• Inbound marketing

Inbound marketing includes all marketing methods that attract a potential audience. It therefore means engaging your audience rather than pushing your brand, campaign, message or products out to potential customers. For this reason, it is often referred to as ‘pull’ marketing, as it pulls the customer into your brand or sales proposition. Inbound marketing is often seen as a more authentic and organic way of interacting with customers and acquiring customers. This is because it does not focus on repetitive calls to action and generic marketing messages.

• Outbound marketing

Outbound marketing refers to marketing tactics in which a business actively seeks to approach and entice potential customers. This is often done with a mass group that has not been specifically selected or researched. It is therefore sometimes classified within marketing as a ‘scattered’ approach. However, this does not mean that it is a bad type of marketing, as strategic, top-funnel, outbound marketing can help reach people who can then be further refined through retargeting using inbound marketing methods. Remember, however, that outbound marketing alone often does not yield a high return on investment.

You can probably think of brands that are known for regularly using purely outbound marketing methods – perhaps you’ve received the same flyer in your inbox too many times, seen the billboards, ads that pop up during a game or internet search. Without the addition of some strong and genuine inbound marketing methods, you could be missing out on a lot of opportunities and business with these tools.

Training exercise: participants will work in small groups to formulate inbound and outbound marketing messages on given topics for given groups, chosen at random. This includes circular e-mails, billboards, TV advertising, etc., as well as guerrilla marketing campaigns, PPC campaigns. Participants will present their ideas and the rest of the group will say what they think are the pros and cons of the idea, what other groups might be more effective or what changes could be made to make it more effective.

Planning and calculating the return on marketing costs

As in all business activities, it is important to maintain strict financial discipline and to base your actions on plans and expectations. In marketing campaigns, it is easy to generate losses by making a rash decision, as you can carry on with campaigns that do not pay off.

All project elements and investments should be preceded by a budgeting process, and this is of course true for marketing activities as well. By understanding how to prepare a marketing budget, we can help our business make the most of its investment and revenue. In start-up businesses, marketing processes can be much more complex than in traditional businesses, due to new technologies and frequent changes in internal regulations and pricing of multinational service providers.

The expected composition of marketing costs:

• team, labor
• advertising budget
• content production (including video and audio editing)
• software, subscriptions
• website development, maintenance
• other costs of social marketing campaigns

The ROI (return on investment) calculation – a financial concept with many uses – can be used to calculate the return on your online marketing campaigns. In this case, the ROI is the ratio of the cost of advertising to the profit generated by conversions (such as sales or leads). ROI can be considered in terms of immediate return (direct sales impact) and longer-term return.

Outline the user flow

Whether you are a PPC professional, a marketing strategist or a social media manager, the first step is the same at all levels: sketch the entire user flow with the client to see how many platforms the prospect is coming from and how this will meaningfully determine the cost, how diversified the communication is. How the customer journey unfolds until they reach the point of purchase.

Training exercise. The plan should include what inbound and outbound elements they plan to use, what forms this will take – written, video, image, audio – and how they can combine them effectively.

Training exercise: The groups are working out a marketing campaign with cost planning and introduce their plan for the group as a last test of their project plan. The rest of the team observes the process and gives feedback at the end. .

Tools for the exercise: Flip-Chart, Post-it – 4 colors, Blue Tech, Markers