X.Feng

Inbound marketing techniques are winning over managers who are shifting away from outbound marketing tactics and pumping in more money on inbound strategies, especially SEO and social media.

According to eMarketer, companies in North America spend 41% of their 2011 lead generation budgets on inbound channels and another 24% on outbound marketing, with the rest unclassified.

Also, a report by HubSpot indicated that businesses dominated by inbound marketing have a 62% lower cost per lead than firms that do mostly outbound marketing.

It seems that with the advent of social networking and growing importance of SEO, inbound marketing is fast dominating the everyday marketing programmes managers use. Still, I feel that there should be a fair balance between outbound and inbound marketing tactics to craft a well-rounded marketing programme. SEO and creating good web content certainly gets customers to ‘subscribe’ to the brand, but I think pushing out professionally crafted messages the traditional way really helps to reinforce the messages that marketers want to get across. Besides, some customers, even if they are interested in the brand, may not be motivated to check out the brand’s inbound marketing content. Instead, they still rely on the information and content sent out through traditional outbound marketing tactics. Instead of replacing outbound marketing, I guess inbound marketing could actually serve as a good complement to a company’s existing outbound marketing strategies.