Inbound versus Outbound Marketing.

Know the difference between these two methods of marketing and your results will be enormous. Outbound marketing sometimes makes you an aggravating nuisance to the people that you want to help and bring into your spear of influence. Whereas, Inbound marketing generates a multiple of paths that people can follow to reach you for your assistance.

Inbound Marketing is a process whereby you know how to make your product or service available without unduly bothering and contacting potential prospects to interrupt what thy are doing and come to take a look at what you have to offer. You make your presents known in places where you know they usually congregate and mingle in their normal daily routine of activity. It is just that you are there, not in an intrusive mode but in a why that if they are looking for what you have they recognize you as knowledgeable and informative and know how to contact you. All queries lead to you in an organized fashion.

Outbound Marketing changes the normal course of activity that your prospect is currently pursueing. They may be eating dinner, watching a movie, surfing the Internet, etc. Then you jump in with an unexpected phone call, an advertisement on the TV, a pop-up on their computer screen, etc. Anything you do that tries to change their focus of attention from what they are doing to your product or service is outbound marketing.

Inbound marketing focuses on creating quality content that pulls people IN to your business, brand and you. They are already searching for answers online, researching your industry, checking out your competitors, and trying to decide if they really need your service or product. So, the goal is to have content that speaks to all of these scenarios and stages of the buying process in order to capture these interested prospects where they naturally hang out.

By aligning the content you publish with your customer’s interests, you naturally attract traffic that comes to you. You can then convert, close, and delight these prospects over time.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Inbound marketing is promoting a company through blogs, podcasts, video, eBooks, enewsletters, whitepapers, SEO, physical products, social media marketing, and other forms of content marketing which serve to attract customers through the different stages of the purchase funnel.

Outbound marketing, in contrast, is buying attention, cold-calling, direct paper mail, radio, TV advertisements, sales flyers, spam, telemarketing and traditional advertising. Inbound marketing refers to marketing activities that bring visitors in, rather than marketers having to go out to get prospects' attention. Inbound marketing earns the attention of customers, makes the company easy to be found, and draws customers to the website by producing interesting content. Many companies are now realizing that their technical documentation, often considered a "necessary evil", is authoritative, trustworthy content that can be a company's most effective inbound marketing channel, generating more than half of overall site traffic and over half of lead generation.

Dennis Roeder, Markethive Alpha Founder
http://markethive.com/dennisroeder