Inbound Marketing Versus Traditional Marketing!

Inbound marketing focuses its methodology on attracting customers: it awakens their interest so that they are curious to know what your company has to offer. It's a non-intrusive methodology that bases your strategy on creating the right content for the right people at the right time.

Inbound marketing differs from traditional marketing because it focuses on the customer and their various profiles (the so-called personas), segmenting them according to the stage they are in on their purchase journey. Traditional marketing, on the other hand, acts as a kind of megaphone, drawing attention to companies in a direct but unguided way. Examples of this are radio and television advertisements, magazine and newspaper advertisements, posters and flyers.

It is true that a marketing strategy can be articulated, applying inbound marketing and traditional marketing in a different way, but as an agency that practices inbound and taking into account the results we have with our clients, at OMT we believe that this methodology is the most suitable these days because:

Customers and potential customers, for the most part, start the purchase process through internet searches and, therefore, it is important that your company's website is prepared to appear well positioned in search engines and, of course, with the content right

How many of us do not avoid, as customers, intrusive and disruptive messages such as cold calls – a very popular tool in traditional marketing?

Thus, with this article, we intend to show you the real difference between an attraction methodology, aimed at the client and whose problems, interests and pains come first, and an intrusive methodology, of mass dissemination, deep down the real difference between the inbound marketing and traditional marketing. If your company is in the process of defining a marketing strategy to adopt or if you want to better understand what inbound marketing is, this article is for you and can give you the indications you are looking for.

#Getting the customer's attention versus selling yourself to the customer

When adopting an inbound marketing strategy, your focus is on the customer and their different profiles, the personas, and you will always pay attention to the stage you are in on your buying journey - after all, why try to sell, for example, a car to a customer when he still doesn't know if a van or a utility vehicle is best for him? In order to guide responses to the most varied profiles, inbound marketing seeks to know, above all, who its visitors are:

By creating useful and quality content that arouses the interest of your potential customers, the number of visitors to your website increases – inbound marketing is concerned with ensuring that your brand, in addition to being visible, is a reference; traditional marketing is concerned with visibility.

Increasing your web traffic, you now have the opportunity to get to know your visitors and, therefore, it is important that your website/blog has call-to-action, landing pages and forms that transform your visitors into contacts or leads. From here on, you already have a relationship channel with your potential customers, which allows you to get to know them: this is how inbound marketing adopts a well-targeted and relevant strategy, avoiding at the same time it being intrusive and inopportune. In traditional marketing, the message reaches everyone without distinction – it could be an advantage, if the content were adapted to the various customer profiles and decision stages in which they are.

Contact with your website visitors promotes two-way communication which, in all businesses, is an asset. Through, for example, interaction on social networks or on your blog, you will get to know their needs, their doubts, their opinions and the subjects that arouse the most curiosity. In traditional marketing, communication is unilateral and does not promote dialogue – it is generalist, formatted and potential customers are not given space to comment, raise doubts or share experiences. It is not possible to obtain the necessary feedback to adapt the responses to each profile.

This path that we present here corresponds to what, in inbound marketing, is called a sales funnel, that is, the path that your company must take with each visitor, who becomes a lead, while guiding him/her to be an opportunity, having in view of the final sale. In traditional marketing, the sales funnel does not occur: communication is unilateral, direct and with the sole purpose of selling, not informing customers and making them loyal.

#Exact results versus estimated results

Any inbound marketing strategy has the analysis of results as a transversal step at all stages of its implementation. This analysis allows for accurate knowledge of the cost of each applied measure and the profit it is bringing you. In view of this diagnosis, you can make immediate optimizations and changes to your inbound marketing strategy – for example, if your lead conversion rate is not ideal, you have the opportunity to optimize your website/ blog to reverse this trend: changing positioning CTA's or improving the content of landing pages will surely see your numbers soar! In an inbound marketing strategy, only actions that trigger good results are replicated, and those that do not generate a response are rethought.

In traditional marketing, it is difficult to specify, among the various strategies and tools applied, the one that generated the most return – which of the ads generates the most sales: television or radio? And is the content of the ad getting acceptance or could another message be tried? It is also difficult to replicate the most productive strategies and tools because you don't know what they are – to access this information in a systematic way, several campaigns must end, as only then is it possible to compare the results of one and the other, in a process that is time-consuming, costly and that it lacks precision.

Opting for inbound marketing favours a strategy to attract customers, in which all results are measurable and in which all actions are defined based on rigorous metrics – analysis is one of the most important components of any inbound strategy. Traditional marketing, on the contrary, has a less exact methodology: in the dissemination of the message, massified, and in the analysis of results, which is more undifferentiated and inaccurate.

By opting for an inbound marketing strategy, you are also deciding on a more controlled investment: throughout the process, you will know the return on each cent invested, making it easier to calculate your ROI, the return on your total investment.