SEO

Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing: What’s the Difference?

Published

4 months ago

November 17, 2022

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.

Image showing how inbound marketing works

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

Matching terms report, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

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.

Organic traffic for Ahrefs' blog, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

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.

Mention of Ahrefs Webmaster Tools in a blog post

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.

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Related Topics:Difference Inbound Marketing Outbound seo Whats

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Should Congress Investigate Big Tech Platforms?

Published

7 hours ago

March 22, 2023

EntirewebNewsBot

Should Congress Investigate Big Tech Platforms?

This week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will hold a full committee hearing with TikTok CEO Shou Chew to discuss how the platform handles users’ data, its effect on kids, and its relationship with ByteDance, its Chinese parent company.

This hearing is part of an ongoing investigation to determine whether TikTok should be banned in the United States or forced to split from ByteDance.

A ban on TikTok would affect over 150 million Americans who use TikTok for education, entertainment, and income generation.

It would also affect the five million U.S. businesses using TikTok to reach customers.

Is TikTok The Only Risk To National Security?

According to a memo released by the Tech Oversight Project, TikTok is not the only tech platform that poses risks to national security, mental health, and children.

As Congress scrutinizes TikTok, the Tech Oversight Project also strongly urges an investigation of risks posed by tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Google.

These platforms have a documented history of serving content harmful to younger audiences and adversarial to U.S. interests. They have also failed on many occasions to protect users’ private data.

Many Big Tech companies have seen TikTok’s success and tried to emulate some of its features to encourage users to spend as much time within their platforms’ ecosystems as possible. Academics, activists, non-governmental organizations, and others have long raised concerns about these platforms’ risks.

To truly reduce Big Rech’s risks to our society, Congress must look beyond TikTok and hold other companies accountable for the same dangers they pose to national security, mental health, and private data.

Risks Posed By Big Tech Companies

The following are examples of the risks Big Tech companies pose to U.S. users.

Amazon

Amazon has made several controversial moves, including a partnership with a state propaganda agency to launch a China books portal and offering AWS services to Chinese companies, including a banned surveillance firm with ties to the military.

Apple

Independent research found that Apple collects detailed information about its users, even when users choose not to allow tracking by apps from the App Store. Over half of the top 200 suppliers for Apple operate factories in China.

Google

The FTC fined Google and YouTube $170 million for collecting children’s data without parental consent. YouTube also changed its algorithm to make it more addictive, increasing users’ time watching videos and consuming ads.

TikTok

TikTok employees confirmed that its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, is involved in decision-making and has access to TikTok’s user data. While testifying before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Vanessa Pappas, TikTok COO, would not confirm whether ByteDance would give TikTok user data to the Chinese government.

Conclusion

While the dangers posed by TikTok are undeniable, it’s clear that Congress should also address the risks posed throughout the tech industry. By holding all major offenders accountable, we can create a safe, secure, and responsible digital landscape for everyone.

Featured Image: Koshiro K/Shutterstock

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SEO

The 29 Best WordPress Plugins (Organized by Category)

Published

8 hours ago

March 22, 2023

EntirewebNewsBot

WordPress plugins make your life easier by allowing you to add features to your website without learning to code or hire a developer.

However, over 60,000 WordPress plugins are available, and more are released every day. Plus, installing too many plugins can cause slow website loading speeds, so you want to avoid adding too many of these plugins.

To help you limit your installed plugins to only the most worthy, I’ve compiled this list of the 29 best WordPress plugins categorized by what they’re good for.

This list comes from my more than 12 years of experience building WordPress websites and working closely with my WordPress developer.

First up, we have some plugins to help you design and add specific functionalities to your WordPress website.

Elementor

Cost: Free ($59/year for premium)

Useful for:

Building a website theme with drag-and-drop editing
Easily creating custom landing pages

Elementor is awesome for anyone who wants a custom-looking website without learning how to code or being limited to a pre-built theme. But it also has pre-built themes you can customize to streamline the process.

Be aware that using any kind of drag-and-drop editor like this will slow down your site.

WooCommerce

Cost: Free

Useful for: Turning your WordPress website into an e-commerce store

WooCommerce is the best plugin to start an e-commerce business on your WordPress website. It allows you to easily create product pages and collections.

You can combine it with WooCommerce Payments to easily collect customer payment information.

Advanced Custom Fields Pro

Cost: $49/year for a single site

Useful for: Creating custom widgets to use anywhere on your site

If you know how to code, Advanced Custom Fields Pro allows you to take full control over your WordPress edit screens and custom field data.

WPCode

Cost: Free ($49–$399/year for premium)

Useful for: Inserting code into your headers and footers

Formerly called Insert Headers and Footers, WPCode is the easiest way for non-developers to add code snippets anywhere on their website.

For example, you may have to add a code snippet to your website’s header to connect it with Google Analytics or to add the Facebook Remarketing Pixel.

WPForms

Cost: $49.50/year

Useful for:

Creating forms for contact pages, newsletter sign-ups, and more
Building surveys for your site visitors

WPForms is a drag-and-drop WordPress form editor. It’s super intuitive and easy to use.

TranslatePress

Cost: €89/year (~USD 95)

Useful for: Translating your website into other languages

TranslatePress makes it easy to create translated versions of your website in other languages. It also automatically adds the hreflang tags for each language, so it’s also good for SEO.

Formilla

Cost: Free (varying premium plans starting at $19.99/month)

Useful for: Adding a live chat feature to your site

Formilla is a live chat plugin for WordPress. You can offer live chat support or use it to answer visitors’ questions automatically using a bot—although that may annoy them.

Next up, we’ve got a whole suite of plugins that help you make your website more secure and easier to manage. WordPress sites are often vulnerable to hacking, so these are important.

Wordfence

Cost: Free ($119/year for premium)

Useful for: Keeping your website safe from hackers and malware

Wordfence adds a robust firewall and malware scanner to protect your site from hackers and malicious software. You can also use it to add two-factor login authentication, have rate limiting, and run security diagnostics on your site—to name a few of the features.

UpdraftPlus

Cost: Free ($119/year for premium)

Useful for: Backing up your WordPress website

It’s important to back up your website every so often to avoid losing your content in the event of a plugin clash, hack, or even accidental deletion. UpdraftPlus makes this easy for you.

Wordable

PublishPress role capabilities dashboard

Membership site built using MemberPress WordPress plugin

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SEO

TikTok Updated Community Guidelines To Include AI Content

Published

14 hours ago

March 22, 2023

EntirewebNewsBot

TikTok Updated Community Guidelines To Include AI Content

TikTok has updated its Community Guidelines, which will go into effect on April 21, 2023.

The updated guidelines introduce TikTok’s Community Principles, which guide content moderation to uphold human rights and international legal frameworks.

TikTok worked with over 100 organizations globally to strengthen its rules to address new threats and reduce potential user harm.

Key changes to Community Guidelines apply to synthetic media, tribes, and civic and election integrity.

AI-Generated Content

TikTok defines “synthetic media” as content created or modified by AI. While AI and related technologies allow creators to express themselves in many new ways, they can also blur the line between fact and fiction for viewers.

Creators must label synthetic or altered media as such to mitigate the potential risks of spreading misinformation.

To reduce potential harm, synthetic media featuring real private individuals is prohibited. Private individuals include anyone under 18 and adults who are not public figures. The use of public figures over 18 – government officials, politicians, business leaders, and celebrities – is permitted, but with restrictions.

Creators must not use synthetic media to violate policies against hate speech, sexual exploitation, and severe harassment. They must also clearly disclose synthetic media and manipulated content that depict realistic scenes with fake people, places, or events.

Public figures cannot be used in synthetic audio or video for political or commercial endorsements to mislead users about financial or political issues.

You can, however, use synthetic media in artistic and educational content.

Protection Of Tribes

TikTok policies already include rules meant to protect people and groups with specific attributes from hateful behavior, hate speech, and hateful ideologies.

With new guidelines, the platform added Tribes to the list of protected attributes, including ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and sexual orientation.

While TikTok allows critical content on public figures, as defined above, it prohibits language that harasses, humiliates, threatens, or doxxes everyone.

Users can consult resources and tools provided by TikTok to identify bullying behavior and configure their settings to prevent it from affecting them further.

Civil And Election Integrity

Noting that elections are essential to community dialogue and upholding societal values, TikTok recently emphasized its alleged efforts to encourage topical discussions while maintaining unity.

To achieve this goal, paid political promotion, advertising, and fundraising by politicians or parties are prohibited. This policy applies to traditional ads and compensated creator content.

TikTok claims to support informed civic idea exchanges to promote constructive conversations without allowing misinformation about voting processes and election outcomes. Content that includes unverified claims about election results will not be eligible to appear in the For You Feed.

Before these changes go into effect next month, moderators will receive additional training on enforcing them effectively.

Will Recent Changes Prevent More TikTok Bans?

TikTok’s refreshed Community Guidelines and explanation of Community Principles appear to attempt greater transparency and foster a safe, inclusive, and authentic environment for all users.

TikTok plans to continue investing in safety measures to encourage creativity and connection within its global community of one billion users globally.

TikTok’s latest changes to improve transparency, reduce harm, and provide higher-quality content for users may be part of efforts to prevent the app from being banned in the U.S.

This week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will hold a full committee hearing with TikTok CEO Shou Chew on how congress can protect the data privacy of U.S. users and children from online harm.

Organizations like the Tech Oversight Project have also expressed concerns about risks that big tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta pose.

Featured Image: BigTunaOnline/Shutterstock

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