5 Ways to Combine Your Outbound and Inbound Marketing Strategies for Better Lead Generation

5 Ways to Combine Your Outbound and Inbound Marketing Strategies for Better Lead Generation

To attract online traffic and turn them into business leads, we need to combine a tactic or two. Doing so allows us to make the most out of it and maximize the results.

As the adage goes, do not put all your eggs in one basket. Hence, doing complementary lead generation campaigns can be your best bet.

It can be a combination of new and old tactics, like email marketing with social media marketing. However, you can also combine outbound and inbound marketing strategies.

But when do you call a marketing strategy inbound or outbound?

Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing

Think of marketing campaigns as a push and pull technique. You need to provide value to attract your ideal clients. Often, you need to get out of your way so your leads would know that you exist.

An inbound marketing strategy is any promotional tactic meant to attract your leads. This includes writing a compelling blog post, posting a viral video on TikTok, or using the right hashtags on Instagram.

On the other hand, outbound marketing is when you go straight to your ideal clients in hopes of transacting with you. This can include emailing business proposals to your list of potential clients.

Regardless of what tactics you use, it would be best to combine inbound and outbound marketing.

Combining Inbound and Outbound Marketing for Better Lead Generation

Think of leads as your potential client. These are people who need your products and services. However, they do not know that you exist or they are using your competitor's products.

As such, you need to find ways (other than web design and development) to build awareness around your brand, get your leads' attention, and turn them into paying clients. Here are five examples that you can follow:

Marketing Automation and Outbound Calling

Automated marketing and outbound calling is a typical combination of inbound and outbound marketing strategies.

What happens is that you encourage your leads to subscribe to your email list. From there, you can send a sequence email that is meant to enable them to do business with you.

You can segment your list of email subscribers based on the subscription source (i.e., blog post vs. product page). Doing so lets you know if a lead is just looking around or interested in what you can offer.

Another way is to ask them if they are facing challenges in their business. That way, you can schedule a call to demo what your products or services can provide for them.

Account-Based Marketing and Content Marketing

Content marketing stands out among the inbound and outbound marketing strategies available. For example, Ascend Finance uses content marketing almost exclusively to generate bankruptcy leads. That's because many people are researching bankruptcy tips online. 

Meanwhile, integrating ABM with content marketing also lets you repurpose your content. Doing so allows you to save time and resources. 

You build inbound marketing content that lets you reach a wider audience. However, it should also be detailed enough to attract the accounts you're targeting in your ABM campaign. Then, you can utilize your ABM content to have a more robust inbound content marketing strategy. 

Case studies, eBooks, and whitepapers that you built targeting specific accounts with ABM can be repurposed and added to your site. That way, you can save time and resources building your online knowledge base. 

SEO and Paid Search

If properly mixed, both SEO and paid search can significantly enhance your marketing results. That's because they both boil down to using the search terms that your leads use to find a relevant result. 

Mind you, keyword research is vital as it can impact the kind of content we need to produce. After all, we need content that drives volume.

For example, you write a blog post or run a PPC campaign for BSNL's 4G internet connection. We want to ensure that it will rank for relevant keywords like "BSNL 4G data balance check."

From there, you can focus your paid search on prospective customers you've previously interacted with before. Again, retargeted ads on posts on social media are excellent solutions over more high-demand and costly keywords. 

Inbound Marketing and Paid Media

Using inbound marketing alone isn't enough to reach your target demographic. Chances are, a lot of your prospects haven't heard from your brand yet. 

That's why a great strategy is combining your inbound marketing with paid media. Paid media usually includes print ads, radio ads, TV commercials, social media ads, and PPC. By combining both, you can take your marketing to the next level.

A great way to do this is to publish ads that provide prospects with special offers through paid media. Of course, it would help if you also came up with a hashtag for that offer that prospects will find shareable. 

Email Marketing and Offline Events

Hosting an offline event can be an excellent way to collect and build your email list. It also enables you to meet your potential clients, pick their brains, and build meaningful relationships.

On the flip side, email marketing can help you fill a room in an offline event. That's because you can invite people in one go and quickly confirm their attendance.

Whether it is via email or an offline event, though, ensure that you are straightforward.

This means that you have to convey your marketing message early on. Let people know what you do as a business, who you serve, and how they can benefit from your products or services. Doing so allows you to weed out who you should attract.

Wrapping it Up

Inbound and outbound marketing has their pros and cons.

Inbound marketing compels you to provide value since consumers now have the power to choose what kind of content they want to consume. However, seeing results can be time-consuming.

This is where outbound marketing comes in, as it allows you to get quick wins. However, it can be expensive.

Nonetheless, knowing how these two complement each other should help improve your lead generation campaign.


The Basic Guide Of Inbound Marketing For Budding Entrepreneurs

The Basic Guide Of Inbound Marketing For Budding Entrepreneurs

Inbound marketing is quite promising, if you know to plan, strategize and execute it professionally. Converting strangers into readers and then turning readers into customers, converting them into your fans, is the basic strategy of inbound marketing. But as a beginner, this might seem confusing. But not to worry, as we bring you a brief guide that will set out the basic understanding of inbound marketing for all new entrepreneurs. 

Inbound marketing is more of a marketing philosophy. It was one of the very few, budding ideas, when digital marketing stemmed in the world of business. And although many new, advanced and much more stronger ways and mediums have come into existence, over the passage of time; inbound marketing doesn’t fall short of its power and grandeur. If done right, this marketing philosophy is quite promising, in delivering wonderful outcomes. 

What is Inbound Marketing? 

Inbound marketing is all about content creation. You create content for them, which they might need, anytime in the future. This marketing technique works through three simple phases:

  • You magnetize the right people. 
  • You build engagement with them, by proving a solution to their pain, so that they can buy from you. 
  • And once they choose you, you go above and beyond measures to help them and guide them through their trouble. 

Customer service plays a huge role after the engagement. A wonderful and professional customer service acts as a marketing tool in itself. The buyers will turn into your fans and will market you onwards, in their social circle too. And we all know that word of mouth is very powerful. 

Understanding Inbound Marketing; it is not SEO:

As a budding entrepreneur, you might assume that inbound marketing is all about SEO, so it certainly is SEO. but it is not. There are different techniques involved in this marketing philosophy. The main aim is to attract, qualify and win customers with the help of amazing content that promises to help them. But to break it down, to be easier to understand; the aim of inbound marketing is to help rather than just sell. 

With the help of content, you are able to address your customer’s potential problems. You earn their trust. And if you are able to create helpful and engaging content more often, you will be able to even sell them something in the future because they trust largely by that time. 

This method of marketing outstands the conventional or traditional procedure of putting our ads and gaining attention. Inbound marketing is a very raw and organic way of gaining loyal customers or audience. 

Inbound Marketing Tips for Beginners:

The digital marketing industry has become quite overcrowded with the passage of time and thus, choosing the best method for yourself, might seem a bit tough. However, if you have chosen inbound marketing then you might be looking out for some piece of advice or tips and we have summed up the best ones for you, right here. 

As we have clarified what inbound marketing actually is, it is now time to look into some inbound marketing tips that will help you in better execution of this philosophy. Let’s dig in. 

  1. Know your customer:

The basic foundation of successful inbound marketing is to know your audience or your customer. To make it effective, you have to understand the daily challenges your target audience is facing and the goals they wish to attain. When you understand your customer in this way, you are able to anticipate the confusions and queries they might have in their head on a daily basis. Your aim here is to provide them with a solution to their pain points and have an answer to their queries before they can even ask them out loud.

To do so, you need to define your target market and see which sector of the audience would be in dire need of the services or products that you are selling. Identifying buyer persona is going to require some time and it won’t happen without proper research and evaluation. You need to dig deeper into the daily challenges your audience is facing and see where they feel most helpless or in need of help. Dig deeper further and see what challenges they face in attaining the goals they have set for men themselves. What are they aiming for? How do they prefer to communicate and what skill set do they have?

Once you are able to understand your potential customer at a deeper level, you can drive good traffic to your website regularly and build some very loyal customers.

  1. Build a website

Inbound marketing cannot be placed into action without a proper website. So if you don’t have one; you need to invest in one right away. Your product or service might be the magic wand that a lot of people would be waiting for. But if you don’t have a user-friendly website; it is all in vain. A hard to navigate website is nothing but a pain for the audience and they wouldn’t bother waiting for it to load or explore it by wasting a chunk of their time. What will they do then? They will simply move on to the next best website! You will miss out on a bundle of potential customers, leads and sales.

Thus to make inbound marketing effective, you need to invest in building an effective and user friendly website. Think like a user and then work on it. Make it compatible for all devices and make sure that it is minimal, eye catching and user friendly.

  1. Value Driven and High Quality Content

Now, content is the heart of inbound marketing and if you aren’t planning it thoughtfully, this marketing will never work for you. Your content must drive value, should be attractive, useful and engaging. It can be a blog post, an infographic, video or whatsoever. The main aim is quality and the value you are offering.

If you are writing blogs, you need to make sure that they are high in quality and do not have grammatical or spelling errors. You can take help from Globex writing services to create meaningful and professional content for you as well.

Content is the basic driving force behind successful inbound marketing and if you don’t invest your effort and energy into it, it won’t ever be fruitful for you. To create meaningful content, you need to know your audience so that you can solve their problems or answer their queries through your content. And thus, that is the very first tip that we have lined up for you above. You can create content in any form, for example:

  • Ebooks
  • Blogs
  • Videos
  • Social media
  • Paid advertisements 
  • Landing pages 
  • White papers
  • Infographics 

The main aim must remain your customer, behind all the content creation. 

CONCLUSION

Inbound marketing puts the customer at the center of the entire strategy and gains their trust by offering them exactly what they are looking for. It doesn’t sell directly. It aims to build long-lasting, trustworthy relationships and customers. And thus, if executed in the right way, it is certainly more fruitful and flourishing than other marketing prospects and methods. 


Guest Blogging: Benefits and How to do it the Right Way?

Guest Blogging: Benefits and How to do it the Right Way?

Most bloggers enjoy the chance to write about their opinions on various subjects and it's wise to take advantage of such opportunities when trying to grow your blog's readership. 

That said, guest bloggers should always be familiar with the subjects they write about and be polite and use proper etiquette when guest blogging in exchange for a backlink.

In any kind of writing, knowledge of the subject is vital and it is particularly important when guest blogging, like personal blogs, are sometimes viewed as the ramblings of an unknown individual. To combat this assumption, making one's knowledge and expertise obvious is required. 

Drawing on a background of subject-specific information and wisdom will prove to readers that the person who is guest blogging should be taken seriously.

Blogs are generally thought to offer a less rigid writing medium for authors than books or magazines, but that doesn't mean the writer has the leeway to ramble. 

Those who write their own posts and those who participate in guest blogging arrangements should make their points with knowledge and passion but do so succinctly and with tact.

Ideally, guest blogging is not to be taken lightly; the writer is responsible for writing clear sentences and carefully articulating his or her thoughts while using precise and deliberate grammar and syntax and staying on target. 

How to find a guest blogging opportunity?

Discover Bloggers Within Your Niche

If you have a website or a blog, chances are you are already very familiar with the competition you are facing within your niche.

If this is the case, you probably already know the higher-profile bloggers in your niche. If not, spend 20 minutes or so searching through Google until you find them.

As you find blogs in your niche, add them to a list. After 20 minutes of searching Google, you should have a pretty decent-sized list, especially if you are on a competitive list.

Narrow Down Your List To Include Only The Most Popular Blogs

Remember, your goal with guest blogging is to increase your visibility and drive traffic. 

If the blog you are looking to write for has no readers, what's the point of guest blogging? 

Remember, guest blogging will require effort on your part, so make sure that your effort is well spent by ensuring that the blog is popular.

Somewhere on the blog, you should see an RSS feed icon. Go back through the blog's archives and see how many comments the readers have been leaving on the posts.

Approach The Blogger

Find the blogger's contact information, then send him an email. Introduce yourself, share your website with the blogger, then tell him you are interested in guest blogging for him. 

Suggest a topic that you think his readers might be interested in. If the blog owner does not accept, just go on to the next blog on your list.

After writing your article (or selecting the one you have already written), e-mail it to him. Include it as a .txt file and include HTML tags to make it easier for him. If you see a Whatsapp number of the owner, you can contact them using Whatsapp marketing softwares.

So there you have the three essential steps of guest blogging. If you are looking to skyrocket your credibility and send a surge of traffic flowing towards your website, give guest blogging a shot. You know how to do it, now take action!

Benefits of Guest Blogging:

Get quality traffic: 

A significant reason to look at investing your time in guest blogging is that it is able to offer a highly effective strategy for increasing direct traffic to your website. 

If you are able to get an article published on a high-traffic blog that is well established in the same industry that you use, then there is a very high chance that you will start to see a quick influx of visitors arriving on your blog. 

But beyond just the volume of traffic that will be reaching your website, you will also be getting the more targeted traffic that is interested in the theme of your website. 

If your website traffic is coming from a similar themed website, there is a great chance that they will be interested in the content on your website and start to explore other areas of the site.

Increase search engine ranking: 

A further quality aspect of guest blogging is that if you are able to add your links to high-quality and established websites, this is certain to help with increasing the rankings in the search engines. 

A significant number of guest posts published on the relevant blogs in the same industry is certain to see a significant boost in your SEO campaign.

If you would prefer to avoid the paid advertising strategies and are more interested in the free opportunities for increasing the website ranking, you will certainly appreciate the effectiveness of this guest blogging practice.

Improve brand exposure and awareness: 

Guest blogging gives a perfect opportunity to instantly increase brand awareness of your business. 

A highly trafficked website is certain to send a significant number of daily visits, and these are the type of visitors that are likely to be interested in the products and services that you are offering. 

By increasing the exposure of your website you are certainly able to find it easier to expand and increase business opportunities in the future.

Conclusion: Is Guest Blogging Easy?

Guest blogging isn't very easy. More than writing articles, it is about relationships that you build with other bloggers in your community. This is why it is hard work.

Some people tend to reserve the best content for their own blog and submit the not-so-good articles for guest posts. 

It doesn't cut it. If you are guest blogging, chances are that this other blog is actually more popular than your own. Their readers would be demanding high-quality content too. 

Remember to give your best in all guest blogs and you'll face far fewer rejections and you can really build a brand around quality content which is extremely important. 

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When done right, guest blogging is a very powerful tool to promote your online website or business. It takes time to research and figure out which blogs accept guest posts and the kind of audience they attract. 

Guest blogging is not only a good way to boost the traffic to your site but it's also a way to help fellow bloggers! 

Far too often however people looking to submit a guest post are too intently focused on how it will benefit them and not the host or the readers! 

The sole purpose of any guest blogger is to create great content, much like they would if it was their own site! The point here is simple, no matter whose side you're posting on, your aim should always be to offer nothing less than great content! 

In the end, you'll find your efforts to be much more beneficial for both you and your host! In the end, you simply need to 'can' the 'what's in it for me' approach since with this attitude you'll find the answer is NOTHING!

SEO is a fast-changing landscape and there could be updates to the search engine algorithms almost every day. 

However, it is not about reacting to these changes but about building a more permanent marketing campaign, of which SEO benefits is one of the site benefits. Guest blogging is certainly a step in that direction.

ABOUT AUTHOR:

I am Shubham Chopra, founder of Marketing Savior and an exuberant content creator with a great zest for providing insightful reviews about digital products that will help startups & SMEs penetrate into the online world easily.

Check my viral meme content on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/marketingsavior_/

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Website - https://marketingsavior.com/


How to Use Inbound Marketing Most Effectively

How to Use Inbound Marketing Most Effectively

What is inbound marketing? How do B2B businesses effectively deploy inbound activities? For an in-depth look at inbound marketing as well as why service industries should gradually shift their focus from traditional methods to inbound marketing before it's too late, read on in the article below.

What is inbound marketing? 

Inbound marketing is a way to naturally attract the world towards a brand through:

  • Useful content is highly personal, helping the target audience to solve the problems that need to be found solutions while skillfully orienting them to decisions that are beneficial to the brand.
  • Strong relationships with customers are based on trust, so that whenever they have a problem in a related field, they consider the brand as an expert to consult.
  • Optimal experiences throughout the customer journey so that even though the brand value provided is slightly lower than the competition, the target audience still favors you because of the outstanding service quality.

In other words, Inbound marketing is a way for brands to help potential customers solve the difficulties they are facing through detailed advice and instructions, thereby gradually gaining trust, favor, and conversion. they become loyal customers and promote the business itself!

In relation to reality, it is easier to understand if you have a friend who is a doctor. Whenever there is an abnormality that cannot be seen by a doctor, with just one phone call, they can help you 'diagnose' and give appropriate advice. Most of the time, we will listen because they are experts in your 'blind spot'. 

Inbound marketing too, once it has confirmed its professionalism and high expertise in the field of operation, every proposal from the brand has weight and more or less affects the final decision of the customer. target image. This is like the same opinion, it's much more believable to hear from a teacher/celebrity!

The main activities when the brand implements inbound marketing

Inbound marketing is just a new methodology, in essence, inbound marketing is still deployed on unfamiliar platforms such as Content marketing, Social Marketing, Email marketing, and SEO.

However, instead of deploying sporadically and sporadically, these activities are coherently chained together through the CRM system - a system for collecting and analyzing customer data from which to establish formulas automation.

The main activities of inbound marketing will start from:

  • Content marketing – useful content developed specifically for each target group
  • SEO – helps the brand appear naturally in the eyes of customers through the process of meticulously analyzing the search needs of each potential customer group
  • Social Marketing – bring selected content to potential customers through social networks such as Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter.
  • Email marketing – nurture leads with highly personalized content to 'lead' them to decisions that benefit the brand
  • Marketing automation – using automated methods to send email marketing or remarketing on social networks based on user behavior and pre-built scenarios based on historical data
  • CRM integration – connect data from many different platforms from social, analytics, email marketing software to evaluate the conversion potential of the customer list through the scoring system. From there, weed out the low-viability objects and pass on to sales leads who can call for advice right away!
  • And much more depending on the specificity of the business sector or the complexity of the business model!

Effective Inbound Marketing implementation process for B2B businesses

Inbound marketing is a process consisting of 4 main stages: attract, convert, close, and delight!

  • Attract: Engage your target audience with in-depth content. When consumers are surrounded by the advertising matrix every day, it is difficult to 'squeeze' in their minds. Therefore, in order to 'catch' customers among hundreds and thousands of messages, brands need to share their insight into the information they are looking for. Thereby, not only affirming our professionalism in the field of brand activities but also gradually narrowing the gap with the target audience!
  • Convert: Persuading the target audience to leave information to receive valuable 'offers' after being 'fascinated' by useful experiences. For example, documents, in-depth reports, product demos, registration for seminars or simply to receive incentives. Coupon code is one of the most potential industries that have a high conversion rate, and although you don’t run any coupon business, you should have at least 1 couponing program or event. 
  • Close: Take care of and convert leads into customers through multi-channel experiences from emailing, remarketing to consulting contacts.
  • Delight: Give customers a reason to come back and treat you as a source of advice and suggestions when needed. This strengthens the relationship and sets the stage for future deals

At each stage of implementation, the tools and platforms used will have differences in focus:

The process of implementing Inbound Marketing in the Attract phase

The first step when implementing an inbound marketing campaign is to become 'visible' in the eyes of potential customers through online channels such as Google, social networks, etc. To attract customers, at first sight, the business must first of all need:

  • Build a persona. The prospect's portrait is a general picture of the concern/anxiety; Dreams/desires or unanswered needs that when 'right touch' will be the shortest way to bring the brand straight to the heart of the target audience. By grouping customers into typical stereotypes, this will be the premise for activities that bring a highly personalized experience!
  • Analyze the customer journey map to find out how they make decisions, what are the barriers that prevent them from going to the next step. From there, by helping them remove these barriers, businesses will successfully bring customers closer to the brand!

After building a customer profile and understanding their behavior, the next step is to choose the right touchpoints to create opportunities for 'first encounters'! 

Conclusion

Above is the basic information about inbound Marketing, hope readers can understand the basics of Inbound Marketing. 

If you want to refer to more information, you can refer to many case studies, especially for those related to coupons, discount codes/promotions programs, because those are very good inbound marketing application models!


5 Reasons Why Blogging Is Important for your Business

5 Reasons Why Blogging Is Important for your Business

Today’s business landscape is ever-changing in terms of consumer demands and technological advancements. For any business to be sustainable, it needs to have a strong web presence where it engages and communicates with its client base effectively.

Even though having a highly functional website is an important part of business branding and marketing in the modern-day, the nature of the global economic dynamic requires business owners to go a step further to build brand awareness and connect with the market base.

Content creation is one of the most effective methods of building brand awareness while availing useful and relevant information to a target audience. Blogging presents an affordable way for businesses of all sizes to drive traffic to their ecommerce sites, attract prospective clients and boost inbound marketing. According to statistics, more than 80% of businesses that include blogs in their marketing strategy report higher client numbers.

If you have not yet taken up blogging as part of your marketing strategies, here are the benefits you are missing.

Blog posts drive long-term results

Content marketing has changed greatly over the last few years, with online content marketing taking over printed marketing. Muchneeded.com shows that blogging is an inexpensive way of marketing a brand and expanding your market while creating a more lasting impression. Once a blog is uploaded on your website, it remains there for everyone to see from any part of the world.

Compared to on-paper marketing, it is possible to create blogs that can remain relevant for months while paper marketing, like flyers, can easily be discarded. By ensuring you have fresh, unique content on your website, you will have an easier time attracting potential leads to your site while establishing yourself as an authority in your niche.

Blogs increase website traffic

The main idea behind blogging is to make it easier for search engines to rank your website. One sure way to be noticed by search engine AI is to create consistent fresh content for your website. The best blogs should adhere to the rules of SEO. This includes using all the relevant keywords, Meta tags, and descriptions that will guarantee the content is noticed and ranked in search results. 

Creating SEO-friendly content ensures you rank high on search engine results. When you rank high, you increase the chances of attracting readers to your blog, and ultimately your website. The best blog posts should be enticing to the reader and make them want to engage more with your brand and even buy your products. The best blogs are informative and value-adding to the reader.

While using keywords, you need to avoid keyword stuffing as this can affect your google ranking. Consider making use of long-tail keywords alongside high-quality writing and the use of semantic indexing to optimize your content for search engines. Your content should answer consumer questions in your niche. The best content meets the needs of the reader. 

Blogs establish your authority

Research is part of the buying process of any consumer. Before someone makes a purchase, they take time to read as much about it as possible. Generally, a consumer needs to know that a seller knows what they are doing and that the product or service they offer can be trusted. Blogging is one of the best ways to build trust with potential new leads. When you avoid content that addresses their concerns, you are seen as an authority in your niche, making it easier for your brand to be trusted.

With blogs, brands have a chance to show off their expertise in their niche, which helps to solidify your reputation and establish your authority. You can choose to write in different areas about your niche to ensure you give readers enough information to make informed purchasing decisions. Blogs are the perfect way to answer recurring consumer questions, and they give you a way to express your enthusiasm and show passion for your work.

To establish yourself as an authority in your industry, your blogs should offer guidance to your target audience, clear uncertainty, and make it easier for them to trust your product.

Blogs add value

The most successful businesses are always looking for ways to add value. Even though blogs are not as flashy as other marketing media, they can be used to enhance the customer experience when engaging with your product or brand.

Emotions play a role in informing a buyer’s decision and are important if you want to attract and retain clients. This is why you need to ensure you are going above and beyond to offer the best customer experience as a way of tapping into a client’s emotions. Blogs can offer a personalized experience to your clients, especially if you run an online store where one-on-one interactions are limited.

Blogging gives personality to your brand

Blogs give you an opportunity to give your brand life and realness. While most brands prefer to keep their online pages professional, blogs are an opportunity for you to allow your target audience to interact with your brand by making it look and feel friendly and approachable, which is an important part of building customer loyalty.

Conclusion

Blogging is an essential component of any marketing strategy for businesses of all sizes. If you are interested in building your online exposure, establishing yourself as an authority in your niche while attracting and keeping leads, you need to add blogging to your marketing. With blogging, your business and brand can enjoy the benefits highlighted on this blog and many more.


Inbound Marketing - Advantages over Push Marketing

Inbound Marketing - Advantages over Push Marketing

Marketing is changing! Potential customers are increasingly ignoring classic advertising. You have gotten good at simply blocking out annoying advertisements. You no longer want to be constantly "harassed" and advertised but want real added value.

Figures also prove this fact:

  • 26.7% of households in Germany refuse to post direct mail.
  • 24% of internet users use an ad blocker.
  • 87% of viewers switch to TV advertising.

As a result, entrepreneurs and marketers must rethink their approach to still reach their target groups. Why should the classic methodology be used for marketing if customers no longer pay any attention to it? A method must be used that offers the customer an additional benefit. For this reason, we are introducing you to inbound marketing today.

This is inbound marketing!

The term " inbound marketing " is far less known in Germany than in the USA. Therefore, many are wondering what inbound means. What are the advantages of this marketing strategy over other marketing methods? We would like to offer you answers to these questions in the following article.

Inbound Marketing is a digital marketing method that should lead to potential customers finding the company / the products on the Internet themselves and this should be done through high-quality content. It is a pull marketing strategy for generating leads.

So, it basically means nothing more than increasing lead generation. However, not as with typical outbound marketing through measures that explicitly aim to actively disseminate the advertising message, but through attractive content. Outbound marketing is a push marketing strategy. This figure illustrates the different possibilities of out- and inbound marketing:

Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing

Classic outbound marketing measures have delivered increasingly unsatisfactory results in recent years. Most customers are rather put off by the flood of advertising messages and switch to draft. In addition, the cost of advertising is blatantly high. Not all companies - especially not SMEs - can afford this in the long term to acquire new customers.

In contrast, inbound marketing relies on high-quality content. This offers solutions and answers to specific questions, specific problems, and clear wishes for clearly defined target groups. This content, with the articles and content it contains, forms the basic structure of every inbound marketing strategy. They are intended to attract the attention of visitors. In the best-case scenario, lots of leads are generated and thus potential customers.

Inbound therefore means that the customer approaches the seller. It is about creating demand pressure. In this sense, it is less about what your company offers than about what your target group is really looking for. In online marketing, one often speaks of the customer journey. “The buyer's journey” - in which he goes through different phases. There is one sentence that you keep coming across:

The method of inbound marketing

In the first phase of "attracting" it is important to create interesting and usable content that gets the attention of the Internet user. They are published in the form of blog posts, newsletter marketing, social media posts, etc. Of course, this must be keyword optimized. You should use words that are searched for on Google and other search engines by the targeted buyer personas. In this way you bring as many visitors as possible to your website.

In the second phase, "converting”, it is important to convert the visitors to your content into leads. Leads can e.g., B. collected via forms, call-to-actions, and landing pages. So potential customers are z. For example, you are encouraged to leave your contact details to download a free e-book or white paper.

 The third phase, "Close”, is about converting leads into sales. For example, personalized newsletters can be used to achieve this.

In the last phase, “impress”, relationships must be cultivated, and customers must be emotionally attached to the company or product. "Impressed" customers can become ambassadors for the company.

Which advertising channels help me best with inbound marketing?

Of course, creating valuable content is not enough. You also need to market the content. That means they must be found. In the inbound area, this is best done via online marketing channels. In the following, we will introduce you to some of the instruments that you can use for your inbound marketing.

Content marketing / content strategy High quality content (articles, posts, guest articles, website, etc.) that stands out from the competition and offers the website visitor significant added value. Good and informative content is the best way to meet the needs of visitors.

Email Marketing / Lead Management

Once you have generated qualified leads, you can set up successful email marketing campaigns. But be careful: Don't shower potential customers with flat, annoying advertising emails!

Social Media Marketing

The social media channels should be used in a targeted manner. Eventually, an experienced social media marketing manager can create a well-thought-out social media strategy and then put it into action.

Conversion Rate Optimization

If visitors do not become customers, the marketing strategy has failed. So, it is essential to pay attention to conversion optimization and the CRM system at an early stage.

Search engine optimization / ads (SEO Marketing / SEA Marketing)

Without SEO Marketing no ranking on Google or YouTube.  This is now the second largest search engine in the world. Means: Without SEO - no new customer acquisition.

Online PR / Blogger Relations

Find a good influencer who will help you to promote your goods using Word of Mouth Marketing. That is much more believable than intrusive advertising messages. This then places you, for example, in his own blog. Blog marketing is becoming more and more popular and important because it appears more authentic and can therefore also generate potentially more interested visitors.

Inbound marketing is a bit like a steamroller: it is hard to get started at first, but once it is up and running, it's hard to stop.

5 tips for successful inbound marketing when acquiring new customers.

So how can good inbound marketing help you acquire new customers? We have put together a few answers for you. This know-how will help you to achieve maximum customer growth.

  1. Attract visitors to your site with high-quality, relevant content. Plan this well before creating the content. Find the right target group and identify the buying personas.
  2. A good target group analysis in advance will help you enormously. Just starting to write will not get you the result you want. If you have content written, you must give all the necessary information and instructions at the briefings. So, the writer can do a good job and create good content. A good article should summarize the main content of the topic and be interesting. It must make the visitor want more and lead him to your offers.
  3. Motivate your visitors to subscribe to the newsletter, to register, to download a free e-book or PDF download in return for their contact details. This is the first impression the potential lead gets of you and your company. So really offer him something extraordinary that makes him want more. With this you can turn prospects into customers. Ideally, this phase is completed by a specific request.
  4. You then can contact the customer, as he has given you the contact information voluntarily. In a sense, he expects a reaction, answer or email from you and your company. In addition, the advertising filter has been removed from the potential customer so that he is more receptive to advertising from you. But still be sensitive!
  5. Turn your customers into promoters. Try to get satisfied customers to recommend your product to others (reviews, likes and re-posts in social media, etc.). Information spreads very efficiently, especially in social networks. This helps you to be more visible and therefore easier to find.

Conclusion and outlook

The big advantage in terms of new customer acquisition and customer growth with the help of an inbound marketing strategy is that the customers will come to you and your company. You do not push yourself like you do with push marketing. The potential customer was looking for you and found you. He now wants you to provide him with information about your goods, your company, or your service. You must not disappoint him now. It is important to keep him in line and to continue to provide him with high-quality content.

The potential of the inbound methodology is enormous. It could become the most widely used advertising strategy in the future. That means it could completely displace classic advertising strategies such as spam, flyers, and commercials in the future. There are opportunities, especially for small businesses.

This is because the adoption of advertising has decreased over the past few decades. Due to the increasing presence in everyday life, it hardly reaches people. Specifically, this means that many people distrust advertisements. As soon as they even remotely appear to be advertising, they will be blocked. This is where the greatest benefit of inbound marketing comes into play. The customer will find your product when he is specifically looking for it himself. So, it already has a direct reference and ideally belongs to your target group. As a result, he is more likely to be willing to buy your goods. It is precisely this advantage that could help in the future to replace the traditional Internet advertising strategies used so far.


Implement the Inbound Marketing Process to Revolutionize Your Business

Time has changed, and so are marketing processes. Now for even starting a small business, you have to work hard and present yourself in the best possible way.

Social media has changed the standard of people. And now, people look for perfection even if someone is starting a small business at home. Due to advancements in technology and easy access to the internet people, search for small businesses on social media.

If they couldn’t find it on social media, they usually do not consider it and rather skip it to look for something present on social media. Now new business strategies are being introduced, and if you do not adopt them permanently. It means you will have no existence in the next five years.

To stay in the market or to remain a part of the business market you have to adopt the changing policies and business strategies. Now, the inbound marketing process is in demand. And if you do not use it to revolutionize your business in this era of digital media, it means you have to struggle to stay in the market.

What is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is the use of Hub Spot, and other social media handles like Facebook and LinkedIn. The outbound marketing strategies like making a list for sending emails or praying for leads are not outdated.

Now people are so busy in their life that they rarely go and check their mailbox to read your recent mails. So, what they do is to look at their social media accounts to see if you have posted anything recently.

Inbound marketing is a mainly online marketing and using social media platforms like Hub Spot. With the help of these platforms, the people in business collect the content of customers interest, align it and then post it on social media.

Inbound marketing is more of online marketing, and it naturally attracts customers at a faster rate than outbound marketing processes. Because now people usually do not respond to cold calls and lengthy emails.

They found it ubiquitous as they are more time-consuming, and people cannot afford to spend too much money on purchasing products. So, therefore inbound marketing is introduced to revolutionize the business market and help people saving their time.

Inbound marketing is not that easy as it sounds. It requires a hell of effort and marketing tactics to make your business successful. There are multiple things that you have to do for inbound marketing at one time.

You have to create content and have to take care of lead generations at the same time. When you create content, you have to do SEO Optimization of content to make it worth posting and for increasing lead generation.

For inbound marketing, you require a variety of marketing tactics like the use of social media, use of analytics, and lead management to revolutionize your business.

How can you implement inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is not an easy job, you have to follow it stepwise. Here are the few steps for the inbound marketing process, and they include

  1. Assess your business

You can start the process until and unless you have a clear picture of your business. For this 

Purpose, you have to ask yourself some questions related to your business. They include:

  1. What is your budget?
  2. What are your requirements?
  3. What are your business goals?
  4. What kind of sales increasing your revenue cycle?

All these questions help you in understanding the current state of your business. And also, what kind of tactics will increase your business value in the future. For example, if your revenue has been declining, you may want to reach out to revenue cycle management experts for advice.

  1. Set your objectives

The next step after assessing your business is to set your goals and objectives. For this purpose, develop a picture of your business according to the demands of ideal customers. When you set objectives, you have to look at the buyer persona.

A buyer persona is the imaginary image of the ideal customer and how they wish to see your products. It is the fictional representation of real data, customer behavior and online customer demographics, and motivation to increase your revenue cycle.

When you set your objectives according to the buyer persona, more people come to your page, and you see your business revolutionize your business within days.

When you see where your customers hang out and how they evaluate products, you already decide what tactics you have to use to get their attention.

When you set your goals according to the lens of your customers you get to know what kind of marketing strategies will be suitable for your customers.

  1. Make your company website

Inbound marketing is all about your online presence and how you cash it to make your business successful. For this purpose, you have to make your social media account or your company website to help people access you through the internet.

A company website is the first place people see, and it is the image of your company. It is the first place where your customers get attracted to you. When someone visits it, it only takes thirty and sixty seconds to decide whether they want to scroll it a little more or jump to another.

It is your responsibility to make it worth attracting and more engaging. You can do it by adding engaging content, blog posts, images, and videos to your website.

Blogging is a key source of attracting people, and you can do it by adding useful things and recent updates on it. When people read them, they show more interest in your products because they get all the required information in one place.

Generate relevant traffic

When you add content on your page regularly, there are more chances that relevant traffic will increase on your page.

SEO optimization and social media marketing help you increasing traffic because when you get more pay-per-click traffic, automatically gets generated. Not only this, but you also get relevant and targeted traffic on your page when you put engaging content on your page.

The digital marketing agency in Cairo also uses social media and content creation to increase relevant traffic on their websites and social media handles. It helps them increase their revenue cycle and sales.

Author bio.

Sheikh Adil is a keynote speaker on social media strategy, LinkedIn marketing & social media marketing trainer, MediaHicon digital marketing author, and SEO consultant for global organizations.


Inbound Marketing vs. Content Marketing

Businesses thrive on lead generations to increase their customer base. However, it is impossible to generate leads if your business is incapable of grabbing its customers' attention through its meaningful content. Regular publishing of content on the website generates more traffic. However, just doing so is not enough to increase your customer base. It is not very potent in converting your site visitors into your loyal customers.

A strategic framework is a prerequisite for impactful content creation. That's where Content Marketing and Inbound Marketing comes into play. However, both of these terms often sound confusing to people. Moreover, their usage and applications also seem to confuse a lot of people. Well, with this guide, we are going to help you to differentiate between Inbound and Content marketing. Idea Usher experts will help you draw a detailed comparison between Inbound marketing vs. Content marketing, including their applications and benefits. So let us begin! 

What is Inbound Marketing?

Let us quickly understand what inbound marketing is. 

Inbound Marketing uses valuable information to attract target customers. This technique of marketing focuses on customers who are already aware of your brand or know about your brand. Furthermore, inbound marketing's target audience already knows what you offer as a brand, your content resources and uses all this to address their queries and questions. 

Inbound marketing has always been there in the market, but it has only emerged as a preferred marketing technique in the past 8-10 years. The main reason for its growing popularity as a preferred marketing method is due to the fact that customers have started to ignore invasive sales messages. Thus, brands had to find new and innovative ways to reach potential customers and turn them into buyers. That's when inbound marketing came into play and changed everything once and for all.

We can all admit that we don't like interruptive and invasive sales calls while doing some important work. However, at the same time, when we are approached through an email or a newsletter about a brand, we are more interested in knowing about it. That is how inbound marketing works. It is a less invasive and more engaging way of marketing and reaching new customers.

Inbound marketing enables the customers to reach out to the brand themselves. Consequently increasing their chances of accepting the targeted offer. This is just like applying reverse psychology to make people respond to a call to action.

This way of marketing is all about providing the right customers with the right content at the right time. The different inbound methods to attract the target customers include

  • Attracting 
  • Engaging
  • Delighting 

Necessary Skills for Effective Inbound Marketing

Some of the necessary skills required for efficient inbound marketing of your brands include

  • Content development and creation
  • SEO optimization
  • Graphic Designing and Web Designing
  • Social media Management
  • Campaign Planning and Management
  • Using digital tools like CRMs and Canva

All these skills will help you market your brand effectively and run it productively to gain substantial profits. Furthermore, these tools will help to create an impression on your prospective and current customers. Henceforth, it is essential that your team is well aware of all these skills and other digital tools.

Inbound Marketing Strategies

In the next part of our blog, let us see the different inbound marketing strategies that we can use to target our customers in an inbound way effectively.

Attracting Strategies

Content development and creation are the major inbound marketing strategies tied to attract customers to your brand. Henceforth it is essential that you must regularly post blogs and articles on your website and social media. However, it is also imperative that you must take care of the content that you are posting. It should be relevant to the brand and should provide some value to your customers. For example, guides, testimonials, product offers, and information about your services or products, etc.,

One can even use inbound marketing on a deeper level by SEO-optimized content to generate a more significant customer base. Using some targeted keywords, you can optimize your website content. This will help your webpage to rank better on search engines. Consequently helping your brand to attract more customers.

Engaging Strategies

It is essential to consider the way you are engaging with your customers. Make sure that it is in a way that your customers would want to associate with your brand for the long term. Engaging inbound marketing strategies should be practical so that you can communicate with your customers efficiently.

Furthermore, brands must find ways to manage and handle the inbound sales call effectively. It also includes how your customer care executive talks and engages with your customers. You can also market your business effectively by selling the story behind the brand rather than selling the services or products. Thus, find out what differentiates your brand from its peers and how it will help the prospective customers find solutions to their concerns. It will consequently lead to a mutually beneficial relationship for both you and your customers.

Delighting Strategies

Delighting inbound marketing strategies makes sure that your customers are happy and satisfied. One can implement this strategy by integrating chatbots and digital assistants on their brand websites and apps. This will improve the customer experience, thus enhancing your brand’s reputation. Another way of implementing this strategy is through surveys. By conducting brand surveys, you can improve your service by many folds. Consequently leading to a better customer base.

Social media listing is another inbound marketing strategy to delight your customers. Your customers can use your social media handles to provide reviews and ask questions that concern them.

To conclude, the sole purpose of delighting inbound marketing is to make your customers happy and satisfied with your services. 

Advantages of Inbound Marketing

There are innumerable benefits of inbound marketing. Let us have a quick look at some of these critical benefits -

  • Inbound marketing is highly cost-effective.
  • This approach of marketing your brands lasts longer than any other method because it is less invasive.
  • Inbound marketing enables the prospective customers to reach the brand themselves. Thus, making it significantly more accessible for the customers to communicate with the brand.
  • It helps the brand establish its proficiency better than its peers, thus allowing it to do better.
  • Effectively converts visitors into leads and further leads into loyal customers.
  • Inbound marketing is high;y effective and trustworthy. It provides users with the right content at the right time.
  • Increase the traffic on your brand’s website, thus eventually increasing your customer base.

So these were some of the top advantages of implementing inbound marketing to advertise your brand in the market effectively and productively. Have an interesting read about Digital Marketing here.

What is Content Marketing?

The term “content marketing” coined around 2001 was used to describe the process of using the content developed by the brands to market themselves to their customers. These brands relied on magazines and books to introduce themselves to the audience. This was somewhat different from advertising using traditional methods such as print media, billboards, and commercials.

Content marketing generally deals with developing and creating content that the users of a particular product demographic or location will find helpful. Furthermore, it also deals with the content creation for the customers related to a specific field or niche. Content marketing has been used long before inbound marketing. It has always been there in the market. Furthermore, the content doesn’t always need to have a strong call for action or a sales pitch. It can be anything related to that brand niche. But it can always help the business to form a slow but intense relationship with its prospective customers. 

As the digital world is snowballing and businesses are opting for less invasive and interrupting marketing measures, content marketing holds an extraordinary place in this area. You can always ditch a monotonous sales tone and tune in to a more fun and engaging way of connecting to your customers using this marketing strategy.

To sum up, content marketing is a less invasive way of marketing your brand. It includes ditching the sales tone in your content and providing your customers with some relevant information about the subject. However, it is a slow method that will slowly but surely help you build your brand’s reputation and eventually increase your customer base.

Advantages of Content Marketing

Similar to inbound marketing, there are many benefits of using content marketing to market your brand. Let us dig in further to know some of the critical advantages of using content marketing and how it helps brands do better in the market. 

  • Build brand reputation and awareness. Content marketing helps you to build a loyal customer base.
  • It is a highly cost-effective way of successfully marketing your brand.
  • Content marketing helps you to increase your website traffic, thus helping you to reach a wider audience.
  • It assists you in reaching an audience who may avoid your ads. The more people will depend on your content, the more they will buy from you. 
  • Content marketing supports other forms of marketing strategies such as social media marketing and public relations. 

Wrapping up - Is one of them better than the other?

Now to answer the question: Is one of them better than the other? Well, the truth is they both are equally beneficial in their ways. Brands should use both inbound marketing and content marketing for marketing their brand effectively. If used correctly and thoughtfully, they can help any business to bring up some fantastic results. 

Inbound marketing is essential because it helps you to personify your digital presence. The content you use, the digital tools you engage with to bring about remarkable changes on your website enables you to make an excellent website.

On the other hand, Content marketing helps you develop a solid and loyal relationship with your customers. It will make your website more resourceful and valuable for your prospective customers. It will help your site visitors to build that trust in your brand. 

Thus to conclude, none of them is better than the other. They both should be implemented simultaneously to attract more customers and build your brand.

Contact us to know more about our wide range of services!


Inbound Marketing for B2B SaaS Companies

Inbound Marketing for B2B SaaS Companies

What is Inbound Marketing? 

You can think of inbound marketing as a methodology that attracts customers by offering helpful and valuable content and experiences that are customized for them. 

It is opposite to outbound marketing in many ways which work by interrupting the audiences with content that may not always serve their purpose. 

Inbound marketing essentially focuses on getting customers to find the brand rather than the brand finding the audiences.

Importance of SaaS Inbound Marketing

The online sphere has given brands a kind of superpower. Marketers now know how to get people to click on things. On top of that, they also know how to get this action to happen organically in a free manner. This kind of knowledge is extremely important for new businesses in particular.

This is precisely what inbound marketing strategies do. They are not interruption-based. Rather they give customers the choice and the power to make informed buying decisions. All the efforts in inbound marketing align with buyers’ thinking, their purchase habits, and what they want.

For B2B SaaS companies, all these points are even more important as you’re selling an intelligible product. SaaS marketing brings on the surface the needs of a customer which they are not even aware of.

SaaS Inbound Marketing Strategy

  1. SaaS Content Creation

SaaS's marketing strategies begin with content that must focus on customers. Meaning, it should take into account the behaviors, problems, and needs of the customers. 

Knowing all that begins with the right project management systems for marketing agencies like Function Point to track all your efforts and assign it to the right team members:

User Research

For SaaS businesses, understanding the buyer persona(s) is super important. A buyer persona is a model that describes your ideal audience. Think questions like:

  • What does your target demographic of an ideal customer look like?
  • What pain points do they have?
  • How can your SaaS product offer a solution to that problem(s)?

Asking only these questions should paint a clearer picture of your ideal customers. As you go more into detail asking more questions, your buyer persona will get clearer.

Keyword Research

To conduct thorough keyword research, you must take care of 3 key principles:

  • Stick with keywords relevant to both your audience and business.
  • Pick keywords that carry enough monthly searches to turn profitable yet not so much competition that they become unmanageable. 
  • Go with keywords that you can write multiple pieces of content on. 

For research purposes, you can use tools like UberSuggest, Google’s Keyword Planner, and SEMrush.

Developing High-Conversion Content

To create quality content, always start by observing the market and see what kind of content is ranking high SERPs. 

Look into things like - nature of content, structure, and keyword insertion. 

After you have an inkling of major topics and their formatting, you can either try to beat it by creating better, bigger, and more detailed content. Or, you can try to approach the content with a different angle/approach.

2. Content Promotion

SEO Optimizations

SEO for SaaS companies is a very broad topic. As a subject, it can be discussed for days. But, there are some key areas on which you must focus, such as:

  • Mobile-responsiveness of the page. Make sure that the page loads within less than three seconds. Loading time more than that is a bad practice SEO-wise.
  • Make sure to incorporate the keywords naturally within the content. Try to use semantically related words.
  • Write structured content. Pay attention to grammatical errors and typos. Always write unique content.
  • Pay special attention to backlinks. It’s good to have quality inbound links pointing to your site. However, if you try to get too many poor-quality backlinks, your site could face serious repercussions. Try to aim for 2-3 backlinks each month and make them high-quality.

Social Media Promotion

Social media promotion can be of two types: paid and organic. Organic content promotion happens when you have a huge number of followers. So, when you share something interesting, more people naturally feel like reading it and sharing it.

Paid promotion, as understandable, is when you pay for your social media advertising. Facebook’s Boost Post is one feature you can use for paid content promotion on this social media platform.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing essentially involves reaching out to an influencer with a huge following or a reputable site and getting them to recommend your product and/or content. 

The goal is to reach an already engaged audience rather than you creating it from scratch. Every SaaS business needs to find the right kind of influencer and work out ways in which to get their product mentioned by the influencer.

One way to approach influencer marketing is to mention an influencer within your content and then reach out to them. It’s possible that they might just share back your content with their followers. But, for that to happen, you must churn out high-quality content.

Guest Posting

Guest posting involves reaching out to reputable sites within SaaS niche and pitching a topic to them. Guest posting (although time-consuming) can be quite an effective way to secure quality backlinks. 

3. Optimizing Conversions for Your Content

When you reach a point where your monthly search volume is over 1000 visitors, it’s now time for you to turn those visitors into leads. 

Using e-mails is one way to do that. Come up with ways in which you can capture your user's email address by creating landing pages and asking for free trials.

The thing is, social media platforms can delete your page without any prior warning. In the same way, Google can also de-index your site any time. In the middle of such uncertainty, emails are the one thing that will stay with you.

Here’s how you can go about converting your visitors into leads with the power of email marketing:

  • Offer premium content - The content could be an ebook, a checklist, or some kind of long post that addresses users’s pain points. Make sure that it’s high-quality and well-researched. Before sharing the content, ask users to share their details like email address, etc.
  • Offer free trials - This is something that every SaaS marketer should do. Offering free trials of your product gives people a chance to test drive the product before committing to it.
  • Create landing pages - A landing page can be anything such as something describing your product’s feature. Make sure that your content is actionable and includes relevant CTAs to prompt an action.

Bottom Line

Inbound marketing for SaaS marketers (if done rightly) can turn out to be a cash cow. Hopefully, this post helped shed some light on how to leverage inbound marketing the most.


What is the Best B2B Marketing Approach in 2021 - Inbound and Outbound Sales Lead Generators

What’s the difference between inbound and outbound sales lead generators?

A successful business strives to expand its scale while finding and attracting potential customers. If chosen correctly, sales lead generators will allow a company to reach a totally new profit level. Simultaneously, business goals are achieved when its owner does not just copy someone else's model or apply standard principles but creates a unique approach that fully meets its characteristics and needs. 

One of the most effective ways is business-to-business lead generation at Belkins, where experts develop and implement tailor-made solutions for each customer, allowing them to maximize sales and get a high ROI. However, to understand which strategy is the best for your company, you need to know its basic principles and differences. 

In this article, we are going to:

  • consider the most powerful marketing lead generators and their aspects;
  • investigate the difference between inbound and outbound approaches;
  • figure out which type of marketing will suit your needs best.

What is Inbound Marketing Lead Generation?

Applying this concept, the company attracts B2B leads to the website by creating quality information to transform them into potential customers. The goal of this approach is to increase the brand's online presence. It includes preparing and posting useful and SEO-optimized content on blogs and social networks; holding events and webinars to help the target audience. Through inbound marketing, a company builds trust with its customers.

Such an approach can be described in the following sequence. The buyer has a problem. They find potential and effective ways to solve it on your website or social network. They compare the solutions and find the most suitable one that fully meets their needs. Finally, they decide on the purchase and then buy your product or service. The bottom line is to create different types of quality content that fits each stage of the buyer’s journey to encourage a potential customer to make a purchasing decision faster.

Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/n8Qb1ZAkK88 

Pros of Inbound Marketing as a B2B Lead Generation Tool

Inbound marketing has been successfully used in many industries to generate leads productively, and here are its strengths: 

#1 It Provides Cost-Effective Solutions 

The good news is that inbound marketing allows you to drive high traffic to your website or social media accounts at a relatively low cost. 

#2 It Increases Brand Awareness 

Lots of clients are ready to share useful information with others if it resolves “painful” issues and helps to find a solution. As a result, you get an extra influx of potential customers. 

#3 It Helps to Generate Relevant Business Leads

The biggest advantage of this strategy is that you attract more potential buyers based on useful information. The lack of aggressive marketing and the client’s ability to make their own decisions increases the level of trust in your brand. This is an excellent basis for long-term cooperation. 

#4 It Creates Authority

By delivering quality, accessible, and understandable content, you make your audience believe that you are an expert. Such an approach also positively affects an increase in sales. Among the two suppliers with similar products, the one possessing an industry authority will drive more sales. 

#5 It Has No Expiration Date 

Another significant advantage is that the content you create will always work. Having posted useful and well-optimized information once, you will continuously generate traffic. 

#6 It Unites Marketing and Sales Departments 

With this approach, both departments are joining forces and make sales more efficient. Together they create useful content and promotion principles that increase conversions and support quality for existing customers. 

Cons of Inbound Marketing as a B2B Lead Generation Tool

With all the positive aspects of outbound marketing, it has several significant weaknesses. 

#1 It Takes Time to See the Results 

Many marketing professionals point out that it will take at least a year and a half for this strategy to start working. This is because you have to create a large amount of useful content (including videos) and attract subscribers on social networks. But when all the processes are set correctly, business leads will start coming to you. 

#2 It Makes Measuring Performance Indicators More Difficult

You will have to determine the productivity of each article, each keyword separately. This will require a lot of effort and significant experience. And if the process is set up incorrectly, it will only lead to the fact that you spend money without making a profit. This is why it is better to entrust creating and implementing an inbound marketing strategy to professionals. 

Belkins provides first-class B2B lead generation services in the fastest possible time. Their experience speaks for themselves. Since 2017, they have helped over 400 clients to increase their customer flows and sales qualitatively.

#3 This Requires a Dedicated Team

Setting effective inbound marketing requires experience and skills. This is a task for several professionals to prepare the following:

  • Blog management;
  • Social media management;
  • Video creation;
  • SEO optimization; 
  • Email marketing;
  • Podcasting;
  • CRM.

What is Outbound Marketing Lead Generation?

This approach is also known as interruption marketing. It is based on the fact that a business initiates a conversation and sends "messages" to its target audience. Advertising content is sent regardless of whether the potential client requested it or not. Outbound marketing might be a one-way conversation, focusing on the product and why clients should buy it. This approach involves TV, radio, magazines, billboards, print advertising, cold calls, and emails, etc. 

In today's technology-filled world, outbound marketing may seem hopelessly outdated. But it's still a powerful lead generation strategy out there. When done right, outbound marketing is a strong tool for sales growth. According to a Linkedin report, cold emails sent through this social network receive 3x the response rate. 

Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/WEDDt-u3q3o 

Pros of Outbound Marketing as a B2B Lead Generation Tool

Many companies successfully use outbound marketing as their primary strategy for promoting their business, and now you’ll see why. 

#1 It Allows You to Reach a Wider Audience

Through large-scale advertising, you find people who do not yet know that they really need your product or service. For example, they have already encountered a problem but have not yet found the way to solve it. With outbound marketing, you generate leads by addressing their pain points.

#2 This Provides a Shorter Sales Cycle 

On average, it takes at least 6 months to see the results. For those who want to shorten this period, cold calls and emails are a great option.

#3 It Gives An Invaluable Personal Communication Experience 

Outbound marketing often implies direct communication approaches with a potential client by email, phone, or outside sales. This increases the chances that they will make a purchase, as you can provide additional information in a timely manner. Besides, various resources report that there is still a high percentage of customers who prefer live communication. 

#4 It Helps Optimize Your Sales Funnel 

When your sales team works directly with customers, they gain valuable experience at the sales funnel’s early stages. This background will allow you to optimize your sales funnel in the future and qualitatively increase income growth. 

#5 It Helps Simplify Customer Acquisition Planning 

Outbound marketing combines different sales lead generation methods, such as mass and direct mailing. They give an understanding of when to expect a large influx of potential clients. Consequently, the results of your promotional campaign become more predictable

Cons of Outbound Marketing as a B2B Lead Generation Tool

This strategy may not be suitable for every business. Here are some factors when such influence can be harmful: 

#1 It’s a Pretty Expensive Approach

Advertising on TV, radio, magazines, billboards, etc requires serious investments. To organize cold calls you need to have a large staff department. All this leads to high costs of business promotion. However, you can resort to email marketing, which is a cost-effective way to attract new customers and nurture them. Belkins manages to acquire lots of leads and build excellent relationships with existing clients by sending well-thought email sequences.

#2 It Can Be Intrusive 

The problem is that you don't know your client's schedule and may call at the wrong time. Such behavior may seem intrusive and unacceptable to customers. This may end up with the client not wanting to do business with your company at all. In such situations, cold emails are much more effective. 

#3 It Can be Difficult to Attract New Customers or Make Outside Sales

Most clients are already halfway through to solving their problem, which means they might have a particular plan and useful resources. You need to convince them that your product is the most effective, which can be a real challenge. This is why it is essential to seek the services of professional marketing agencies. When the strategy and approach to potential customers are right, they are easy to implement. 

Differences Between Inbound and Outbound Lead Generators

The essential differences between the two strategies lie in the fundamental approach. When it comes to inbound marketing, this is where you allow potential customers to take the lead. They themselves choose the most useful content, the most convenient time, and the place of action. Inbound marketing lead generator is associated with a longer-lasting strategy that requires less investment. 

The outbound approach means that you decide when your target audience sees the ad and receives relevant information, taking their preferences into account. Here lead generation depends on the effectiveness of the sales team. The costs of outbound marketing can be significant, but at the same time, it allows you to get quicker results. 

What Do Inbound and Outbound Approaches Have in Common?

Despite their deep diversity, the two approaches also share similarities. Both strategies have a common goal, which is to create demand for business products or services. In both inbound and outbound lead generators, you must have a good understanding of the segmentation of your target audience. 

Which Type of Marketing Lead Generation Strategy to Choose?

The opinions of marketers vary greatly. Someone believes that outbound marketing is ineffective, someone is trying to use its approaches, and someone is convinced that both types can be combined. There is no single answer as to which lead generation method is better. Largely, the choice depends on the characteristics of the company. But here are a couple of crucial aspects to consider: 

  • Company Size

Your marketing budget depends on the type of your business. Inbound marketing is an excellent solution for startups, small and medium-sized businesses. The investment in creating useful content, SEO-optimization and participation in events is significantly lower than the cost of outbound marketing. But large companies or corporations can afford to launch mass advertising, internet mailing, and cold calls. At the same time, inbound marketing will not bring significant results for such types of business. 

  • Strategic Goals

When you need a long-term strategy that will generate leads almost automatically, it’s inbound marketing. Outbound marketing is applicable when a company seeks to get a new flow of customers.

  • Size of Your Audience 

If your goal is massive market capture, the outbound approach will be most effective. Inbound marketing is perfect for companies with a highly targeted audience. 

  • Market Maturity 

Outbound marketing is used in cases where the target audience does not yet know about their problem. In this case, lead generation is about presenting the problem to a potential client and showing them how you can solve the best way possible. Inbound marketing is used when the client already knows about their problem and is looking for ways to solve it. Your task here is to demonstrate that you are an expert and offer them a great suggestion. 

Final Words

It is fundamentally wrong to say that one approach prevails over the other. Both inbound and outbound marketing has certain strengths. But the choice of a particular strategy should be fully focused on the purposes, needs, and characteristics of the business. Entrust professionals with setting up B2B lead generation tools and applying effective client acquisition strategies. When you hire experts to solve your marketing issues, you can be sure that you’ll spend your budget effectively and get excellent results.