Inbound Marketing Meaning and History
Posted: Mon Apr 21, 2025 5:17 am
The term inbound literally means “incoming”. And in fact it is a type of marketing that manages potential customers who are attracted to the brand and not vice versa (outbound), when it is the brand that does everything to get noticed by the customer to the point of becoming almost intrusive.
The term was coined by HubSpot in 2005, an American company that produces inbound marketing software. This company defines inbound marketing as permission marketing, “focused on creating quality content that naturally attracts people to your company. By aligning the content you publish with the customer’s interests, it is natural to attract inbound traffic.”
Economist Peter Drucker said: “There will always, one might assume, be a need to sell. But the purpose of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The purpose of marketing is to know and understand the customer philippines email list so well that the product and service adapt to him and sell themselves.”
And it was Druker himself who cited several examples of inbound marketing that demonstrate that this strategy has roots as far back as the first decades of the 19th century.
In the late 1800s, for example, Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck published the world's first mail-order catalog, which quickly grew from 80 to over 300 pages, reaching millions of potential customers.
sears inbound marketingsears inbound marketing2
Sears' strategy was very simple: customer first, using this priority scale:
listening to the customer;
adaptation of advertising language;
offering services for the benefit and protection of the customer.
Listening to the client consisted of orienting oneself towards his desires, worries, anxieties and urgencies.
The advertising language is simple and direct, suitable for housewives, simple people, farmers with large families, in short, small towns in the Midwest.
The term was coined by HubSpot in 2005, an American company that produces inbound marketing software. This company defines inbound marketing as permission marketing, “focused on creating quality content that naturally attracts people to your company. By aligning the content you publish with the customer’s interests, it is natural to attract inbound traffic.”
Economist Peter Drucker said: “There will always, one might assume, be a need to sell. But the purpose of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The purpose of marketing is to know and understand the customer philippines email list so well that the product and service adapt to him and sell themselves.”
And it was Druker himself who cited several examples of inbound marketing that demonstrate that this strategy has roots as far back as the first decades of the 19th century.
In the late 1800s, for example, Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck published the world's first mail-order catalog, which quickly grew from 80 to over 300 pages, reaching millions of potential customers.
sears inbound marketingsears inbound marketing2
Sears' strategy was very simple: customer first, using this priority scale:
listening to the customer;
adaptation of advertising language;
offering services for the benefit and protection of the customer.
Listening to the client consisted of orienting oneself towards his desires, worries, anxieties and urgencies.
The advertising language is simple and direct, suitable for housewives, simple people, farmers with large families, in short, small towns in the Midwest.