The answer to “Can a company today survives on inbound marketing?”
will be “YES”. However, the accuracy of the answer should depend on what kind
of product business is promoting and what goal the business wants to achieve by
conducting certain marketing strategy. The influences of inbound marketing can’t
be ignored. And under some scenarios, inbound marketing is more effective than
outbound marketing. Based on the changing behavior of customers, businesses are
realizing that rather than “push” their message to customers, “pull” customers
to look for the brand will get higher returns.
Inbound marketing so far is like an “invisible hand” behind
the scene. When customers are reading high quality blogs with useful knowledge
online, customers may not think that the blog may be provided by a commercial
good company aiming to convey the promoting information between the lines. We
are in the era where people need to pay to get high quality information and
knowledge. Once, customers find this kind of information for free, they will
dig more into it. The promotion information hiding between the lines will be
founded by customers. Customers won’t regard the company name shown in the
article as the annoying advertisement which is same with others on newspaper
side bars. Inbound marketing is better
than outbound marketing because it won’t let customers feel they are interrupted
or manipulated by businesses. Under the influence of this “invisible hand”, the
best situation will be customers telling their friends about the company and
the using experiences. Recently, I just have an experience with inbound
marketing. I was searching in the medical device market. I found this great
article talking about the market size, market trend and problems with real data
and good information. And in this article, I came across this company name “Stryker”,
who is a player in the market. After reading the article, I went directly to
check out the company. See the result! I am totally influenced by the inbound
marketing.
Besides the advantages of inbound marketing, I want to talk
about the practical utility of inbound marketing. I want to say that inbound
marketing is a great marketing tool since it won’t require a great of money investment
and it will reach the goal of expanding brand awareness. Working on my ETR
business plan on Solar Panel, I consider the utility of inbound marketing as a
market tool in introducing our whole new brand by posting renewable energy
related blogs. Also, by coming up with some useful “keywords” tags, I can increase
the visibility of the blog and our company. However, I started to think of the
returns that I can get by going after this strategy. I see this strategy will
harvest good result in a longer term by constantly investing in high value
blogs and information and get customers to go word-of-mouth influence
eventually. But whether it will help me achieve the goal of aggressively opening
the market? I believe that the answer
will be “no”. This is when I think a combination of inbound and outbound marketing
will be a good choice. Gove’s Green wants to build the market from zero up. The
best way to open the market will be outbound marketing by pushing advertisements
out on outdoor billboard, community newspapers and internet. Also, I will also
conduct the inbound marketing going on at the side.
The role of outbound marketing is still important in today’s
world. It’s hard to find a company only does inbound marketing and survives. The
changing behaviors on customers’ side, preferring to go after products
suggested from peer reviews or friends recommendation or discovered by
themselves, stimulate the adoption of inbound marketing and lower the position of
outbound marketing. However, there are also other changes that can’t be ignored;
for example, people now spend more and more time on their smart portable
devices. Many start-up companies focus on analyzing data and pushing mobile personalized
commercials to customers. This new pivoted outbound marketing can help business
effectively higher returns.
Menting I agree with many points madein your posting. The success of marketing choices be it inbound or outbound definitely depends on what point of the product cycle the product is in and the type of consumers you are trying to reach.
ReplyDeleteInbound marketing is definitely a very cost effective way to advertise.I like your "invisible hand" reference. I think it summarizes the point nicely that inbound marketing is a non aggressive way to pull customers to a product.
The combination of the two techniques will vary during a product's lifecycle and the timing and amount used of the two techniques will be key to a company's marketing success.
There is a lot to be said about your comment around the product or service type having an influence on marketing. Similar to you, I believe that it's possible to rely solely on inbound marketing as I've seen it with some very successful companies. However, when it came to the analysis of your project you were right to recognize the need for a combination of inbound and outbound marketing efforts. This is a common theme for start-ups and especially those that require some explanation as to the benefits and how it applies.
ReplyDeleteAnother great point is around the quality of information being put forth through inbound marketing. Even in the example of the article you referenced, the content in the article would have likely impacted how much interest you would have in looking into a particular company. While inbound marketing is a cheaper alternative to what can sometimes be expensive outbound marketing techniques, there is a significant time requirement associated with producing content that is meaningful. It must resonate with consumers in order to be successful.
Menting, good points on "push" and "pull" analogies. I agree with your final analysis that almost all companies need both outbound and inbound marketing these days in order to survive and grow. Blogs and word-or-mouth are helpful to promote the products, but they are simply not enough to "agressively opening the market". Outbound marketing, however inconvient to a lot of customers, can be used to target large segments of customers in relatively short amount of time.
ReplyDeleteI could not agree with you more on the mobile transformation of customer behavior, especially the younger generation. As customers spend more of their time on wireless devices, so should companies spend more efforts on mobile marketing. Recent aquisition of Instagram by Facebook clearly illustrate the trend of moving ads from stationary web site to mobile devices.