Is Your Business Generation Getting Pushy?

The age of digital marketing has seen an evolution of strategy execution to inbound marketing. Whilst all marketing is designed to generate interest in your business, there is a fundamental difference between inbound and outbound marketing, one requires a fatter wallet whilst the other a little more patience.

Essentially inbound marketing is the overall ‘pulling’ of clients and interest towards your business (eg: blogging, social media, webinars) and outbound marketing (eg: cold calling, print adverts, trade shows) is the ‘pushing’ of information, products and services to cold clients to fill pipelines and ensure efficient prospect to close ratios.

As consumers we receive on average over 2000 cold marketing interruptions per day which makes cold marketing irritating and with the internet providing us access to an abundance of information we are able to find what we need ourselves without having a solution thrust upon us.

While outbound generated leads remain cold and sales tough, inbound marketing, is the tentative pulling of the client towards your proposition; they feel in control and when contact is finally made the lead is warm and ready to be closed.

And so we come to the old adage, marketing is only as good as sales and vice versa. After doing all the hard work and having the patience and commitment in following an inbound marketing strategy the rewards can be lost in how and, perhaps more importantly, when a lead is followed up. Referred to as the ‘WOW effect’, as in “wow, that was quick”. Dr. James B. Oldroyd of MIT discovered that an inbound lead followed up within the first 5 minutes of receipt had a high chance of close success, after 5 hours it is 3000 times less likely to close.

Inbound marketing should not replace outbound methods, however, often activity is dictated by budget and in place of pound signs a marketing team may need to generate a lot of patience, stamina and a close-knit relationship with sales. So how about it, stop being pushy and embrace inbound channels to pull your clients in.