The lie of inbound marketing

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one:

Interrupting consumers doesn’t work any more. Outbound marketing – direct mail, trade shows, conferences, PR, advertising – just doesn’t work any more. Instead, you need inbound marketing. Attract customers like a magnet to your products or services! The new truth of marketing is that interruption is out. Ideas that spread, win. No one is listening any more. Go viral.

If you wholeheartedly believe every bit of this, stop reading now. Close this browser window, walk away, and have a wonderful, productive day.

Are you still here?

Which part of you does NOT wholeheartedly believe the new mantras of marketing?

Which part of you thinks there might be some falseness to what is claimed as absolute truth in marketing today?

That part of you is right. There is more than just “make a cool video on YouTube” or “optimize your web site for Google” to marketing. Do these things matter? Absolutely. Search and content that rocks are vital components of any marketing program, and it’s just as insane to dismiss them as it is to dismiss outbound efforts like direct mail and cold calling.

The truth of the matter is that inbound and outbound marketing are both vitally important to your company, your products, your services, your ideas, and they complement each other. They are equally important, and they balance each other. Look back over the thousands of years of human civilization and you’ll see inbound and outbound marketing together. In the earliest bazaars, barkers called out their wares for sale – the purest form of interruption marketing. “Apples! Fresh apples, just brought in by horse from Judea!” If you were in the mood for apples, you might have bought some, and if the vendor’s apples were good, weren’t full of worms, were as he claimed them to be, then he’d gain a little of your trust. Over time, if he kept fulfilling his promises, you’d probably tell a friend or two. “Hosea, try the fruit vendor Ismael next to the butcher!” That’s word of mouth marketing, permission marketing, inbound marketing.

Examine the long history of marketing through the ages. Look how media changed marketing, but more important, look at how core principles of marketing remain the same despite the changes. You still have to find people interested in what you’ve got. Inbound or outbound, a consumer who neither wants nor needs what you have will remain deaf and blind to all your marketing, no matter how hard you try any approach.

Inbound and outbound marketing are co-dependent on each other. When you first get started, you’ll find that you do a lot more outbound marketing than inbound marketing. This is the time to experiment with all the methods of outbound. Try out direct email, advertisements, trade shows, and all of the outbound methods, and find the ones that work best for you. Once you begin to gain momentum, more of your business will come from inbound methods – word of mouth, search as your web site gains more credibility, content that rocks, promises you keep to the consumer.

Ultimately, you should find yourself with a balance. You’ll still need outbound to continually find new customers, especially in unexplored niches and verticals where you’re always the new person, the new business. You’ll still need inbound to find friends of your friends, customers of your customers, and keep the promises you’ve made to the people whose trust you’ve gained. Will it be exactly 50/50? Probably not, but it will be in balance, in equilibrium.

If someone tells you that any marketing methods, inbound, outbound, direct, fax, whatever, is the only thing you need, you know two things to be true – they are either lying or clueless, and they probably have something to sell you.

Comments

9 responses to “The lie of inbound marketing”

February 23, 2009

Bryan Coe

Christopher, great post. My company is involved in SEO and Social Media solutions, but I completely agree. These aspects are not an end all of marketing solutions, they are complementary. Plus they are oftoen the next step for many companies looking to reach their target market, as well as new markets, in new ways. There are a few profound benefits of using online marketing (inbound or outbound) that are not as easily measured in traditional marketing. The biggest one is probably the ability to track success of a campaign, i.e. conversion tracking(who buys) and traffic from the campaign.

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February 23, 2009

Bryan Coe

Christopher, great post. My company is involved in SEO and Social Media solutions, but I completely agree. These aspects are not an end all of marketing solutions, they are complementary. Plus they are oftoen the next step for many companies looking to reach their target market, as well as new markets, in new ways. There are a few profound benefits of using online marketing (inbound or outbound) that are not as easily measured in traditional marketing. The biggest one is probably the ability to track success of a campaign, i.e. conversion tracking(who buys) and traffic from the campaign.

Reply
February 23, 2009

Bryan Coe

Christopher, great post. My company is involved in SEO and Social Media solutions, but I completely agree. These aspects are not an end all of marketing solutions, they are complementary. Plus they are oftoen the next step for many companies looking to reach their target market, as well as new markets, in new ways. There are a few profound benefits of using online marketing (inbound or outbound) that are not as easily measured in traditional marketing. The biggest one is probably the ability to track success of a campaign, i.e. conversion tracking(who buys) and traffic from the campaign.

Reply
February 23, 2009

BbeS

Christopher, great post. My company is involved in SEO and Social Media solutions, but I completely agree. These aspects are not an end all of marketing solutions, they are complementary. Plus they are oftoen the next step for many companies looking to reach their target market, as well as new markets, in new ways. There are a few profound benefits of using online marketing (inbound or outbound) that are not as easily measured in traditional marketing. The biggest one is probably the ability to track success of a campaign, i.e. conversion tracking(who buys) and traffic from the campaign.

Reply
February 23, 2009

BbeS

Christopher, great post. My company is involved in SEO and Social Media solutions, but I completely agree. These aspects are not an end all of marketing solutions, they are complementary. Plus they are oftoen the next step for many companies looking to reach their target market, as well as new markets, in new ways. There are a few profound benefits of using online marketing (inbound or outbound) that are not as easily measured in traditional marketing. The biggest one is probably the ability to track success of a campaign, i.e. conversion tracking(who buys) and traffic from the campaign.

Reply
March 11, 2009

Antidote Web Design

Great post! However on my side of the planet, most business owners will not be able to relate to your article. A majority of them are practicing purely outbound marketing and have none/little awareness about the possibilities of inbound marketing. Educating them can be challenging at times 🙂

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December 10, 2010

Dharmesh Shah

Could not agree more. Even at HubSpot (known best for inbound marketing), we believe in finding a good balance between inbound and outbound methods.

Organizations should test, test, test — and do more of what works.

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December 10, 2010

Don Dalrymple

Enjoyed your article. I do think information overload has changed buyer behaviors and the marketplace. It does still start with attention and focus which the buyer previously gave because time was not so compressed and information was not so prevalent.

Something has to trigger attention whether it is inbound or outbound. Inbound being that there is emotion, pain and urgency to drive search. Outbound in that different markets may require less self-service and more full-service in the sales process. Our work with different organizations reveals that markets behave differently and the ensuing methodology to use will slide on the proverbial scale accordingly. Thanks again.

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December 10, 2010

Kevin

I couldn’t agree more. When you hear anyone speaking in absolutes about anything, I suggest being very suspicious. Reality is almost always a shade of gray.

Of course, we tend to buy into it because it seems to be an easy answer, or at least a clearly defined answer. The hard part to the best answer is what you described; its individualized, some combination of efforts, and only discovered after trial/error and some hard work.

We have a saying about cold calling, its god’s punishment for not asking for referrals. Of course we would rather work on referrals, but, like any inbound opportunity, it takes time and effort to put ourselves in a position for them to actually happen.

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