Two Ways to Market Your Course: Interruption VS Inbound
This is basic concept not spoken about much but I see it costing course creators money and time every day.
Not getting this is almost like bloggers not understanding search intent.
Let’s begin
I like to think of them as push vs pull ways of marketing.
Interruption = Push (as you’re pushed into an offer you didn’t ask for)
- Leans to entertainment
Inbound = Pull (as you’re pulled into content based on own unique interests)
- Leans educational
Next time some fresh out of middle school marketer tells you to get on Tik Tok or Pinterest… ask them the following
“I can use any platform to get traffic but can it be sustainable and predictable?”
Additional factor to consider.
Do you want to do marketing or grow a channel?
These are completely different things
Growing a channel
- Post lots of content
- Thousands of one time updates
- Not evergreen
- Hope to reach audience
Marketing is getting your offer in front of potential buyers. The more they are looking for this offer… the better you conversions (and more sales).
How I rate each one of these methods & why
- Organic interruption marketing (fastest)
- Good for beginners without budget
- Difficult to get traction
- Can start for free
- Little control over who sees it
- Need to build a channel to get best results
- Typically lowest quality leads
- Paid interruption marketing (cheaper)
- Good for validating funnels if you have some budget
- Can choose audience
- Able to expand reach & get content in front of more people
- Some niches can be expensive
- Need to do song and dance to move prospect from entertained to persuaded
- Paid inbound marketing (more expensive)
- Great for proven offers before you invest money & time into evergreen content
- Can get real data of possible buyers per keyword or phrase
- Able to quickly see what keywords lead to most conversions
- Best keywords are most expensive
- ROI will highly rely on your ability to find hidden keywords gems
- Organic inbound marketing (slowest)
- Once you have a working funnel, time, money & know what converts
- You control it
- Its evergreen
- Have to nail down search intent, content production & getting links
- Might take 6-12 months to see any results
Example of how Interruption VS Inbound marketing works
You can have both on one platform & you have to adjust your marketing accordingly
Youtube: People can search for content, the platforms gives suggestions & can run ads
- If you’re focusing on search traffic you educate and answer question fast (especially now with youtube pushing very hard for its creators to make reels type 1-2 minute content)
- If you’re thinking of both your thumbnail or first 15 seconds should catch attention
- If you’re running video ads (you’re mostly entertaining)
- If you’re running image ads (you’re interrupting)
All depends on intent: is the person searching for an answer or killing time with dopamine hits.
