The Daily Omnivore

Inbound marketing is promoting a company through blogs, podcasts, video, eBooks, electronic newsletters, whitepapers, SEO (search engine optimization), physical products, social media marketing, and other forms of content marketing which serve to attract customers through the different stages of the purchase funnel. In contrast, buying attention (marketing stunts), cold-calling, direct paper mail, radio, TV advertisements, sales flyers, spam, telemarketing, and traditional advertising are considered ‘outbound marketing.’

Inbound marketing refers to marketing activities that bring visitors in, rather than marketers having to go out to get prospects’ attention. Inbound marketing earns the attention of customers, makes the company easy to be found, and draws customers to the website by producing interesting content. Many companies are now realizing that their technical documentation, often considered a ‘necessary evil,’ is authoritative, trustworthy content that can be their most effective inbound marketing channel, generating more than half of overall site traffic and over half of lead generation.

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Earned media refers to publicity gained through promotional efforts other than advertising, as opposed to ‘paid media,’ which refers to publicity gained through advertising. There are many types of media available to online marketers and fit into the broad categories. Owned media is defined as communication channels that are within one’s control, such as websites, blogs, or email.  Paid media refers mostly to traditional advertising. Earned media, on the other hand, is generated when content receives recognition and a following outside of traditional paid advertising, through communication channels such as social media and word of mouth.

A Nielsen study in 2013 found that earned media (also described in the report as ‘word-of-mouth’) is the most trusted source of information in all countries it surveyed worldwide. It also found that earned media is the channel most likely to stimulate the consumer to action. Other authorities make the distinction between online and offline earned media / word-of-mouth, and have shown that offline word-of-mouth has been found to be more effective than online word-of-mouth.

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The study of the history of marketing as an academic field emerged only recently with the publication of ‘The History of Marketing Thought’ by Robert Bartels in 1976. Broadly defined marketing is any activity that connects producers with consumers, which was previously considered a subtopic of economics. Wroe Alderson’s book, ‘Marketing Behavior and Executive Action’ (1957) is also considered a break-point in the history of marketing thought. After Alderson, marketing began to incorporate other fields of knowledge besides economics, notably behavioral science, developing into a multidisciplinary field.

Marketing historian Jagdish Shethhave identified three schools of marketing: Managerial (systematized marketing emerged during the late 1950s and became arguably the predominant and most influential school of thought in the field), Consumer/Buyer Behavior (the use of behavioral science to market goods and services was popularized in the second half of the twentieth century), and Social Exchange (recently, ‘exchange’ has been forwarded as the fundamental concept of marketing).

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