After hearing about Demand Generation and Inbound marketing, you are surely wondering what the differences are between the two methodologies and what they represent within your marketing and sales offices. Which one should your company focus on? Is there one that is more important than the other? Let’s explain it!
Demand Generation and Inbound marketing are quite similar at first glance, but appearances are deceiving.
Demand generation places greater emphasis on sales
Technology evolution have made great strides in the past, improving and simplifying the ways to generate demand, but little has changed on a conceptual level. The outbound marketing methods (the so-called outbound) remain unchanged, on the contrary the potential customers have become more receptive to our inputs, developing an autonomous search for information through multiple channels (think about emails, TV commercials, webinars and so on ): It is precisely here that a demand-oriented approach finds its field of application, involving and maintaining contacts with potential customers and preparing them for dialogue with the sales department.
Inbound marketing places greater emphasis on marketing
Inbound marketing in the last ten years has changed the concept and methodologies related to marketing activities, but the real push has been in the last five years with the evolution of SEO tools and emails, the functional use of blogs and social media. The basis of this methodology is the creation of content and the public sharing of your knowledge and competence in a given sector, which inserted within a correct inbound strategy lead to generating incoming Quality Leads for your company, involving or not your sales department. The advantage of this approach is that the leads generated in this way are less expensive than those generated through an outbound strategy. It is a forward-looking approach adopted by companies that develop long-term strategies that aim to anticipate market trends.
Demand Generation + Inbound Marketing: what is the winning formula?
This is the classic million dollar question! There is no single answer, each company develops its “magic formula” based on its internal skills, resources and competences, for this reason the exact proportion will vary from case to case. A recent survey by Hubspot reveals how more and more is invested in inbound marketing and less and less in outbound marketing, and this difference is expected to become even more pronounced in the coming years.
What does this mean for your business?
You will find that starting to focus on inbound marketing rather than outbound marketing could turn into a winning move to improve the profitability of your actions and to make your job much easier and more efficient.
Would you like to ask us to start your demand generation strategy? Contact us Playmarketing.ch
