Thinking outbound means thinking from the inside out, starting from the company's capabilities and what we want to sell to create messages that will reach the public. And that's where the creative minds of large advertising agencies come in, challenging themselves to create campaigns that engage the public.
The competition for the best accounts and the best actions raised the level of marketing and advertising, and everything went swimmingly, until the advent of Generation X and, more definitively, Generation Y. The world of Mad Men experienced a gentle and continuous decline (it is still falling), and creatives continue to fight for the attention of the new generations. But the new generations have attention deficit and hate invasive, interruptive communication. What now?
Young people are naturally digital, they were australia contact data connected, they enjoy getting information online, whenever, wherever and however they want. Promotional campaigns, no matter how innovative they are, may even be liked virally (some become jokes, even when there is no intention), but they do not convert. In other words, large media campaigns will continue to exist for mass marketing, but when it comes to engagement marketing, paid media will have to increasingly tie itself to proprietary media, which is the basis of inbound.
New Call-to-action
That's when the world discovered "inbound thinking", that is, thinking with the public's mind. To think Inbound Marketing, the corporate world had to learn to monitor its audience, understanding their interests in this order:
Attract you ( to your content of interest );
Convert it (from unknown to a relationship with the brand);
Engage them (encourage them to interact with the brand);
Make them loyal (convince them to promote the brand in their personal network).
Inbound Marketing and Inbound Communication
This is a cycle, as loyalty increases the attraction (in a network) of new contacts. Then comes inbound, whose main objective is to engage the public with the brand to generate new business . And here comes a little confusion: are inbound and Inbound Communication the same thing? Yes and no.
As good old Kotler explained to us, the objective of marketing is to seek market opportunities through scenario analysis, determining actions based on what was called "the 4 P's": product (what to sell), place (in which markets), price (with what margin) and promotion (with what incentives). In other words, communication is an arm of marketing, the one that takes to the market and promotes the strategies chosen to position our company. The next steps are once again in the hands of the consumer, in keeping with Keller and his classic Brand Equity pyramid .
If we bring this concept to the scope of inbound thinking, marketing must generate the strategy and communication must disseminate it. Thus, Inbound Communication is part of inbound.
How does Inbound Communication become part of inbound?
Let me explain. If we want to attract an audience to our proprietary content, we need to understand their needs and interests , how they search for information on the internet using keywords, and then create an inbound platform and editorial plan that will gradually attract and engage the audience with the brand.
Nothing has changed since Kotler created the concept, and nothing will change, for now, in the rational and emotional journey of the consumer designed by Keller. Inbound is concerned with understanding and planning the audience engagement strategy, and Inbound Communication is its execution.