Marketing activities, in general, create a push and pull with your customers. As an entrepreneur, you want to do certain marketing activities in order to influence your customers’ behavior, and encourage them to buy from your business.   

This push and pull mechanism is commonly referred to as inbound and outbound marketing. Here’s how we define those terms:

• Inbound marketing pulls customers into your business via relevant messaging. 
• Outbound marketing pushes your message out to customers. 
  

Simple enough, right? 

Examples of inbound marketing include creating and distributing content like blog posts, podcasts and videos. If you have a compelling social media account that tells a story about your business, your posts could also be considered inbound marketing because they’re helping customers find and understand your business. 

Other activities, like search engine optimization (SEO), can be considered inbound marketing because they also help customers find you online. Last but not least, email marketing (where the customer has opted-in to receiving emails from you) could also be included as an inbound marketing activity. 

The marketing technology company HubSpot and their co-founder/CEO Brian Halligan, are widely credited with coining the term “inbound marketing” in the mid-2000s.

On the other hand, taking our entrepreneur hats off and thinking as consumers, we’re more familiar with outbound marketing. Outbound marketing includes most forms of advertising: online, television, radio, print, billboard, etc. If you think about an ad, it’s an opportunity for a business to push their message out to a consumer in the style and format that they want. 

The latest industry estimates say that consumers are exposed to 6,000 to 10,000 ads per day. This is exponentially higher than the pre-internet days, and over time the consensus has been that outbound marketing activities have become less effective. Consumers are learning how to tune them out, avoid or block them entirely.

Knowing this, should you be doing inbound marketing only? Absolutely not. An effective marketing strategy balances both inbound and outbound marketing activities. The split between inbound and outbound marketing activities will depend on your business (you know it best, after all!) and your goals. 

For instance, if you know your product has a long buying cycle and that you need to educate customers about it before they decide to buy, you may choose to focus more on your inbound marketing (aka, educational content that will pull customers in and bring them to your business) than your outbound marketing. This can apply to expensive or complex products, like B2B enterprise software or a new TV. 

If your product has a short buying cycle or you’re running more of a volume business, you may instead choose to focus more on your outbound marketing. This can increase awareness and drive a high level of interest. We find that most entrepreneurs spend a lot of time focused on outbound marketing because it can deliver quick results for metrics like website visits.

Either way, you’ll need to use both inbound and outbound marketing to draw customers to your business and encourage them to buy from you.