Mixing outbound and inbound marketing | how to make the most of it.

Inbound marketing is the new big thing. Small and large businesses alike are adopting tools like SEO and social media to promote their brands and attract customers with greater precision than was ever possible with the old outbound marketing tactics.

But that doesn’t mean traditional advertising is dead. To the contrary, a business can combine the tools of inbound and outbound marketing in a way that can make both techniques more effective than ever.

The two approaches can help each other precisely because they are so different. While outbound marketing is focused on aggressively spreading the word about a business through tools like direct mail, advertisements and trade show promotions, inbound marketing uses the behavior of search engines and online customers to transform a company’s website into a funnel to attract and generate leads. Inbound advertising boasts a higher conversion rate because it is geared to attract people who are already interested in a company’s product, but outbound marketing can raise awareness among a much wider base of potential customers.

For example, if a company is entering a new market and wants to raise awareness about its business, an outbound advertising campaign can be a good way to get consumers’ attention. Online traffic tends to lead to more online traffic, so a campaign that helps a first round of visitors find the company’s website can pay dividends later on — both by generating new potential leads and attracting the visitors and referrals that encourage search engines to give the site a higher ranking.

Linking a company’s inbound and outbound marketing efforts can be as simple as including the business’ Web address on advertisements, flyers or trade show presentations. A more sophisticated approach could use specialized links to direct consumers to a specific landing page. Once the consumer arrives at the landing page, inbound marketing takes over, and the visitor is presented with a call to action that builds on the message of the advertisement.

Outbound marketing is ideal for generating short term customer traffic, since most advertising is very time sensitive. This means a combined strategy works best for specific events, such as the launch of a new business and short-term promotions, sales or giveaways. And since outbound marketing is likely to reach a large and fairly general audience, the broader the appeal of the offer, the better.

The great strength of inbound marketing is the fact that it provides a powerful suite of tools to nurture and convert new leads, using calls to action that track their specific interests and analytics that demonstrate the success of an inbound advertising campaign more effectively than ever before. These advantages exist regardless of how a consumer arrives at the company’s website, meaning that outbound marketing can still help to make that initial connection. What’s more, since maintaining a website is both relatively cheap compared to an outbound campaign, and something that most modern companies are doing already, a company shouldn’t need to sacrifice its outbound marketing programs to make an inbound strategy work financially.