Inbound and Outbound Marketing: Foes or Friends?

Inbound marketing alone can be a recipe for failure.  That’s the view of Jon Miller, VP of Marketing at marketing automation IT provider Marketo who defines inbound marketing in a recently published Marketo inbound marketing whitepaper as “The process of helping potential customers find your company – often before they are even looking to make a […] The post Inbound and Outbound Marketing: Foes or Friends? appeared first on VMR. Inbound and Outbound Marketing: Foes or Friends? was first posted on April 16, 2012 at 6:39 pm.©2015 "VMR". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me at hugh@vmrcommunications.com

I tend to agree with both Jon’s definition of inbound marketing and his contention that inbound marketing alone is not enough. But I think it’s important to note that if you asked inbound marketing evangelists like Hubspot CTO Dharmesh Shah, I think they’d agree as well that a mix of outbound and inbound approaches makes perfect sense. Indeed, Shah has explicitly stated as much on quora over the last few years. For example:

Hubspot’s CMO Mike Volpe also points out – on quora – that the cost per lead is 60% lower using an inbound-marketing focused approach.

Where Marketo and Hubspot may disagree, therefore, not so much on whether outbound marketing approaches are necessary but rather the degree to which businesses should focus their efforts on inbound approaches as opposed to outbound approaches.

And that is a perfectly legitimate debate worth having.

Equally important for marketers to discuss is how best to integrate the two approaches strategically rather than implementing them as stand-alone approaches that are executed as completely separate marketing initiatives.

With this discussion in mind, I’d like to propose a new term to describe marketing strategy that involves a synergistic combination of outbound and inbound approaches: Mixbound Marketing.

A good example of a social media- oriented mixbound strategy that combines both traditional outbound approaches and inbound approaches would be using Facebook Sponsored Stories  (outbound with a social layer) to amplify the reach of a Facebook Page that focuses mainly on growing its fan base and engagement rate with an organic approach that is rooted in posting remarkable content to the Facebook Wall (inbound).

Another example would be Organic SEO combined with Paid SEO/SEM.

And lest I leave out perhaps the best example: I learned about Marketo’s inbound marketing whitepaper (inbound/content marketing) thanks to a Facebook Ad (outbound marketing).

Outbound and inbound marketing approaches should complement rather than compete with one another. And I don’t know if I’m the first to use the term but I refer to the synergistic, *strategic* merging of the two approaches as “mixbound marketing.”

Further information on inbound marketing and outbound marketing and the benefits of each:

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Inbound and Outbound Marketing: Foes or Friends?

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