While business choose between focusing on winning the long or short keywords game.

The canned answer usually goes something like this: Why try to buy customers with traditional “outbound marketing” when consumers aren’t even paying attention?

45% of direct mail never gets opened, 200 million people are on the national Do Not Call Registry 85% of people fast forward through commercials 84% of 25­–35 year-olds are likely to skip a website with excessive advertising. That makes it more likely for you to win a lottery than get a sale out of a banner ad.

While that’s a good enough answer with compelling stats that back it up, but there’s more to inbound marketing than this. In this post, I’m going to give you my insights. I’m not just going to harp on how outbound is reaching increasingly smaller audiences and how inbound is more engaging and more accessible — although both statements are very true.

I’m going to speak from experiences that are my own.

And in the spirit of full disclosure: Vital is a Hubspot Partner Agency, so I could simply repurpose Hubspot’s experiences and playbook like most partner agencies. But we also consider ourselves a Moz shop, with a Moz Pro account, and we develop using the WordPress CMS with the Yoast SEO plug-in (not the Hubspot COS), which means we have some independent experiences and additional tools that play into our perspective.

Inbound marketing — if Hubspot didn’t coin “inbound marketing,” they have certainly spent a lot of time and money branding it as their own invention. Here’s how they define it: “Inbound marketing focuses on creating great content that can attract people toward your company and product, where they naturally want to be. By aligning the content you publish with your customer’s interests, you naturally attract inbound traffic that you can then convert, close, and delight over time.” This is a decent definition, if somewhat oversimplified.

The term “inbound” is actually quite nouvelle. It took Vital a while to accept the term “inbound” to describe what we were doing with our clients. At the very start we referred to it as “SEO” and “content marketing,” and although while not exactly a Hubspot partner agency, we were reading their content. We knew a term was needed for the paradigm shift we were seeing in online marketing, because SEO had fundamentally changed and digital marketing was becoming increasingly more disparate from traditional marketing. Digital distribution made analysis highly measurable and results-oriented, showing that inbound marketing was X times more successful than outbound marketing, when done properly.