Inbound marketing vs
outbound marketing –
for B2B services

These are two drastically different philosophies. There’s nothing preventing you from using both strategies at the same time. Be careful though, if you’re resource-limited on the marketing and sales side, there’s a good chance you’ll want to choose one as your primary focus while you use the other for support. The biggest difference between inbound and outbound marketing is that outbound is about pushing yourself onto people and inbound is about attracting people to you.

What is outbound marketing?

Outbound marketing is any form of marketing where you are pushing your company’s services onto a potential customer, as opposed to attracting them to you. A key element is that you generally drive the timing and medium of the initial outreach, as opposed to your potential customer.

The most obvious B2B outbound marketing strategy is cold calling. Other examples include direct mail and networking. There are other channels where things get fuzzier. Social media marketing for example. I mostly consider this an outbound channel because you’re pushing your message at eyeballs and hoping that it’s relevant for some small portion of those eyeballs. There’s a good chance the majority of them won’t be actively looking for the content you’re presenting.

Exhibiting at trade shows/conferences is more of an outbound thing because you’re putting yourself out there hoping the right eyeballs see you as they pass by your booth. This method is fuzzy because you’re putting yourself in a position to be found by your potential customer, and they’ve put effort into coming to a location which implies that they do have some level of interest in the broader topic of the trade show.

Email marketing gets even fuzzier, and can be either more outbound or more inbound depending on how sophisticated of an approach is utilized. The main indicators that suggest how outbound-focused vs inbound-focused include:

The number of links you need to send to the list to be relevant for the majority of the list. If you only need one link in an email to be relevant to the majority of your group, you’re more on the inbound side of things. If you need two, three, or four links to accomplish this, you’re not segmented enough and you’re more on the outbound side.
Click-thru rates (CTR). CTR gives you an indication of how interested your audience is in a particular topic. Low CTR generally suggests low interest. Low interest means you’re blasting a bunch of info out to a large portion of people that aren’t interested. That’s an outbound sort of thing.
Are some of your emails in response to observed behavior or is it just an email you send out once ever month or two? If it’s behavior-responsive, this is more in line with inbound. If it’s just timed to your schedule, this is more of an outbound indicator.

Outbound marketing – the good

Shorter feedback loops

The feedback loop on what’s working or not is shorter than inbound. You’ll know pretty immediately if what you’re doing is working or not. Why? Because you’re either immediately engaging a large enough portion of the people that you’re reaching out to in order to satisfy your goals, or you’re not. You’ll usually have a sense of how it’s s going for each event or conference you attend, or within a matter of days or a couple weeks for email, paid social media, and cold calling. This allows you to iterate faster on what’s working for you and what isn’t.

Hit the pause button

You can (mostly) shut outbound marketing off at the drop of a hat. I say mostly because you can’t just start ignoring the people you’ve started engaging with. But you can stop cold calling, pause paid social, stop sending emails, stop sending direct mail, and decide not to exhibit at the next tradeshow. You can’t really get away with this with inbound. The lag time is too long and you may end up inflicting non-linear damage.

It’s an available approach even if no one is looking for you

In case you haven’t realized yet, in order for inbound marketing to work, people have to be looking for things within the universe that you live in. If you’re trying to sell something that people aren’t looking for, or a general topic they don’t know exists, inbound likely won’t be your main approach. With outbound, you have the opportunity to make the market aware of you. You’ll need to put yourself out there in front of media, at shows, networking, etc.

Outbound marketing – the bad and ugly

You’re more likely to irritate people

How do you feel when someone interrupts you, talking about something that you didn’t want to talk about? It could happen at a store when you’re trying to buy one thing and someone stops you to ask you something totally unrelated that they’re trying to sell you. Or when you’re going through your social media feed and see an ad that’s totally irrelevant to you. You’re likely to irritate way more people with outbound than you are with inbound. This can accumulate over time, impacting your reputation/trust without you even knowing it.

Your timing is random relative to your buyers

Even if you do a good job narrowing your audience so that you’re only trying to engage people that could have a need that you can help with, when you drive the timing you’re not aligning with your buyer’s timing. That means, even if they’re a good fit some day, they’re way less likely to want to engage with you if they don’t plan on working on the thing you can help them with for another year or two.

You’ll need a stronger value proposition

Relative to inbound, you’ll need a stronger value proposition. Why? Because there’s a psychological aspect in play when you’re looking for help vs when someone interrupts you. You can almost hear yourself say “this better be good”. That’s what’s often in play when you reach out to someone unexpectedly.

Organic social media can take a long time

Social media can feel more like an inbound approach from a patience and timeframe standpoint because if your main goal is to engage your followers, you’ll have to build that follower base over time. This will take years, not weeks or months, and that’s with solid supporting content and active effort.

Outbound marketing – a couple other things to note

Account-based marketing

Sophisticated account-based marketing is likely to have both inbound and outbound components to it. It’s essentially the top of the pyramid from a company sophistication standpoint. It requires several elements of inbound (namely content and paid search), along with a very sophisticated sales team that can patiently build relationships over a long period of time. It’s not for newbies. See account-based marketing vs inbound marketing for more detail.

Focused 1:1 outreach

Using tools like LinkedIn can be a great way to engage a potential customer, assuming you’ve got a strong value proposition and know how to succinctly articulate a message. Be warned though, you’ll want to do your homework up front to stand your best chance of connecting.

What is inbound marketing?

The goal with inbound marketing is to position yourself ahead of time so that when someone is actively looking for help (they could be learning about a topic, or trying to solve a near-term problem), your content is there waiting to help.

This generally starts with a potential customer searching in a search engine. From there, the searcher may either:

Engage with your content and start to become familiar with your company. This is awareness and early-stage trust-building.
Engage with your content and like it enough to either sign up for one of your email lists or follow you on LinkedIn (or other social media). This is where you get a chance to start to actively nurture them over time.
Engage with your content and be ready to initiate a conversation, at which point they reach out for a chat (either filling out a form, engaging in a chat session, or calling your office). This is where sales-ready leads start to come into play.

This makes it important to show up for several related and relevant topics around a particular niche application area, as well as having supporting content to be able to both nurture and serve as proof points, depending on where the buyer is in their journey.

Inbound marketing – the good

Being less annoying

There are several good reasons to be interested in inbound marketing. Probably the biggest is that it can be significantly less annoying to your customers, which should be good for you and them in the long run.

See the pros section of the pros and cons of inbound marketing for more benefits of inbound.

Inbound marketing – the bad and ugly

How patient are you?

If you answered, “not very”, then you’d better find someone that is to help you. Probably the biggest negative to inbound marketing is that it’s a long game. It not only takes many iterations to home in on your sweet spot, there are so many factors that can hold you back (eg. website technical challenges, lack of empathy), and it takes a long time for the Google machine to trust you.

See the cons section of pros and cons of inbound marketing for more inbound challenges.

Inbound marketing – other things of note

Inbound is tightly tied to content and search marketing. This is both useful and challenging because in order to do inbound well, you want to think about your marketing in a very holistic way, not compartmentalized. You need someone to oversee all your efforts so that they can tie them all together and make it all make sense, both to the user and to Google.

Next steps

If you’re trying to figure out whether you want to focus more energy on outbound or inbound efforts, feel free to reach out and we can chat about the pros and cons for your scenario.

Yes, let’s chat

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