A lot has changed over the past 20 years with regard to marketing, how it’s evolved, what is popular, what works and what doesn’t. Then there’s the price consideration. If you were to research, you would find a vast difference in price with the different platforms on offer. Also, the different terms used, outbound marketing, inbound marketing, attraction marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, telemarketing, and the list goes on.

Let’s just concentrate on outbound and inbound marketing as all other marketing strategies are a subset of either one of these.

What is Outbound Marketing?

Outbound marketing is also referred to as interruption marketing. It basically involves getting your message out by way of advertising, cold calling, direct mail, telemarketing, flyers, and since the era of the internet, traffic exchanges and mass email marketing. Many of these techniques are aggressive as they interrupt people in their daily lives. It requires getting a lot of messages out in the hope they strike someone who is interested. Very much a numbers game. The costs can be very expensive if it involves advertising on television, radio, even printing and mailing materials can be costly. Outbound Marketing is putting your message out to people whether they want to hear it or not and can be intrusive and annoying. People are tuning out.

Inbound Marketing – How effective is it?

Over the years it has been proven that Inbound Marketing has been more successful in customer acquisition in B2B and B2C markets. People will not tune out to your messages. Period! Inbound Marketing is the process of attracting the attention of prospects, via content creation, before they are even ready to buy; it's one of the best and most cost-effective ways to convert strangers into customers and promoters of your business.

Inbound Marketing platforms integrate blogging, email marketing, marketing automation, social media monitoring & publishing and analytics all in one. It also delivers landing pages and offers a content management system that assists you in optimizing your content.

With inbound marketing, potential customers find you through channels like blogs, search engines, and social media. It offers better two-way communication where the prospect or customer can interact. When people participate they become engaged and invested in your message. This creates relationships and a sure fire way to keep them long-term.

Inbound Marketing is perfect for Non-Marketers

Due to the very nature, inbound marketing doesn’t feel like marketing. Traditional marketing (outbound) takes a certain amount of aggressiveness, particularly cold calling. Inbound Marketing provides valuable content like infographics, white papers, and blog posts. This assists in attracting the optimal customer. It’s really not selling in the conventional way, therefore more attractive to those who feel uncomfortable with the old pushy image of “selling”.

Notable Inbound Marketing Platforms

Marketo was founded in 2006 and centers around the B2B market. Their tools manage the business cycle of a company and gather information to create itemized client profiles. These profiles enable you to determine definitive behavioral paths of leads and the content data is displayed relative to their current location in the sales funnel. They may mean either fundamental product information is presented to prospects in the inquiry stage or clients that are close to buying may receive a call from the sales department.

Their tools include landing pages, email marketing, lead management, CRM integration, Social Marketing, Analytics, and reporting. Marketo, Inc. is a software company focused on account-based marketing, including email, mobile, social, digital ads, web management, and analytics. A notable feature of Marketo is its custom-built ROI reporting tools. Marketo requires a high level of technical ability and is well suited for marketing departments of larger scale companies.

Prices range from $1,195/mth through to $25,000/mth

Hubspot was founded in 2005 and coined the phrase “inbound marketing”. It provides strong solutions for business owners, marketers, and entrepreneurs including publishing content through a blog platform, attracting and managing an audience, messaging with prospects and reporting. The package allows you to create lead capture forms integrated with an email marketing platform. Also Social media engagement tools and SEO features.

Additional services are also available. Custom consulting (starting at $10,000) offers professional hand-holding when needed and HubSpot classroom training ($500 per seat) can help bring new team members up to speed on the theories and methods of inbound marketing.

Pricing starting from Basic onboarding fee, $600, then $270/mth through to Enterprise Onboarding fee $5000, then $3,200/mth (billed annually)

Markethive founded in 1995, operating as Veretekk first established “Inbound Marketing” which the company called “Automated Marketing” platforms. It has been a pioneer in professional and ethical online business systems, developing innovative and powerful tools for global communities of marketing professionals. Markethive’s mantra from the beginning has been to build systems “for the little guy and gal”.

Markethive's functionalities include SEO features, Analytics, Customer Management System, Traffic Portals, Capture Page and Lead Creation, Profile Page, E-commerce portals, video conferencing, and Blogging Platform. Markethive plugs into all Social Media, simplifying your marketing efforts, with automated email campaigns allowing for lead flow into your designated business. Markethive incorporates collaboration and building relationships within the community.

They have significant training tutorials and weekly live support meetings.

Pricing: Markethive’s entire lineup of Inbound Marketing tools is free for life. No limit on leads, no limit on email data. No limit on campaigns. There is an Entrepreneur 8 point program at $100/mth that opens up a whole new world of opportunities.

Inbound Marketing is the technology and action that attracts customers through relevant and helpful content, adding value at every stage in your buyer’s journey moving closer and closer to becoming a loyal fanatical client.

A new Inbound Marketing model has emerged.

They are called Market Networks and are a hybrid system; part social network, part marketplace, part SaaS built on the Blockchain. Blockchain-based Companies are decentralized and derive their profit from the projects that are underpinning it, plus the products and services they deliver, therefore they are able to give back to its users in many forms, including remuneration for using the platform. It also assures complete privacy and freedom of speech. In essence, they give the power back to the people.

If you are wondering how Markethive can offer a complete inbound marketing system for free as stated above, it is because Markethive is the first company to implement the new model. Markethive, 20 years in the making has had the forward thinking and tenacity to integrate the latest technology to deliver a complete ecosystem for anybody aspiring to work online.

Deb Williams

Markethive Associate & Entrepreneur

The Complete Social/Market Network

I am the Market Manager and writer for Markethive. I'm a strong advocate for technology, progress, freedom of speech. I embrace Change.

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden

Win Mindshare to Influence Your Market

Years ago Peter Drucker, the father of business consulting, made a very profound observation:

“Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two—and only two—basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”

Yet the marketing function is broad, challenging, and often misunderstood, especially at the small to mid-market level. The Fortune 500 and savvy mid-market consumer products companies approach the marketing function from a fundamentally different angle from that of most small to mid-market companies:

They start with market research and devise a focused, comprehensive strategy to penetrate their market, build their brand, and win mindshare before they enter a market.

The typical small to mid-market company is focused on sales, a tactical function of the marketing process, and gives little thought to researching the market, building a brand, and winning mindshare. When you consider the mindset of the typical small to mid-market CEO, this makes sense; most were very-skilled and well-trained engineers, salespeople, or finance people prior to starting their own company or taking over the top role.

Winning Mindshare Starts with Positioning Strategy

If you believe in Drucker’s observation, then the most important part of marketing strategy, the positioning and branding strategy, should be owned by the CEO of a small to mid-market company. It’s simply too important to delegate to a consultant or tactical marketer.

Positioning and branding can be complicated, so to get started, think about the one thing you’d like your product/service/company to be known for – the mindshare that you’d like to own.

To win mindshare and influence your market, follow these steps at the highest level:

Determine the mindshare you want to win.
Create a brand strategy that embodies the mindshare you seek to own.
Use a systematic approach for all your marketing and sales activities.

Tools for Creating Your Strategy

This short article isn’t meant to trivialize these tasks; all three can be very challenging for a mid-market company. It’s simply meant to give CEOs and marketers in small to mid-market companies some direction when it comes to long term growth strategy.

If you’re a CEO of a small to mid-market company, our new eBook written with our ShortTrack CEO partners goes into greater depth on how to influence your market (it’s concept 3 in the book). Download it here. Currently it’s complimentary.