Response: Differences Between Inbound Marketing and Digital Marketing

You may be familiar with the branded phrase “inbound marketing,” largely promoted by Hubspot and supported by marketing agencies across the world. And if you’re not, inbound marketing is a concept that involves earning the attention of prospects, making yourself easily found online, and increasing traffic to your website. A recent article on FindAndConvert.com had us in a disagreement to their assessment.

Our Twitter post to @SpinSucks this morning addressed the article by saying “we enjoyed that white paper and propose ‘digital + inbound = integrated.’” Although we did enjoy the content of their message, we also disagree with a large part of their post, and we wanted to provide some insight on the topic. 

They start with their process of taking in new business by addressing the questions essential to building a digital strategy. Upon assessing the big picture, the strategy branches off to subcategories of brand, inbound, and outbound. They continue with their presumed difference of email marketing being classified as inbound marketing, and we believe the latter. Even though emailers are going OUT, that doesn’t mean it’s a outbound marketing strategy.

Outbound marketing strategies include trade shows, seminars, cold email blasts with no intent of recall, internal cold calling, and outsourced telemarketing. These techniques involve pushing the message down the consumers throat with the hope of a slight resonation. In the case of inbound, email marketing does not throw a message at consumers; however, it builds a community of subscribers who look forward to reading the content. These readers provide traffic, interaction, and conversions on your website, therefore classifying them as INbound, or coming IN to your website.

The article goes on to say that social media is not a strategy, and I believe this is true by traditional means, not digital. Social media is a tool used to interact with your consumers as the face of your brand. It involves strategizing content, context/interaction, and tone. Social is an inbound marketing strategy because people are linked to you via a Facebook page. They are technically subscribers if they “like” your page, looking forward to reading your content and interacting with you. Remember, outbound shoves messages down throats while inbound cultivates a following and motivates action to a website.