One of the areas that I consistently get asked about from clients is the difference between inbound and outbound marketing. Marketers and communicators have difficulties differentiating between the two concepts and how to take advantage of inbound marketing .

So lets start with outbound. Essentially outbound marketing is based on on what we know and understand as traditional media. Marketers create carefully crafted messages and communications that they then distribute to an ‘audience’ through media channels. Think TV, Radio, Outdoor but also direct response physical mail or online mediums such as Display advertising. Its characterised by one-way communications, little interaction with the media itself, in the case of broadcast the message is ‘broad’ by its nature as the media is expensive therefore making niche messaging not affordable or feasible.

An example of outbound for instance, might be a company who buys up a contact list, then creates a physical print pack to distribute through physical mail to these contacts, with a direct response hook that will hopefully be triggered by the receiver. Think of a new chain of restaurants in a city sending out a marketing pack to a bought list of HR managers, notifying them of the launch of the restaurants and the running of a competition or aimed at employees. The hope is that the HR manager will distribute the offer/competition to the employees and they can voluntarily respond to the stated offer – win a meal for your work group – that type of thing. The problem with this outbound marketing is that there are a lot of points of friction along the way. The marketers have to buy the list, create the print pack, send it out via physical mail and then, fingers crossed, the HR manager distributes to the work colleagues and then they go and respond to the specific offer. Way too many potential points of failure. I’ve seen this type of marketing fail spectacularly.

Whereas Inbound marketing is characterised by businesses understanding that these days they need to produce rich content on a range of different digital platforms where their prospects are active, and then use this content to attract these prospects’ attention inwards to their business. At the heart of inbound is content marketing. And by content we are not talking ads, we’re talking content that prospects find useful, helpful, amusing, engaging to some degree. So when a business thinks of inbound they need to understand in order to gain the benefits of it, they must be producing regularly updated content on platforms such as their website, blog, social media, regular useful emails, webinars etc… The idea is that this content is being seen and shared by prospects and customers on platforms of their preference (think Twitter, Facebook, Slideshare.net, Website, Blog, etc..) , its useful to them (not always in a massively significant way – but they are happy to receive the information) think Lidl Facebook post – with this weeks special offers – people want this information and they have an affinity with it. And it also keeps the company top of mind and hopefully the customer engages and purchases at some point. Inbound distribution platforms are essentially controlled by the companies themselves – website, blog, social – there can be a paid media element but not 100% necessary – the main cost is the resources required to produce the content. This is where we see this model of owned media coming to the fore.

So lets take an example, imagine you are a health food expert and nutritionist. And you are thinking what kind of content can you produce online that will demonstrate your expertise in your area but also be very helpful to potential client base. If they become exposed to your ideas there is a strong chance that a percentage of these will at some point contact you and convert to a patient etc.. . What would the health nutritionist produce online to achieve both ends? Well, they could regularly provide online information on topics such as family diet plans, celiac dietary considerations, how to manage diabetes in young children, behavioural spectrum dietary responses, realistic healthy diets for working professionals etc.  This information is being published on the blog or website ,  and snippets are being shared on the likes Facebook and Twitter.  They could also produce self-interviews on specific topics that they share on Youtube (topical issues of the week, reports that have been released in the media and make comment on these etc.) – then take the video form YouTube and publish on their blog or other social channels. Maybe they do a talk at a conference on managing child obesity and then share the slides on Slideshare.net and again share the link with some small comment on twitter and Facebook. They could possibly release the audio recording  that went with the talk  as an audio file on their blog or upload to iTunes for download – the scope is endless.

The idea with all this information is that your prospects are seeing your content online, they feel they know you and trust you as they read your work, and then when if necessary they require your services, they think of you first, or refer you to someone they know (word of mouth). Google is also indexing all this content and hopefully the keywords you are trying to be found for on search engines are being used in this content, so when someone searches for your services online using these anticipated words – you come up number 1 and reap the benefits of this. Also, by producing content online and being active in conversations and forums you are building your platform as a professional, which means that you maybe asked to speak at conferences, engage in media debates – all of which generates more awareness of you.

The scope of opportunities for inbound marketing are great. The advantage for the business is that they can control this content and produce as much or as little as they want. The most important thing is quality. As long as the content being produced is of quality and your prospects find it so, that will be the measure of your success. Because if prospects like what you are producing, business will flow Inbound as a result. We are all inbound marketers today whether we know it or not. We are all going to have embrace it because Customers Find Businesses Online Today (but the reality is they don’t, the good businesses Make themselves Findable online, the bad ones don’t and don’t even realise it).

OnlineMarketing

One of the most important jobs of a Digital Marketer is to understand how to create engaging and smooth user experiences targeted at well understood personas. One of the skills that I find a lot of Digital Marketers don’t possess is the understanding that unless you know how to create optimised user journeys, driving all the traffic in the world to that destination will not improve conversion rates. It behoves all marketers to research and figure out what works for their audience – and the only way to do that is to test. Because your own personal biases when creating online pathways and information flows will not translate into the ‘best’ user experience. There’s a myriad of testing tools these days on offer – a free tool that anyone can use is Google Website Optimiser. Very straight forward to run tests on variations of your webpages.

Embedded is a presentation, based on the ab tests reported on by a site called ‘Which Test Won’. It presents a whole series of tests based on a hypothesis, two test versions and goes through the winning version. Have a look through, and start analysing your own site and ask yourself the question – is the site clearly understood to users, both new and returning, in terms of who you are as a business, what you do, what problems you solve, and if they are your ideal customers why would they choose to do business with you (clear value propositions), and if they want to do business with you what are the next steps involved and how easy is it to get to the endpoint (Calls to Actions etc.). Most website do not do a good job of addressing these questions. Then of course, there’s the whole science and trial/error of testing checkout processes, landing pages, subscription and registration forms etc… This slidedeck is a good pointer to even get you thinking about it, regardless of whether you are B2B or B2C.

OnlineMarketing

Quick presentation that focuses on the need to focus firstly on your content marketing requirements and then how best to deliver that with a Content Management System

OnlineMarketing

Digital Insights has just finished up delivering three Diploma courses in Online Marketing, Sales and Digital Strategy with Dublin Business School, Griffith College Dublin, and IBAT College Dublin. These have been a great success with many large and medium sized business partners and individuals participating on the courses. They will be all run again in October 2010 so if interested please register at the various colleges. These courses have been certified by the Institute of Commercial Management (ICM) and by the Dublin Business School.

They cover in practical terms how to create an online and digital strategy that is aligned with measurable business objectives with clearly stated goals. They demonstrate to participants how to plan and research your target audiences and understand where they coalesce online and how best to create online tactical solutions that engage with them.

The courses cover how to create inbound marketing programmes based on producing compelling valuable content for your buyers, for both a B2B and B2C environment. We look at how to create awareness and demand through your content and how best to leverage social channels as a means of connecting with your prospectives and customers. As part of the course we differentiate for participants between the differnt forms of media that are used online today – and we break these down into Owned Media, Paid Media and Earned Media, and how to create your media profile based on these segmentations.

We demonstrate to participants how to design and implement paid search campaigns, search engine optimisation programmes, keyword analysis, competitor analysis, blogging strategies, podcasts, videocasts, webinars, screencasts and, relate all of these to particular buyer cycles and sales funnel activities that can help augment site conversions. We go through how businesses can leverage social media to share content, develop community and make their content more “findable”, improve customer service, acquire new customers and retain existing ones. We also show participants how to create measurement frameworks for businesses to track ROI Key Performance Indicators. We go through using the google analytics interface and how to tie this in with site conversion tracking.

These are intense 12 week courses with the aim to provide participants with a clearly defined set of practical digital skills which can be leveraged immediately at client-side marketing teams, digital and integrated agencies, and drive strategy and tactical solutions for enterprise eCommerce businesses, B2B and B2C businesses, communications and public relations organisations, owner managed businesses, and web marketing organisations.

DigitalStrategy, OnlineMarketing DigitalStrategy, OnlineMarketing, social applications, social media, Social Media Optimization, TrainingCourses, Video, Web Platforms

FriendFeed the social aggregator and now real-time sharing and commenting application has upgraded to its new Front-End interface. Up until yesterday, users could opt to use the application in beta mode, which got mixed reviews. Some of the power users such as the ubiquitous Scoble were quite positive about it. It will be interesting to see how it is viewed by the wider audience.

Initial feedback is that if you have a large amount of friends, that the real-time update is just too much and far too much noise for the regular users. I am big fan of FriendFeed, I really like the fact that you can follow people and see their aggregated footprint, providing that they are posting interesteng and sharing relevant content. I use the FriendFeed notification application that displays updates in the corner of my screen. So I tend not to use the actual friendfeed interface. The diference that I see with FriendFeed to Twitter, is that you do get exposed to more information from users in FriendFeed, depending on what services they have decided to share – for instance, GoogleReader shares, Blogs, Feeds, video and photo sites etc…but providing people are sharing and posting interesting content, one gets to see and read a lot of good, wide and varied content. This of course can be construed as a massive noise wall by users who do not want exposure to this level of detail.

But the main point, I think for FriendFeed, is that it is still a tool for users who are very technically engaged, as opposed to new users of social applications. It will be interesting to see will it become a Twitter like tool in terms of popularity. I think possibly not, as the options and levels of perceived complexity may switch people off.

That said, it’s a great application and one that will be very interesting to watch. The guys who set it up are also Google veterans who know what they are doing. Also, saw a very interesting video with their chief interactive designer with Scoble on Kyte.tv. Worth checking out to get an insight into the new changes and what is coming down the tracks.

OnlineMarketing Aggregator, Real-time computing, twitter