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Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing (Part 1)

The Internet has fundamentally changed the way people find, discover, share, shop, and connect with each other. The Internet has evened the playing field when it comes to access to information. Whether you live in a small town like Kelowna or a big city like Vancouver, your access to information is the same. In the U.S. over 3/4 of adults are online and these people are spending ever-increasing amounts of time online.

The Internet has become pervasive to everything we do.  From communicating with each other to researching what movies are on and where to paying our bills and taking online classes.

All of this access to information means that the average person in Kelowna today is inundated with more than 2000 marketing interruptions per day. This has caused us to become more selective about what information we consume.  We have become more and more creative at blocking marketers efforts to get to us, whether it is called id, spam filtering or Personal Video Recorders. Instead consumers prefer to pull the information they need when and where they want it rather than waiting for it to arrive in a timely way.

These consumer habits have resulted in the reduced effectiveness of traditional marketing efforts aimed at marketing to the masses of people trying to block them (outbound marketing). Instead smart marketers and marketing agencies are looking at how they can engage consumers that are actually interested in the products they sell and who approach the organization or business in some way (inbound marketing). In the second part of this article we'll look at what this means to Kelowna businesses.