In this second installment of Inbound Marketing Fundamentals, let’s take a closer look at the irreversible shift from Outbound Marketing to Inbound Marketing.

A humorous video perspective on Outbound vs Inbound Marketing, entitled the "Monks vs Wizards”, is coming soon to www.gossamar.com. Stay tuned with an RSS feed.

Traditional B2B marketing has focused on Outbound techniques such as Print Advertising, Direct Mail (Mail or Email), and Trade Shows. With Outbound Marketing, you essentially blast your message out to a mass audience, in the hope that someone on the receiving end is interested in your message at that instant in time, and will pay attention.

Since all your competitors are essentially doing the same thing, your strategy as Outbound Marketer is to shout louder and more frequently (as frequently as you can afford), in the hope of drowning out the rest of your competitors.

What’s worse, with Outbound Marketing you rarely hear back from your prospects, and so the communication is primarily one way: The sellers shout; the buyers mostly tune out the noise.

Whoever thought that this was effective communication?

We’ve known for years that Outbound Marketing is becoming less and less effective. Trade Show attendance has been dropping. Response rates in outbound direct marketing campaigns continue to be laughable. Print Magazine circulation and ad placements have fallen off a cliff. And yet we plodded on, holding our nose, because we simply had no alternatives.

Enter Inbound Marketing. Inbound Marketing focuses on your company “getting found” by prospects and buyers, at the time and place of their choosing, and assisting them through their buying cycle. Naturally, the easiest place for prospects to find your company is on the internet.  Any day.  Any hour.  Here’s the proof: Today, over 90% of B2B buyers start their sales cycle online by looking for new solutions to their needs.

In the words of Seth Godin:  “Selling to people who actually want to hear from you is more effective than interrupting strangers who don’t. Finding new ways, more clever ways to interrupt people doesn’t work.”

With Inbound Marketing, your website is no longer just one of the elements of your marketing mix, but becomes the central “clearing house” for all marketing efforts, both online and offline.

Why should B2B marketers embrace Inbound Marketing? Inbound Marketing will deliver:

1. More B2B Sales Leads of Higher Quality at Lower Cost than any Outbound Marketing strategy.
2. Priceless real-time Market Insight, essentially for free.
3. A strong competitive edge because you are listening to your market, not shouting at it.

And how do you make sure prospects and buyers can find your company on the net? Here’s the 1-2-3 overview:

1. Create valuable content that helps prospects with their buying cycle, and put it on your website.
2. Optimize your website around that content, so that buyers can easily find it when searching on the net.
3. Promote that content through traditional and online media, including web 2.0 vehicles like blogs and communities.

The “how to” details will be covered in upcoming posts. In the meantime, if you are the impatient type, check out our whitepaper on SEO/ SEM and other “how to get found” strategies for B2B companies.

Next week’s post on Inbound Marketing Fundamentals will uncover the powerful shift from Manual to Automation in marketing.

Till then – Axel

Tags: b2b marketing, Inbound Marketing, Inbound Marketing Fundamentals, Marketing 2.0

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 26th, 2009 at 11:35 pm and is filed under Blog Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.