SEO
Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing: What’s the Difference?
Inbound marketing is where you build brand awareness and interest with content. Outbound marketing is where you reach out to consumers to do the same thing.
In this post, you’ll learn how to decide which is better for your business.
Let’s start with the basics.
Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that aims to “pull customers in” with relevant and useful content.
The term was coined by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, founders of the SaaS company HubSpot. According to them, it typically involves three stages:
- Attract – Bring in the right people.
- Engage – Help them with their pain points and goals.
- Delight – Help them find success with your product or service.
1. Attract
This stage is all about attracting potential customers to your website with useful content.
One way to do this is to create content for topics your target customers are searching for. You can find these topics using a keyword research tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer.
For example, here’s how we can find topics for an online store that sells coffee products:
- Brainstorm words and phrases potential customers may enter on Google
- Enter them into Keywords Explorer
- Go to the Matching terms report
- Switch the tab to Questions
Learn more: Keyword Research: The Beginner’s Guide by Ahrefs
2. Engage
Some people who visit your website will buy right away. But many won’t. That’s because they need time—time to think about their problems, consider their situations, and evaluate solutions.
Even if they’re not buying now, you’ll want to be there and continue to engage them. That way, your brand will be top of mind when it’s time to buy.
One way to do this is to build an email list. Encourage your website visitors to sign up, then send them regular updates. For example, we send a weekly newsletter that includes both our latest content and recommendations from around the web.
3. Delight
Each happy customer can spread the good word among their friends and family, therefore referring more customers to you.
But how do you “delight” your customers?
The best way to do this is to have a great product. If your product doesn’t help your customers solve their problems, it doesn’t matter how many tactics you implement.
You’ll also want to guide your customers to make the best use of your product or service. For example, at Ahrefs, we have tons of in-depth courses that cover the nooks and crannies of using our tool.
Inbound marketing is mainly about creating and publishing content. So examples of inbound marketing typically boil down to the different types of content you can create, which include:
- Blog posts, e.g., this blog.
- Videos, e.g., our YouTube channel.
- Podcasts, e.g., “The Perpetual Traffic” podcast.
- Webinars, e.g., ConvertKit’s webinars.
- Social media content, e.g., our Twitter account.
And more.
Should you invest in inbound marketing? Let’s look at the pros and cons.
Pros
Here are the advantages of inbound marketing:
- Non-interruptive – Prospects find you in their own time and will.
- Targeted – Prospects search for your content only when they’re interested or have problems. This makes it easier to sell to them.
- Staying power – Prospects can continue to discover your content as long as it ranks high on Google, is internally linked to, or exists as part of your content archives (e.g., YouTube channel). This sends consistent traffic to your website without you having to “actively” maintain it.
- Can be more cost-effective in the long term – Our blog gets an estimated 573,000 monthly search visits. If we were to buy that traffic via search ads, it’d cost us an estimated $795,000 per month (or $9.5 million per year). Considering that our content team is <10 people and we’re not paid millions each in salaries, we can reasonably say inbound marketing is cheaper in the long term.
Cons
Here are some downsides to inbound marketing:
- Takes time to work – You need time to create high-quality content. You also need time for Google to discover and rank your content. In fact, SEO takes around three to six months to work.
- Challenging to do well – There’s simply too much content these days. If you want to stand out, you need to create high-quality content that people enjoy reading. That can be a tall order if you lack resources.
Outbound marketing is a marketing strategy where a company actively pushes a message about a product out to prospects.
While outbound marketing constitutes completely different tactics, from cold calling to social media advertising, we can roughly break it down into these “stages”:
- Audience targeting – Decide who should see your message.
- Message pushing – Actively push the message out.
- Following up – Follow up with the target audience (if there is no response).
1. Audience targeting
Audience targeting is where you decide who should see your message. For example, if you run a billboard ad in Times Square, you’ve decided to target the people of New York City.
Even tactics like cold calling and cold emailing are not random. Companies usually procure a relevant list of numbers or emails (e.g., people who are customers of X company) to push their messages.
2. Message pushing
This is where you create and push the message you want your target audience to see. For a social media ad, it’ll look like this:
For cold calling and cold emailing, it’ll be your pitch.
3. Following up
If there is no response to your initial message, you might want to consider following up. For example, this is a follow-up email I sent to check if someone was interested in contributing to a post:
For social media advertising, follow-ups can be done via retargeting.
Here are some common examples of outbound marketing:
- Cold calls
- Cold emails
- Direct mails
- Billboards
- Print ads
- Television commercials
- Social media advertising, e.g., Instagram ads
- YouTube ads
Should you invest in outbound marketing? Here are the pros and cons.
Pros
What are some advantages of outbound marketing?
- Faster results – Generally speaking, outbound marketing tactics are much easier to set up and run. Therefore, you can actually get results faster.
- Easier to track “success” – For example, you can easily measure the number of opens or replies for cold emailing, the number of impressions and clicks from social media advertising, or even the number of positive responses from cold calling. (There are exceptions, such as running a huge billboard ad in Times Square.)
Cons
There are downsides to outbound marketing too:
- Interruptive – Prospects are not necessarily looking for your product or service, so you’re basically disrupting their daily schedules to show your message. For tactics like cold calling and cold emailing, there is a risk that you could “damage” your brand in the long term if you’re spammy.
- Blindness – People tend to tune out or ignore cold calls, emails, and advertising. They can also—and increasingly are—use tools like ad blockers and email solutions like Gated to block out ads and unsolicited emails.
Despite being styled as opposite, inbound and outbound marketing are not mutually exclusive.
In fact, the best companies use them together.
Here’s how you can combine both inbound and outbound marketing:
1. Capture leads using inbound and follow up using outbound
Imagine this: What if you can reach out via outbound marketing to people who’ve already indicated their interest? Won’t it be much easier to sell?
Well, you can. People who are searching for you or your content have already indicated their interest in your product or a pain point you solve. So rather than “blast” everyone with emails or ads, here’s what you can do instead:
- Do keyword research to find topics that your prospects are searching for on Google
- Create SEO content that ranks high for such topics
- Capture their contact information when they visit your site
- Follow up with the most promising leads, e.g., people who’ve tested your free trial, visited a comparison page, completed your free course, etc
Here’s an example of how it works. A prospect wants to learn how to audit their site for SEO issues. So they search for “how to perform an SEO audit” and discover our blog post.
In the blog post, they learn that they can sign up for a free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT) account and run an audit of their site. So they do.
By signing up for AWT, they’ve qualified themselves to be interested in an SEO tool like ours. So, if we had a sales team, we could easily reach out to them via email to see if they would be interested in upgrading to a paid account.
This is only one blog post. You can see how this easily scales up across the hundreds of pieces of content we’ve created on the blog and on our YouTube channel, generating hundreds of leads we can potentially follow up on.
In fact, this is a core strategy of many SaaS companies. Generate qualified leads via inbound, then reach out via their sales teams to generate sales.
Learn more: Lead Generation: The Beginner’s Guide
2. Use content for building brand awareness
Imagine getting a cold email from a HubSpot rep. Even if it’s unsolicited, would you give it a few minutes of your time to see what they had to say?
I bet you would. That’s because it’s HubSpot. It’s a massive brand. You trust that the email—even if unasked for—potentially contains something important.
My point is this: Outbound marketing benefits from having a recognizable and known brand. People will choose whether to read your emails or tune in to your ads based on your brand.
And one way of building a brand is to create relevant and useful content for your potential customers.
If your prospects are constantly seeing you on the SERPs and if your content genuinely helps them solve their problems, your brand will be top of mind. And that can only serve to boost your outbound marketing efforts.
3. Repurpose inbound content for outbound marketing
Outbound marketing isn’t always just about the sales pitch. It isn’t a case of “spamming” until someone buys.
Offering value upfront can be helpful in converting prospects into customers. For example, here’s a cold email sent to HubSpot from Bryan Harris:
Instead of pitching his services in the first email, Bryan offered value. He created a demo video for HubSpot to show what that could look like for it. He didn’t ask for anything in return either—all he wanted was to gauge its interest.
And it worked—Bryan got the contract to work with HubSpot.
In this example, Bryan created the demo video from scratch. But you don’t have to. If you’re already creating content, you can easily repurpose it into new formats that you can offer prospects. For example, you can put together an ebook from your published blog posts.
Of course, the exact piece of content you should create depends on who you’re reaching out to. But the point stands—if you’re doing inbound marketing, you can simply repurpose the content for your outbound marketing efforts.
Keep learning
Check out these resources to learn more about inbound and outbound marketing:
Any questions or comments? Let me know on Twitter.
SEO
Google Declares It The “Gemini Era” As Revenue Grows 15%
Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, announced its first quarter 2024 financial results today.
While Google reported double-digit growth in key revenue areas, the focus was on its AI developments, dubbed the “Gemini era” by CEO Sundar Pichai.
The Numbers: 15% Revenue Growth, Operating Margins Expand
Alphabet reported Q1 revenues of $80.5 billion, a 15% increase year-over-year, exceeding Wall Street’s projections.
Net income was $23.7 billion, with diluted earnings per share of $1.89. Operating margins expanded to 32%, up from 25% in the prior year.
Ruth Porat, Alphabet’s President and CFO, stated:
“Our strong financial results reflect revenue strength across the company and ongoing efforts to durably reengineer our cost base.”
Google’s core advertising units, such as Search and YouTube, drove growth. Google advertising revenues hit $61.7 billion for the quarter.
The Cloud division also maintained momentum, with revenues of $9.6 billion, up 28% year-over-year.
Pichai highlighted that YouTube and Cloud are expected to exit 2024 at a combined $100 billion annual revenue run rate.
Generative AI Integration in Search
Google experimented with AI-powered features in Search Labs before recently introducing AI overviews into the main search results page.
Regarding the gradual rollout, Pichai states:
“We are being measured in how we do this, focusing on areas where gen AI can improve the Search experience, while also prioritizing traffic to websites and merchants.”
Pichai reports that Google’s generative AI features have answered over a billion queries already:
“We’ve already served billions of queries with our generative AI features. It’s enabling people to access new information, to ask questions in new ways, and to ask more complex questions.”
Google reports increased Search usage and user satisfaction among those interacting with the new AI overview results.
The company also highlighted its “Circle to Search” feature on Android, which allows users to circle objects on their screen or in videos to get instant AI-powered answers via Google Lens.
Reorganizing For The “Gemini Era”
As part of the AI roadmap, Alphabet is consolidating all teams building AI models under the Google DeepMind umbrella.
Pichai revealed that, through hardware and software improvements, the company has reduced machine costs associated with its generative AI search results by 80% over the past year.
He states:
“Our data centers are some of the most high-performing, secure, reliable and efficient in the world. We’ve developed new AI models and algorithms that are more than one hundred times more efficient than they were 18 months ago.
How Will Google Make Money With AI?
Alphabet sees opportunities to monetize AI through its advertising products, Cloud offerings, and subscription services.
Google is integrating Gemini into ad products like Performance Max. The company’s Cloud division is bringing “the best of Google AI” to enterprise customers worldwide.
Google One, the company’s subscription service, surpassed 100 million paid subscribers in Q1 and introduced a new premium plan featuring advanced generative AI capabilities powered by Gemini models.
Future Outlook
Pichai outlined six key advantages positioning Alphabet to lead the “next wave of AI innovation”:
- Research leadership in AI breakthroughs like the multimodal Gemini model
- Robust AI infrastructure and custom TPU chips
- Integrating generative AI into Search to enhance the user experience
- A global product footprint reaching billions
- Streamlined teams and improved execution velocity
- Multiple revenue streams to monetize AI through advertising and cloud
With upcoming events like Google I/O and Google Marketing Live, the company is expected to share further updates on its AI initiatives and product roadmap.
Featured Image: Sergei Elagin/Shutterstock
SEO
brightonSEO Live Blog
Hello everyone. It’s April again, so I’m back in Brighton for another two days of Being the introvert I am, my idea of fun isn’t hanging around our booth all day explaining we’ve run out of t-shirts (seriously, you need to be fast if you want swag!). So I decided to do something useful and live-blog the event instead.
Follow below for talk takeaways and (very) mildly humorous commentary. sun, sea, and SEO!
SEO
Google Further Postpones Third-Party Cookie Deprecation In Chrome
Google has again delayed its plan to phase out third-party cookies in the Chrome web browser. The latest postponement comes after ongoing challenges in reconciling feedback from industry stakeholders and regulators.
The announcement was made in Google and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) joint quarterly report on the Privacy Sandbox initiative, scheduled for release on April 26.
Chrome’s Third-Party Cookie Phaseout Pushed To 2025
Google states it “will not complete third-party cookie deprecation during the second half of Q4” this year as planned.
Instead, the tech giant aims to begin deprecating third-party cookies in Chrome “starting early next year,” assuming an agreement can be reached with the CMA and the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
The statement reads:
“We recognize that there are ongoing challenges related to reconciling divergent feedback from the industry, regulators and developers, and will continue to engage closely with the entire ecosystem. It’s also critical that the CMA has sufficient time to review all evidence, including results from industry tests, which the CMA has asked market participants to provide by the end of June.”
Continued Engagement With Regulators
Google reiterated its commitment to “engaging closely with the CMA and ICO” throughout the process and hopes to conclude discussions this year.
This marks the third delay to Google’s plan to deprecate third-party cookies, initially aiming for a Q3 2023 phaseout before pushing it back to late 2024.
The postponements reflect the challenges in transitioning away from cross-site user tracking while balancing privacy and advertiser interests.
Transition Period & Impact
In January, Chrome began restricting third-party cookie access for 1% of users globally. This percentage was expected to gradually increase until 100% of users were covered by Q3 2024.
However, the latest delay gives websites and services more time to migrate away from third-party cookie dependencies through Google’s limited “deprecation trials” program.
The trials offer temporary cookie access extensions until December 27, 2024, for non-advertising use cases that can demonstrate direct user impact and functional breakage.
While easing the transition, the trials have strict eligibility rules. Advertising-related services are ineligible, and origins matching known ad-related domains are rejected.
Google states the program aims to address functional issues rather than relieve general data collection inconveniences.
Publisher & Advertiser Implications
The repeated delays highlight the potential disruption for digital publishers and advertisers relying on third-party cookie tracking.
Industry groups have raised concerns that restricting cross-site tracking could push websites toward more opaque privacy-invasive practices.
However, privacy advocates view the phaseout as crucial in preventing covert user profiling across the web.
With the latest postponement, all parties have more time to prepare for the eventual loss of third-party cookies and adopt Google’s proposed Privacy Sandbox APIs as replacements.
Featured Image: Novikov Aleksey/Shutterstock
-
SEARCHENGINES7 days ago
Daily Search Forum Recap: April 19, 2024
-
WORDPRESS6 days ago
13 Best HubSpot Alternatives for 2024 (Free + Paid)
-
MARKETING6 days ago
Battling for Attention in the 2024 Election Year Media Frenzy
-
WORDPRESS6 days ago
7 Best WooCommerce Points and Rewards Plugins (Free & Paid)
-
MARKETING5 days ago
Advertising in local markets: A playbook for success
-
SEO6 days ago
Google Answers Whether Having Two Sites Affects Rankings
-
SEARCHENGINES5 days ago
Google Core Update Flux, AdSense Ad Intent, California Link Tax & More
-
AFFILIATE MARKETING6 days ago
Grab Microsoft Project Professional 2021 for $20 During This Flash Sale
You must be logged in to post a comment Login