Why Inbound Marketing Doesn’t Score You Quick Wins
Every startup founder out there have heard of the saying, “Content is king”. Every startup founder have been told that they need to ramp up on their content, SEO, resources like free e-books, and other inbound marketing channels.
But when you’re looking to gain customers quickly for a new product, inbound marketing might not be your best bet for quick wins.
Think about it…
For example, if you are in the B2B SaaS space, you have to ask yourself one simple question: “What is the most necessary thing to keep my business alive?”
Most of the time that answer is money..
Money allows you to recruit more people, acquire more users, and have a longer runway. Your company can’t survive without money.
So what can you do in the early days? In the early days, you should slowly invest in inbound marketing for a long term effect, but you should not use inbound marketing as a quick win.
Top companies in your niche will dominate the rankings for SEO because they have powerful in-house teams of SEO experts as well as a long history of what they do. If you want to rank higher than all your top competitors, that’s going to take some time and that’s why I recommend that you slowly invest in inbound marketing overtime, but never take it as a strategy for a quick win.
Inbound Marketing is extremely difficult to track
While it’s true that you can have all the necessary tools such as Google Analytics or Mixpanel to track your inbound channels, but most of the time the metrics aren’t as clear and it requires a lot of time and effort to set things up correctly. Think about all the UTM parameters, spreadsheets, and analytics that you need to look at with inbound marketing.
This isn’t the case with outbound marketing. The metrics are straight-forward and you’ll be able to figure out your target market quickly. The prospect either responds, opens email, or needs a follow up. They might click on your signature and that’s one thing you can track, but the bigger picture is quite clear.
Again, Inbound Marketing isn’t a quick win
Think about the entire process that comes with inbound marketing. Creating free e-books, blog post, social media, SEO rankings, and so many more headache items.
Even if you just focus on one of the above for a month each, that can lead to months and months of effort which deeps into your cash.
With outbound marketing, you can start testing your ideal customer profile as soon as possible and move onto the next one.
As long as you have a list of quality leads and a good outreach process, you can stack up the outreach throughout the month and see which market will bring you the best results.
Inbound Marketing will bring you users, but it won’t close a deal
At the end of the day you are trying to close deals and accumulate bigger deals with enterprise companies. This is especially true if you are in the software space.
With outbound, someone might come to your website through a paid advertisement or from a cold outreach campaign.
With inbound, most people will actively seek out your brand or your services in general.
Too many users will visit your website or content and share it. That’s great for brand building, but it won’t turn them into a customer. Closing a deal requires educating your customers and human interaction plays an important role on that end.
In other words, in most cases, an inbound marketing strategy can’t survive on its own. It at least requires a savvy outbound strategy to complement it.
So what’s my recommendation?
My recommendation would be to focus on BOTH inbound marketing and outbound sales, but don’t rely on inbound marketing as a quick win. Use inbound marketing strategies to develop your brand as you grow your customer base and brand presence.
At the same time, come up with a strategy to implement outbound right away and double down on it while slowly investing in inbound marketing for the ultimate sales machine.
If you’re looking for high-qualified and targeted sales leads for your product/service, reach out to us at GrowthOK
