Inbound & Outbound Marketing – What Are We Talking About?

Like many things we colloquially call “Marketing,” there is ambiguity in the language we use, and the terms inbound marketing and outbound marketing are not immune.  We need a common language, and when one does not exist, we need to clarify our meaning.

This is the first of many articles I envision that will try to unearth this ambiguity, and help us to ask questions of one another to ensure we are both speaking and hearing the same definition as we operate.  This disambiguation is becoming critical as older executives and managers communicate with younger team members and staff, and recent definitions in use can cause confusion, or worse, ambiguously set and subsequently missed expectations.

Inbound & Outbound

I like the disambiguation found on Wikipedia for the terms. Definition set 1. Wikipedia says “inbound marketing (implies as recent) is a marketing strategy that focuses on getting found by customers.” The article further suggests that it is synonymous with relationship marketing (attributed to Seth Godin) and permission marketing, a more common term.  The complementary term “outbound marketing is a pejorative term for traditional marketing that focuses on interrupting customers through excessive and inappropriate advertising and promotion,” and the term is synonymous with interruption marketing.

This can be summarized as: inbound marketing is the tactics, programs, and initiatives that make a company visible and findable such that customers want to come “into” and engage with the company and outbound marketing (brand, positioning and core messaging) is secondary, at best.  The visual metaphor in my mind, is not having a clear destination in mind while waiting for a train in Grand Central Station, a place with dozens of trains every hour, inbound and outbound.  Which one is looking for you?

Definition set 2. Wikipedia (calls out as “older”) says “Inbound marketing is market research.” it goes on to say that in this definition, “…information about customer needs and interests, not customer themselves, flow into the company.”  The complementary term “outbound marketing is the non-pejorative term for marketing communications, […] information that flows out to prospective customers who have a need.” In this definition, customer needs and requirements for solutions are “inbound” to the company, and it is up to Marketing to digest that information, and lead the Company to create products and services and develop those into solutions that satisfy the needs and requirements of the customer.

This pair of definitions can be summarized as inbound and out bound marketing are defined by direction of flow of information, inbound tells companies what solutions are needed by customers, and outbound is the communication of solution value in order to motivate customer interest and sales using a broad set of marketing methods based on a central positioning and messaging framework.

Analysis.  The difference based on its claimed origin (less than 10 years old), is greatest between inbound marketing definitions 1 and 2.  Outbound marketing while pejorative or non-pejorative (the new definition disparages, is derogatory or belittles “advertising and promotions”) is functionally similar in terms of customer outreach, and targeted prospective customer engagement.  Based on the Wikipedia definitions, let’s look at these side by side: