The Crisis of Inbound and the New Push Marketing

Why doesn’t Inbound work?

There are so many misconceptions surrounding Inbound Marketing that practitioners might find it hard to work with it properly. In addition, the philosophy has to evolve — a lot has changed since 2011, when the term was coined. The mobile revolution and appification of everything will or leave the inbound untouched. Have you noticed that websites these days resemble mobile apps more than anything else? They’re dynamic, designed for active users, and perform multiple tasks. Mobile marketing (push notifications, personalized offers delivered in real-time, 1-to-1 communication) inspire other areas of marketing and influence the whole paradigm of interacting with customers. We wanted to address these two issues: the myths around Inbound and its inevitable transformation.

Who do we write this for?

If you:

Are sceptical towards fads and buzzwords,
Are data-driven and expect tangible effects,
Look for actionable solutions,
Want to educate customers while selling to them, but engagement is not enough for you.

What will you learn?

What the differences between inbound and outbound and pull and push are.
Why inbound marketing doesn’t work the way you think it does.
Why you need a bit of push marketing to interrupt your customers from time to time.
How mobile devices have changed the way we use the internet and why marketers should care.
What the New Push philosophy is and how it leverages Big Data and personalization.
How to use push tools in practice to acquire more customers and increase sales.

Inbound vs. Outbound

Inbound and outbound are the two main philosophies of approaching the customer and two opposed models of marketing. The outbound approach is aggressive and oriented for quick results, so it pushes customers to buy. The inbound method on the other hand, stresses the importance of building trust, educating the customer and listening to them. In this paradigm, a marketer tries to follow their needs, and not force a fast buy. In other words, inbound could be summarized with the phrase “don’t disturb your customer!”

Inbound

Content: blogs, podcasts, ebooks, video, quizzes, edutainment, SEM.
An ad will appear then the user is looking for a product (for example, when they search for it),
An ad is tailored to customers interests and needs,
Interaction with user, two-way dialogue. Using social media,
Customer as a prosumer: researches looks for more information,
Customers are rational, know what they want and are prepared to the purchase, armed with data, they don’t trust salespeople,
Brand follows the customer,
We PULL user with incentive (like an interesting ebook),
Long-term aims, long-term relationship assumed, education.

Outbound

Ads in press, radio and TV, popups, recommendation engines, push notifications, telemarketing,
The ad interrupts the user when they are doing something unrelated to the product or shopping,
The ad is generic and perceived as an intruder, usually resulting in it the user ignoring it (banner blindness),
One-way relationship: marketers speak, customers listen,
Customers are lazy and wants the work to be done for them. They like comfort, convenience and optimization. Instead of doing things manually, they will try to find an app for it or a way to ‘hack’ the process,
The customer is impulsive, susceptible to suggestions and buys on a whim,
The brand precedes the customer,
We PUSH them to buy,
Short term aids concerning immediate sales is the goal.

The relationship between the two is often described as an evolution from the archaic push to the modern inbound.

In such a narrative, the history of marketing consists of 3 stages:

Before the web:

Back then, access to information was limited. Learning about the product required a lot of time and effort, so the customer considering the purchase relied totally on the salesperson. Salespeople had incomparable knowledge at their disposal, so they controlled the shopping process.

The dawn of online marketing, or the push age:

Marketers relished the power of the Internet. Advertising on forums or social media was free, banners on websites were much cheaper than ads in the press — and banners couldn’t be ignored. You could measure its efficiency! No wonder it ended in massive spamming, which is awful for customers and ineffective for marketers. Spraying ads blindly without targeting couldn’t deliver impressive results. Marketers tried to translate old-fashioned strategies to new media, where advertising was cheaper.

Customer rebellion, or the birth of inbound:

Finally, users couldn’t take the spam anymore. Do you remember having your inbox filled with tons of spam? Or motley websites, full of glittering banners and pop-ups that cover the text you want to read. Who could stand it? That’s how a new marketing philosophy was born. Seth Godin called it “permission marketing” and it was quickly labelled the marketing approach for the new millennium. Godin said that marketing actions must only be addressed to people who have agreed to it. In essence, emails can only be sent to individuals who opted in for newsletters. Banners should be displayed to a targeted group of users interested in a given product, and instead of attacking whoever comes along with the banner, you might consider creating a useful blog post published on a portal that attracts your potential customers. The idea of permission marketing gave rise to the concept of inbound: a belief that consumers that are empowered with the knowledge readily available online, are now in charge of the shopping process, and marketers should accompany them, assist them, educate them, but never force them to buy.

The idea of customers and marketers going hand in hand from purchase to purchase seems fantastic, but the reality doesn’t meet the idyllic picture that inbound evangelists depict.

Why inbound doesn’t work?

Companies that blog generate 77% leads and 97% more links than that business that don’t. One post a month is enough!

Generating a lead with inbound marketing is 62% cheaper when compared to outbound.

79% of companies that use content marketing see a greater ROI from inbound.

The content that doesn’t convert

You probably know these stats and many others that back up inbound, but you probably wonder why it doesn’t look like that in your company. You invest in content creation, produce a lot of high-quality
materials, share your knowledge, but see no substantial results. Even if people read your posts or watch your videos, they prefer to shop at your competitors.

Authenticity in social media

You try to engage in social media, show your company life and try to be as authentic as possible. You invest hours in crafting personal messages and adding a human touch to your marketing. However, your customers don’t appreciate that and prefer to share cat memes than your photos from your last company party. Sadly, the effort you put in social media doesn’t pay off.

Don’t disturb the customer!

After having become a Seth Godin psycho-fan, you don’t want to disturb the consumer or interrupt them in any way! Banners, popups or SMS messages have disappeared from your communication, and you realize that you’re still not growing. Your database, sales and traffic have all stopped. Do these all-pull techniques really work?

Investment in great content, SEO and social media can betray your expectations if you don’t include a couple of push technologies. In other words, interrupting your customer a bit is a must.

Why?

1. Mobile has changed the way we use the internet, the way we shop, learn and communicate. We multitask as our attention span gets shorter, we get more impatient and want things to be done as quickly as possible. Consequently, websites mimic the mechanics of mobile apps more and more.

2. Inbound and outbound tactics don’t exclude each other. Many marketers get trapped in the maze of fancy brand buzzwords, but most of them do nothing else except describe something that was already there. Inbound, despite being treated by some as a new religion, must be combined with push methods to succeed.

How mobile devices changed marketing?

Mobile has not only transformed the role of smartphones in our lives but also our approach to the web and our communication on it.

80% of internet users browse the web on their smartphones. Mobile content consumption has exceeded desktop consumption by a significant margin. For many consumers, mobile devices are
the most convenient way to access the internet.

It’s estimated that in the USA alone, m-commerce (mobile commerce, a sub-division of eCommerce) will grow from 54.6 million dollars in 2014 to 96.3.

eCommerce forecasts show a 9-11% reach for your smartphone to find the nearest service station, right? growth rate per year, while m-commerce develops more dynamically, at the 26-32% per year rate. 22 m-commerce markets around the globe will grow from 102 billion dollars to 291 billion in 2016.

71% of marketers believe that mobile is the key channel for their businesses.

68% of today’s marketers integrate mobile into their overall strategy.

58% of today’s marketing firms have a dedicated mobile team. Mobile apps are called the most significant marketing technology today.

Mobility, not just mobile

Mobile is no longer an addition to your regular marketing strategy. It’s how your consumers research, communicate and shop. For this reason, some specialists postulate the use of the term “mobility” instead of “mobile” to express the enormous shift in consumer behavior.

Mobility denotes a switch signified by:

Using mobile devices to search for information related to a situation that consumers find themselves in at the moment. When your car breaks, you reach for your smartphone to find the nearest service station, right?
Choosing apps over mobile browsers.
Expecting personalized offers tailored to the context.
Expecting 24/7 customer service.

“But what I mean is, mobile is no longer the side dish to your main course marketing strategy. It’s neither a nice to have nor a musthave — mobile marketing is all marketing, and we should be changing both our thinking and our vocabulary from mobile to mobility”.

Appification

You can clearly see that today’s consumers not only prefer smartphones to computers but also place apps above mobile browsers.

Active users

Apps don’t work the same way as websites do. That statement appeals not only to mobile apps but also to those you have on your laptop, desktop or your IoT smart device. Apps make life easier, and most customers use them before they visit the website —the app simply feels more convenient.

Appification

Raj Aggarwal writes that more and more websites resemble apps every day, and he calls that trend “appification”. We are moving from the idea of websites as containers to the concept of the web as a network of apps that help us solve problems, collect data to optimize processes and suggest to us the best solutions for the moment.

The appification trend means that consumers are getting used to that mode of using the web: they want to optimize completing tasks, not passive reading on websites. That’s why push logic, the logic of suggesting data-based solutions to customers before they realize they need them, is the future of the web, both for mobile apps and the desktop internet. The web will soon resemble a mobile app.

Big Reverse: Towards the Push Logic

5 or 10 years ago, the web operated on the pull principle: you opened your browser and typed in the question or product you wanted to research as if you were navigating a vast catalog, full of static records. You were responsible for spotting the right pieces.

Dries Buytaert claims that this is the reason why inbound marketing used to be so popular — it corresponded to the way people used the web. However, that era is coming to an end before our eyes. The new internet, the push-based web, is rising and will dominate in the next 10 years.

Why?

Companies collect more and more user data, which leads to the enhancement of predictive algorithms. Recommendation engines are now very powerful and drive substantial revenue for brands like Netflix, Amazon or Spotify. This trend will only continue to grow.
Consumers will want more relevant offers and messages tailored to their personal contexts. When brands leverage data to personalize ads, both these standards and customers’
expectations will increase. Apps (mobile, desktop, IoT) have become a part of our everyday lives, and push notifications develop a basic form of communication.

“The future of the web is „push-based”, meaning the web will be coming to us. In the next 10 years, we will witness a transformation from a pull-based web to a push-based web.”

Dries Buytaert

The Big Reverse: products and services find you by themselves

In other words, due to smart recommendations, products and services will find you before you even begin to search for them. The offer will precede the need!

Imagine that your plane is late. A hotel utilizing big data could use that opportunity to offer you a hotel room! When your running shoes wear off, you will get an offer for new ones, because of a small sensing device built in your sneakers. You will get a discount for a coffee exactly when you pass by your favorite coffee shop. Beacons for offline tracking and geolocation can do that. An app will remind you about servicing your computer —because it registers your drives.

Soon you won’t have to type anything in the search box and browse results. Apps will take that work off your shoulders that will analyze the relevant data to deliver to you what you need most at the moment.

Facebook or Google Now apply that methodology today: these platforms pick the most interesting news for you, depending on what you have read and liked before.

As a result, the Internet will stop being a catalog, and evolve into more of a virtual personal assistant.

Practical solutions. How New Push Marketing is reviving Inbound

Dynamic banners

Websites that operate in an app-like manner will be more dynamic and less static. What’s the difference?

Static websites

On these websites:

Every visitor sees the same content.
Visitors browse and consume the content.

Dynamic website

On the website:

Each visitor sees different, customized content, such as personalized product recommendations or suggested reading.
User actions shape the website they see. The content is modified in real-time, according to the indicated visitor’s needs.

Dynamic banners

How do you achieve this effect? One of the ways to make your site more personalized is by implementing dynamic banners. This type of banner is a creation that doesn’t have any fixed content, obut is a matrix that actualizes itself with relevant content for each visitor in real-time. As a result, person A will see different products or offers than person B.

What content is displayed to each user?

Interests (products previously viewed, added to cart, or bought),
Location,
Engagement level (scoring).

What could the advantages of this type of tool be? You not only increase the performance of your banners but also improve the quality of your users’ experience. They feel that the website is cut out for fulfilling their needs and like a personal assistant, puts forward carefully selected and valuable ideas for addressing their needs.

Efficient content

Marketers sometimes write amazing stuff, but a company blog may not be the best outlet for their suppressed creativity to burst out. Don’t ignore the artistic and substantive value of your production, but remember to incorporate the content you produce in the buyer’s journey and think about the function of the materials you generate. Another important issue is the distribution of content: your posts, ebooks, infographics and podcasts must reach the audience and encourage them to register, download, try or buy.

The most frequent content marketing mistakes
include:

Irregularity: When your readers realize that the blog died, they not only lose the motivation to go back, but they also stop trusting you.
The content doesn’t suit the audience: What do you base your editorial calendar on? Do you analyze what pieces were read the most, showed the highest conversion rates and/or generated a lot of buzz in social media? Do you use the feedback from other departments to learn what information your customers seek?
No target : What role does content play in your overall strategy?
No promotion: Some experts claim that good content doesn’t need promotion because its quality makes it highly shareable. If that were true, would you see so much clickbait in your feed? In reality, you have to put time and energy in delivering your content across many platforms, channels, media, forums and groups.

No Lead Gen tools: Content often serves the purpose of attracting new traffic. You pay for creating the piece, distribute it and it simply works —you see a fresh visitor on your website. They consume the post, and maybe even find it helpful, but what’s in it for you? They are about to leave the website and — no matter how great and informative your piece was — forget they ever visited. They haven’t bought anything, and you can’t be sure if they ever come back. They may probably read 5 to 10 equally good posts that day, so chances are poor that they will return to your blog on their own. How exactly do you profit from that post? What do you get from it?

Giving someone useful tips is very generous, but not profitable. When people visit your website, collect their contact data. Use contact forms, welcome mats or pop-ups to make sure they have plenty of opportunities to give you their email addresses so that you can stay in touch, educate them, and prepare them for a purchase decision.

Effective content

Your content can have various goals:

Attract new users.
Facilitate shopping decisions.
Build a relationship: problem-solving, responding to challenges, delivering ideas that connect users.

Tips

Don’t forget about Lead Gen: use contact forms, pop-ups, etc.
Set a precisely defined aim for your content.
Find your publishing pace (how many pieces can you provide per month?) and stick to it. Make a commitment to post regularly.
Create good, valuable pieces. Pieces that you would like to read yourself. Pieces you’re not ashamed of sharing. Don’t add to the sea of spam and clickbait that already plagues the internet.
When deprived of inspiration or time, recycle your existing content. Turn it into an infographic, update your stats, create a presentation and/or reorganize the information. Instead of rushing a new post, redesign something useful.
Try less obvious forms of content, like video, simple games or quizzes (see Bonobos Case Study).
Choose a KPI for content marketing. This might include traffic, social media buzz and/or the time spent on the website or sales. Precisely defined metrics will translate into bigger sales.
Don’t spam people.
Make time to distribute and promote your content
Apply Lead Nurturing (both in B2B and B2C). A user probably doesn’t know much about your company and product right after they subscribe, so begin with a cycle of educational messages that will introduce them to the world of the brand.
Tailor the content to the context.

Pop-ups

Pop-ups are only getting more and more popular. Not only are they one of the most prominent elements of web design, but thanks to Big Data they are undergoing an amazing metamorphosis to address users’ immediate needs. If you associate pop-ups with intrusive marketing from the 90s, please remember that:

Pop-ups operate on push logic, suggesting solutions to users before they recognize a problem

As recommendation vehicles, pop-ups increase sales.

Introducing pop-ups on your website boosts. Lead Generation by 1375%.

Personalizing contact forms on pop-ups increases the number of contacts generated by 45%.

Armando Roggio, a Practical eCommerce expert, calls pop-ups one of the hottest web design trends of 2016.

Pop-ups are another symptom of ongoing appification
wherein the website interacts with users, instead of just waiting patiently for them to browse. On the contrary, it actively advises and assists visitors.

Web push

Websites are becoming similar to apps not just on the conceptual level, but also regarding design and some specific solutions. A prominent example of this is ‘web push.

How does it work?

When you visit a website that implements this type of solution, it will ask you if you want to get notifications. If you agree, the website will send you them even when you have your web browser closed. A small window will appear on your desktop (this also applies to mobile devices).

Who uses that?
Many websites utilize the power of web push, including:

Facebook,
eBay,
Pinterest,
Vice News.

How can we use this tool?

Employ it to deliver time-sensitive,
Write in a concise manner: 120 characters per message,
Use social proof to increase efficiency,
Personalize web push notifications!
Track their performance (CTR).

Serious mobile marketing

85% of smartphone users say that the device is essential in their everyday lives.

Today, consumers spend 65% more of their times in apps than they did only 2 years ago. Interestingly and simultaneously, the amount of apps the average person uses has increased by only 3.5%. This indicates that we are more loyal to fewer apps and prefer to use the ones we trust more heavily than to have our devices cluttered with hundreds of apps.

Metrics for mobile marketing

Marketers observe a higher efficiency of campaigns that are integrated with mobile channels (this applies to both B2B and B2C). However, to seriously get into mobile marketing, you must set clear targets and target metrics, and be sure that you have the tools to track your chosen KPIs.

Your metrics might include:

Website traffic or from app
Conversions
The number of leads generated
The number of interactions

Tools: Mobile Marketing Automation

Apart from your set KPIs, you also need technology to collect customer data and personalize messages. To do this effectively, we require Mobile Marketing Automation (APPmanago, for example).

Mobile Marketing Automation provides:

Analytics of user in-app behavior.
Analytics of other apps installed on the device.
The ability to personalize messages and push notifications (user segmentation, 1-on-1 communication).
Intelligence exchange between the Mobile Marketing Automation platform and traditional, desktop Marketing Automation (that way you get enrich your customer profiles by combining data from various resources).
Automation of mobile marketing.

What’s the essential mobile marketing feature? It’s push notifications that express new marketing logic entirely. Pushes are fast, refer to non-specific context and are made to work instantly.

Push notifications

Their effectiveness will amaze you, but only under the following conditions:

Notifications are personalized and match users’ profiles.
They are tailored to the right context. You can deliver them according to the user’s location, habits, time and their immediate needs.
Are sent in a 1-to-1 mode. The “Spray and pray” approach commonly leads to catastrophe.
Are only sent to users who have agreed to receive them.
Contain valuable information
You customize not only the timing and the content, but also the frequency of notifications. Obviously, more engaged users should get more notifications than less committed ones.
Precede consumers’ expectations. Thanks to Big Data and recommendation engines, we can predict what products or services will be most relevant or attractive to particular users.

Push notifications in numbers:

The engagement of users who have pushes turned on is 88% higher when compared to users who turned notifications off.
80% of people who opted in for push notifications are satisfied with what they get.
60% of users opt out from push notifications. The reason? Not the message overload, but weak customization.

This is how the all online communication will look like in 10 years or less.

Recommendation engines

Recommendation engines act on the following principle:
Know what your customers want before they do, and offer it. We will explain how this works using the example of the SALESmanago Copernicus – Machine Learning & AI.

How SALESmanago Copernicus – Machine Learning & AI operates:

Firstly, it provides insight into customer purchase history and buyer’s journey,
analyzes the way products correlate in categories,
allows for highly engaging and eye-catching offers to be delivered to individual customers.

Finding patterns

Analysis is conducted not only for individual users, but also for the whole base, globally. That way, the system can identify patterns in customer behavior and link products that customers view or buy together. In other words, the module recognizes that consumers who bought product A, also bought product B, so a new user viewing product A on the website, will automatically have product B suggested to them. Additionally, we can learn which products are most popular globally and in specific categories.

Perfectly tailored recommendations

A recipe for a perfect recommendation algorithm? Take 2 types of data:

On an individual user: interests, behavior, previous purchases, products and categories viewed.
Regarding the whole base: which products are most popular and which are considered and bought together.

After that, you can turn that data into personalized messages across all channels, such as:

Emails,
Dynamic banners,
Pop-ups,
Push notifications.

Recommendation engines are great examples of new push logic, where the brand precedes your customers’ needs, but the message is not perceived as intrusive because it has been carefully personalized.

Conclusion

Don’t believe that good content doesn’t need promotion. It does. Be sure that inbound is PART of your strategy, but not the whole strategy.
Invest in mobile (especially in in-app marketing, Mobile Marketing Automation and precise KPIs to measure the performance of particular actions).
Introduce push solutions: notifications, pop-ups, but primarily in 1-on-1 mode.
If you work in eCommerce, apply recommendation engines.
Websites are starting to resemble apps. Get more dynamic and interactive with yours.
Use marketing technology that allows you to:

Collect and integrate data from many sources,
Personalize messages based on rich customer profiles,
Use mobile-desktop synergy,
Personalize dynamic banners, pop-ups, push notifications and recommendation engines.