Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing

When I talk with most people in marketing today about how they generate leads and fill the top of their sales funnel, most say seminars, trade shows, email blasts to purchased lists, internal cold calling, outsourced telemarketing, and advertising. I call these methods "outbound marketing" where a marketer pushes his message out far and wide hoping that it resonates with that needle in the haystack.

I think outbound marketing techniques are getting less and less effective over time for two reasons. First, your average human today is innundated with over 5000 outbound marketing messages per day and is figuring out more and more creative ways to block them out, including caller id, spam filtering, Tivo, and XM satellite radio. Second, the cost to learn something new or shopping for something new using the internet (search engines, blogs, and social media sites) is now much lower than going to a seminar at the Hilton or flying to a trade show in Vegas.

Rather than do outbound marketing to the masses of people who are trying to block you out, I advocate doing "inbound marketing" where you help yourself "get discovered" by people already learning about you and shopping in your industry. In order to do this, you need to set your website up like a "hub" for your industry that attracts visitors naturally through the search engines, through the blog-o-sphere, and through the social media sites. I believe most marketers today spend 80% of their efforts on outbound marketing and 20% on inbound marketing and I advocate that those ratios flip.