Can a company survive on inbound marketing? It would obviously depend on the company's business model and the market they are competing in. However, it is safe to say that inbound marketing has taken over as the preferred means of relaying advertisements.
As compared to TV, radio, and print advertising. Blogs, forums, pod casts, and social media are considerably less expensive. As consumer's in a fast pace environment, we are saturated with media advertising and we only give 3-5 seconds of interpretation to a traditional advertisement before discarding it. Inbound marketing has the advantage of receiving potential clients searching for the best product and price from the start. It is up to the quality of the web site and the product/service to engage the costumer into action. The successes of Amazon and eBay tie into this, products do not generally sit around on a store shelf, costomers are actively engaging the seller for the product without any significant advertising. Active costomers are likely to buy a particular product, the issues is how does a company sell their product/service by these resources to their preferred target audience?
The cost of the product or service will determine how much effort must be taken to engage a costomer. Costomers will compair competing/ similar products more rigorously. Providing adequate resources whether it be video, studies, discussion forums, or trials can do this well.
I'm not saying outbound marketing is not without its place, just saying I can't afford a 5 million dollar Super Bowl ad!
What do you think would be a way for a company leveraging inbound marketing to reach a critical mass of awareness without resorting to outbound marketing? I find this to be the "virtue" of outbound marketing in that while it may not convert many people into prospects or customers it certainly gets your name/product out there and helps to build up awareness.
ReplyDeleteWhat do you think? I am partial to message boards myself as they get you injected into a community or various communities, but there can be a significant amount of time needed to build a solid reputation in an online community like a forum. This is "problem" of inbound marketing that I have been toying with and I would like to hear your thoughts.
Adding on to Dave's comment, if a company were to rely only on inbound marketing how do they reach the audience who is not specifically look to buy their product/service? Many times, a consumer doesn't know he/she wants to purchase a product/service until it is thrown in their faces through outbound marketing (i.e. Who knew a thing about godaddy.com before their famous Super Bowl ad campaign? Many people went on to purchase domains through godaddy.com in the future because of the commercial they saw watching the Super Bowl).
ReplyDelete