Inbound Marketing, Does it Completely Replace Traditional Offline Marketing?

POSTED IN Blog | TAGS : business, inbound marketing, marketing, social media
20.06.2009

Let me start off by saying that I completely subscribe to inbound marketing. I understand that the way people make purchasing decisions has shifted because of search engines, social media, online communities, etc. It is important that people are able to find you and that you interact with those potential and existing customers on a more personal level. However, I don’t think that inbound marketing completely replaces traditional offline marketing.

Here’s an example. My company uses tools from HubSpot, a leading inbound marketing company, in our marketing efforts.  It’s a great tool and they are a great company. However, I would likely have never discovered HubSpot had they not had a table at an AMA conference I was attending. Granted, they didn’t just set up a table and wait for the attendees to talk to them. They provided each attendee with a grade from their Website Grader tool, which was a great way to get us interested in their product. Nevertheless, if they hadn’t exhibited at the conference, I don’t think I would have ever learned about their company and started using their tools. We were happy with the way we were doing things already.

Although I think inbound marketing is very important, I think that traditional marketing can still be effective. We’ve had very good response from our social media and inbound marketing efforts, but we’ve also had very successful advertising campaigns and tradeshows. I’m sure that most people understand this, however, every presentation or pitch that I see on inbound marketing seems to discredit all traditional forms of marketing. Traditional offline marketing is not ineffective; marketers just have to be smarter and more creative with these methods. That’s how I see it anyway, what do you think?