‘What’s with all the categorizations of Marketing? Do we have to make it any more complicated than what it is?’ You might think. And I’m afraid to say, ‘Yes, we do.’
Marketing is an art that would lose its touch gradually if innovation was not an integral part of its progress. Therefore, we always see new terms and techniques arising in this field and this is actually what makes it work.
We are living in an era when every business, big or small, is aiming to attract as much attention and gain as much audience as it can. We are living in the era of Information and in this era, in order to be successful in sales, having marketing knowledge is a must.
Innovation, being an essential part of marketing, has led to the development of a multitude of categories and classes in this field, like the famous four Ps that we talked about in our last post, Offline vs. Online marketing, Network marketing, Direct marketing and many other types, two of which are Inbound and Outbound marketing.
Outbound marketing refers to any kind of marketing where a company initiates a conversation and sends its message out to an audience, mostly in the form of advertising, to persuade the audience to buy a product or service. However, customers are smart. Whenever in the history of mankind a retailer attempted to manipulate the decision of a customer explicitly, the customer eventually realized the tricks that were pulled on him and did not get enticed by that method anymore.
This has continued all through history and has made many marketing attempts ineffective over time. In recent decades, with the advent of online advertisement, people are getting more and more immune to these forms of outbound marketing and less and less prone to be influenced by them.
On a subconscious level, online advertisement gives rise to a type of inattention called ad-blindness or banner-blindness that causes the audience not to notice a banner or an ad on a webpage. Even if the ad is specious enough to not let the users ignore it, they will seek help from ad-blocker services, finding their way out of unwanted information stalking them wherever they go.
With the massive amount of data constantly bombarded toward the internet users, striving to gain as much publicity as possible, the competition is fierce. In this ecosystem, a need for a less aggressive, yet more impressive marketing approach was felt and it was answered by ‘Inbound Marketing’ which was distinct from ‘Outbound Marketing’ by its more passive yet engaging approach. It consists of all the activities that increase awareness around a business and make it more appealing to potential customers.
Examples of inbound marketing approaches are Social Media Marketing(SMM), Search Engine Optimization(SEO), Content Marketing, Video Marketing, etc. Plenty of effective and helpful platforms specialize in each or a few of these approaches, helping a wide range of users in performing them. But this method, in and of itself, for small budget local businesses, is not enough. First, because the technicalities are too much for a layman business owner and second, it cannot create a fast-growing awareness around a newly developing business.
Take SEO as an example. It is a powerful approach to increase traffic for a website, by targeting the keywords that are most searched for in search engines. Using the right techniques, one can help a website to come up with a set of keywords that most probably convert the audience into buyers. However, it doesn’t work that easily. Even in a newly formed business that applies all the right SEO techniques to raise its rank for a specific keyword, when there are already powerful competitors in the field, chances of increasing awareness around the business are way too low to rely upon.
That’s why, that even though inbound marketing is a powerful approach in helping businesses grow, by itself it is not answering the marketing needs of all the spectra of new and existing businesses. Despite all the issues these methods have had, both of them had separately proved to be beneficial to promoting businesses over time, but why not make them more efficient and get the best out of them when we can?
Integrating The Best Approaches In One Platform
For this reason, we introduce a combination of the inbound and outbound marketing approach for local businesses. We have designed a platform that even an inexperienced shop owner can work with and use it to his benefit. Our power lies in our simple solution designed for both new and existing small businesses.
With Weriz, a combination of the Inbound and Outbound marketing approaches is possible and business owners can benefit from the best practices of marketing in order to promote themselves in an efficient way.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning come to our aid when it comes to the issues that outbound marketing raises. These technologies make it possible to deliver relevant content to the users interested in them, clearing out the intrusiveness of advertisement.
Okay, enough about the business side of Weriz. We know that businesses can only benefit from Weriz if their local communities are willing to participate in it and to make that happen, we have spent a lot of careful effort into designing the user side of the platform, to make it attractive for users as well, so that both parties enjoy their experience with Weriz and get the results that enhance their lives the most.
In our next blog post you will read about how users receive a service from Weriz that has diligently considered their needs and interests while respecting their privacy.
