Inbound and outbound marketing are very different ways of engaging with your customers. One focuses on broadcasting a message while the other is a much more personalized experience, but both methods are necessary to succeed in today’s market. The best companies differentiate their marketing efforts, meaning that they use both inbound and outbound marketing techniques. Here are three examples of today’s strategies on inbound and outbound marketing.
Know Your Audience
Take for example President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. His staff used inbound marketing to increase his reach to younger voters, but rather than trying to create the sort of rallies that draw a younger crowd, they took their pitch to where their prospective audience already was – social media. The Obama campaign was active on twice as many social media platforms as the campaign for Republican candidate Mitt Romney, and provided nearly four times as much content.
Take a Stand
Another way to use inbound marketing to grow your business is to take a stand on an issue. It could be directly related to your business, such as a restaurant that does not serve GMO foods writing about associated health risks, or it could take a broader approach, like Oreo did in 2012 when the company released a series of gay rights ads on Facebook during Pride Month to commemorate the cookie’s 100th anniversary. Not all the reactions were positive, but it got people talking. Over 143,000 people “liked” the post and over 18,000 people commented on it.
Create Engagement
According to Variety, almost 70% of people record television shows on a DVR so they can avoid commercials. Rather than fight it, Netflix-rival Hulu came up with a different strategy – choose your own experience. Before watching many shows or movies on Hulu, viewers are asked which ad experience they would prefer, like PayPal’s “People Rule” campaign that gave viewers a choice between ads centered on the service’s speed or its security. By introducing a choice, viewers were engaged with the ads in a way they never would have been had they aired on television.
Reaching your audience, talking about issues that matter to them, and creating ways for existing and prospective customers to engage with your company will help take your marketing efforts to the next level. To learn more about how SMG can help you develop successful outbound and inbound marketing strategies for your company, visit our website!