Both inbound and outbound marketing is essential for a small business. Outbound is more aggressive and may involve advertising and public relations.
Inbound is more subtle and uses search engine optimization, content marketing, and social media engagement techniques.
This post explains how to effectively use each of these methods to get the most out of your investment.
And remember that if you need financing to implement these strategies with the help of some microloans for small businesses, you can do it.
What Is Outbound Marketing?
Outbound marketing entails using traditional marketing techniques like trade shows, cold calling, email blasts, seminars, billboards, TV/radio/print ads, etc.
These methods aim to blast and push advertisement messages far and wide to all audience types to attract some leads and convert them into buying customers.
Since it doesn’t target a specific audience, outbound marketing tends to be less effective, costly, time-consuming, and hard to measure results, resulting in a much lower ROI.
What Is Inbound Marketing?
On the other hand, inbound marketing employs digital marketing methods that target and appeal to a specific group of users who have already shown interest in your brand or products/services.
Instead of pushing ads to customers, you position your brand so that customers can find you naturally in their search for products/services that you offer.
Thus, inbound marketing is more effective, less costly, easy to measure results, and results in a higher ROI.
Top inbound marketing techniques include Search Engine Optimization (SEO), blogging, personalized email campaigns, engaging customers via social media channels, etc.
How These Marketing Types Can Help Your Small Business
Both outbound and inbound marketing techniques can help your business grow and are part of a successful marketing strategy.
Outbound marketing methods work well in the short run and are great for placing your goods/services before a wider audience.
Whether they are searching for your products, potential customers will see your ads and take action, which helps drive quick results. That said, it’s less effective and costly, so you’ll have to pay to play.
Inbound marketing techniques help your business grow and require time and patience to work effectively. Once they take effect, they help drive highly qualified leads with little cost.
In the short run, you may have to use outbound marketing to boost and supplement your inbound marketing strategy.
For instance, you may have a great website, quality content, and great social media posts.
But you may need to run paid search engine ads and social media ads to drive traffic to your website or boost views and engagement on social media.
That way, potential customers get to know about you.
How to create an inbound marketing strategy for your business
- Define your target audience: Define your ideal customer based on their interests, pain points, motivations, the type of content they interact with, and how your brand can help solve their problems.
- Set clear goals and objectives: Set SMART goals, stipulating clearly what you want to achieve within a specific time.
- Focus on SEO: Make sure your website and content are optimized for search engines by integrating keywords and key phrases that your potential buyers use to search for your products/services.
- Leverage social media: Have a solid social media presence where you post fun content to drive engagement and user-generated content to showcase your products/services in action or use.
Tactics For Implementing Outbound Marketing Into Your Small Business
According to Databox, small businesses can use the top five most effective outbound marketing tactics to drive high conversion without blowing their budget.
They include:
- Search engine ads
- Social media ads
- Cold calls and emails
- Direct Mail
- Trade shows/events
To succeed with either of these methods, you should do your research well and try as much as possible to personalize your marketing message to drive more conversions.
Fund Your Outbound/Inbound Marketing With Microloans
Microloans for small businesses are a great way to access relatively small amounts to suffice your marketing budget. They are designed for small businesses that need to access $5,000- $100,000, and they can be used to fund different business operations.
Visit the link in the intro to learn how to apply for a microloan and how it can make your business thrive.
