As organizations have shifted their focus on marketing from selling to creating loyalty, there has been an evolution in terms of the tools used for driving traffic, conversion, and retention. For many years, the main marketing tool used was traditional SEO. This made sense at the time when performing search engine optimization was considered the most effective marketing measure. But the Internet is a dynamic environment that continually evolves and new technologies emerge to shape how the industry operates. Companies need to constantly evolve to meet the needs of their users, customers, employees, and partners.

While SEO remains a valuable tool to help businesses optimize the landing pages they have created for their content, mobile users have proven that what they look for differs greatly from what they were looking for just a few years ago. Mobile users interact with search engines in a user-centric, social-first way, and they typically want more personalization, recommendations, and relevancy than the big guys can offer. This leads to the creation of the term “augmented reality” or “AR”—an intensive way of applying information to a user’s environment. This applies not only to websites and mobile apps, but also to, well, all business activities.

To manage the marketing and sales data that are collected and their uses, marketers need to analyze both the inbound and outbound marketing in order to ensure their brands are relevant to their users.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound Marketing happens on a website or in a company’s ERP system that requires content to be published on their site. Inbound Marketing takes the form of content published and linked to from the website, which encourages potential customers to connect with the business. This is often referred to as content marketing.

There are some drawbacks to Inbound Marketing. For example, it is not always productive because the business must pay an SEO agency to help with promotion and search engine optimization. The professional can optimize a website and give it the SEO look that the business desires. The main goal of Inbound Marketing is to create loyalty with the intent of generating leads or for qualified leads to convert to sales. Conversion is when a lead is hired or issued a product or service.

Outbound Marketing

Outbound marketing has grown rapidly in the last few years. In Outbound Marketing, businesses are able to communicate with prospective customers through social media platforms, email, social, mobile, etc. Outbound marketing is when someone encounters a business’s information, services, or product online and decides to engage with them.

The primary strategy of Outbound Marketing is to engage with users by posting information on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc. and engaging their followers with to-the-point messaging. Also, companies reach out to customers via telephone, email, and messaging as well as forum posts and comment threads.

Outbound marketing ensures that brands continually have useful information to share with users that can inform them and engage them in a meaningful conversation.

In the future, organizations will embrace “hybrid” tactics which combine both inbound and outbound marketing tactics. At first, companies will use inbound tactics but they will increase their efforts to use both outbound and Inbound Marketing.