sums of money to appear in radio, television or highway ads. However, at the end of the campaign, the marketing team does not have tools to measure their return from investment or ROI of those campaigns.

On the contrary, when conducting a campaign through Inbound Marketing, the knowledge acquired is almost immediately, allowing to make the economic result of marketing actions more tangible. The digital platforms we use, provide us with valuable reports on their impact. Google, for example, allows us to have control of each of our actions in AdWords. Its Analytics tool offers us statistics on traffic, bounce rates, origin of visits, etc, and tools such as a CRM provide us with information about the consumer´s path that he has followed through all our digital channels where each of the funnel stages are perfectly measurable through metrics such as Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) or Customer Life Cycle Ratio (LTV Lifetime Value).

Loyalty

For traditional marketing, the most important thing is the sales action plan. The brand focuses just on selling, selling, and selling without attending the suggestions of its consumers. Communication is intrusive and does not add value, creating consumer rejection.  Although the consumer was a passive consumer, the change in technologies and easy access to different channels allows him to access many options and publicly tell all his friends how good was the experience that he chose.  The user, therefore, has more and more to tell us and we have the obligation to listen to them to create a connection with our audience.

Now that you know the differences and characteristics of both approaches, which one do you prefer to drive the development of your business? Outbound or Inbound?