Internet (digital) marketing has evolved a lot, and the paradigm shift from traditional marketing to digital marketing and SEO has been an immense success for a lot of MSPs.
The best part about digital marketing is that it is accessible to everyone, no matter what the size of your business is.
Below I’ll highlight the five main difference between outbound and inbound marketing and will explain why your MSP should consider the inbound marketing approach.
1. Target market vs mass media
When it comes to outbound marketing, it becomes heavily dependent on volume. The main focus of outbound is to spread the message as many times as you can, to as many people as possible, hoping some of these people might show some interest in your service.
However, inbound marketing is very different. It is a finesse in itself and targets the audience that you wish to reach out to. If done in the right way, then the results could be outstanding because you target the right audience and receive the prospects which you want.
2. Interruption and Permission
Here’s how outbound marketing works. You advertise, make outbound cold calls to multiple people and so on, creating an extreme disruption.
You will often hear people say “no” to cold calls because these cold calls are often made when people are least expecting it. Even subscriptions are getting outdated, and people opt out of that as well.
However, inbound marketing is a better strategy because it helps you to create a better relationship with your clients. This happens because you take the permission of your clients before communicating with them. Inbound marketing leads to the client wanting to interact with you.
3. Sales pitch vs content pitch
Outbound marketing gets straight into selling their services or products and trying hard to convert the person responding to their cold calls to become a customer.
They are more into hard selling more than educating their audience. However, inbound marketing takes the initiative to educate the audience about the business, the industry, the service the business provides, and also about the services.
This also keeps their scope open to questions and answers. Inbound marketing knows that it is a two-way communication, and it is not only about forcing someone to buy their service or products.
4. The limited opportunity vs unlimited opportunity
Outbound marketing, as we said earlier, gets straight into the point. Its either you want your service or not. There is minimal space to say because the customers, on the other hand, generally disconnect the calls the moment, they get to know that it is a sales call.
Inbound marketing provides an array of opportunity to build a relationship with the client. They use different content and a different platform to spread the word.
For instance: website, blogs, SEO, articles, social media platforms, webinars, photos, podcasts, videos, and more. In each of these methods, there is always scope for the business to talk about the key message, giving the audience an opportunity to engage in the conversation by asking relevant questions.
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