A lot of the stuff you read about online marketing nowadays suggests that “outbound marketing” is dying, and it’s all about “inbound marketing”. Stop trying to broadcast your message to the world, and instead, encourage the world to come to you. That’s how the market is working now, isn’t it? Buyers want to do their own research, they don’t want to listen to your interruptions.
Well, possibly. But here’s the thing. When I’m working on managing AdWords campaigns for clients, there are two situations where we have a problem. One is where buyers aren’t going to be looking for your offering in the first place, because it’s something new which they won’t even have heard about. The other is where your offering is so difficult to describe that you can’t drag them in because you simply don’t know how they’ll be articulating what they’re looking for.
In both difficult cases, “outbound marketing” may have an impact. To do this, you can either do it the old-fashioned way, and rent a vehicle, such as a magazine, to push your message out. Or you can send it out to a list you’ve built yourself. I suspect that for most readers, there are only a few hundred potential buyers in this country and a few thousand around the world. Medium- and long-term, it’s a lot more cost-effective to invest in building this list yourself, although amusingly it’ll be “inbound marketing” marketing techniques which can help you do this.