Because you’ve had success using marketing techniques like direct mail to find target customers and let them know how you can help them, it might seem like an “isn’t broke don’t fix it” situation.

But ignoring the fact that inbound marketing can supplement, improve, or potentially replace the prospects you work to acquire, while drastically reducing costs, would be detrimental to your business.

In the past few years, you may have heard the phrase “outbound marketing is dead” so many times your ears have started to bleed. Today’s marketers tout inbound marketing as the new normal and a more effective alternative to cold calls and email blasts.

In fact, there is a lot of truth to these “newfangled” marketing ideas. Check out this stat from Demand Metric: Inbound marketing generates three times as many leads as traditional outbound marketing, but costs 62% less.

Insane, right? Hubspot reports that companies are saving an average of $20 thousand per year when they switch from outbound to inbound marketing.

Beyond lead increase and cost decrease, here are three other ways incorporating inbound marketing into your promotional efforts will help take your business to the next level:

Give To Get

Let your prospects have the control they desire. The rise of the Internet and, subsequently, social media has brought about a fundamental shift in consumer behavior. People are now in charge of what they see and how they see it. They are now the empowered buyer, rather than the company controlling the message.

People don’t want to be sold to. It’s as simple as that. They don’t want your products or services pushed in their face. That’s exactly what happens with outbound marketing. Communication is one way, customers are sought out through advertisements and cold calls, and the outbound marketer provides little or no value to the customer.

But, with inbound, marketers are able to provide value to the consumer, through educational materials like blogs, ebooks, and whitepapers. Companies are now able to communicate and interact with potential customers, who seek them out via search engines, social media, and referrals.

Like I mentioned earlier, people are seeking value. They want to do their own research and come to their own conclusions about the solutions to their problems. As a company that could offer and product or service that solves their problem, it’s now your job to get found by that person. You’ll do this through search engine optimization, blogs, social media and content offers (whitepapers, ebooks, etc).

Know More About Your Leads

Early on, direct mail was innovative with being able to reach a prospect’s mailbox and be personalized with their name, address, and a detail about their situation (car dealers jumped on this trend very quickly). But, wouldn’t it be nice to not only let a lead know that you have their name and car model, but that you understand their pain points. You can not only articulate their problems, but you can help walk them to solutions and your company can help guide them from where they are to where they want to be. Inbound marketing helps you do all of this.

You will attract ideal prospects, wherever they are in their buyer’s journey, and tailor messages, solutions, and content (on your website) that helps them solve their problems and make a purchase decision?

When you align the content you publish with your target customer’s interests, you attract inbound traffic naturally. You don’t have to fight for their attention because they are searching for you.

Think about how many high-quality leads exist in the 3.5 billion people that use the Internet today. Are you doing everything you can to attract them? If not, you might want get in touch with us to see how we can help.

Do What Your Buyer Wants

Choosing the right marketing method to take your business to the next level all comes back to knowing exactly who it is that you are trying to turn into a customer.

On average, people are inundated with 2,000 outbound marketing interruptions every day – from TV and radio ads to telemarketing, and yes, even direct mail. There are also creative ways to block out these distractions, including streaming services (Netflix and Hulu), caller ID and no-call lists, and music streaming services (Spotify and Pandora). People are willing to pay a monthly subscription service to NOT SEE intrusive ads.

What do they do with unwanted direct mail? That goes straight to the shredder.

 

But, if direct mail works for your business (and more importantly, your prospects), make sure you maximize the performance through the use of inbound techniques, like making sure you have optimized your website and social media for inbound. You still want to be in the right place at the right time, remember?

With a targeted, optimized inbound campaign, you’ll be able to collect the information of leads. And yes, that information can be their direct mailing address.

Through direct mail, you can send your leads the information they may be looking for to make the next step in the buyer’s journey.

Make Inbound The Star of Your Marketing Strategy

Outbound marketing has lost a lot of its power. It’s no longer the way to go for businesses of all sizes to generate leads and make sales.

But some aspects of outbound marketing can be used in conjunction with inbound efforts. These must be well-thought-out campaigns that target the right people in the right stage of their buyer’s journey.

By incorporating inbound marketing as your primary outreach, you will be able to increase your ROI (in online AND offline efforts), learn more about your clients, and avoid your business’s carefully-crafted messages ending up in the spam folder (or the shredder).

Ignore the power of inbound, though, and you’re just wasting money.