How are inbound and outbound marketing evolving together in 2025?

When HubSpot was founded in 2006, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah introduced the term "inbound marketing" to describe their decisive break from a traditional, interruptive advertising approach. But how has the inbound methodology evolved to deal with the new distractions facing digital audiences in 2025?

As far as Hubspot was concerned, outbound as lead generator was a busted flush.

Instead of spending money shouting at prospects through print, direct mail, and display advertising, Hubspot showed how to harness the growing power of search, blogging, social media, and email to organically bring right-fit prospects to websites and businesses.

HubSpot's original definition of inbound

This was their definition of inbound back then:

“Inbound marketing is a business methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them.”

Inbound was all about bringing customers to the top of the AIDA funnel and turning them into buyers through effective nurturing.

But since then, the game has changed. The job of managing buyer experiences digitally now stretches way beyond top-of-funnel and initial conversion activities.

HubSpot's definition of inbound has changed

As the opportunities in the digital marketplace grew, so did Hubspot’s product offering and definition of inbound. 

The online retail and entertainment experiences of the 2010s, like Netflix and Amazon, had set sky-high expectations for customer experience and service. 

HubSpot realised that if B2B clients learned these lessons from B2C, they too could accelerate sluggish sales cycles and scale CRM operations - transforming themselves from mere suppliers into value-adding partners for their customers.  In doing so, they could turn customers into advocates and keep their brands growing organically.

Introducing the flywheel model to replace the traditional sales funnel was revolutionary in the B2B world. Content was part of that new cycle of education, service, and delight that could continually open up new growth opportunities for customers and brands alike.

These days, Hubspot have a new definition of inbound:

“The inbound methodology is the strategic method of growing your organisation by building meaningful, lasting relationships with consumers, prospects, and customers.” 

Outbound executed in an 'inboundy way'

Expanding the definition of ‘inbound marketing’ to include the orchestration of end-to-end customer experience shows how holistic Hubspot’s view of their role has become.

As Robert Rose of the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) points out a lot of these recommended elements are outbound tactics executed in an increasingly ‘inboundy way'. 

With its digital approach, the platform now aims to support a three-stage process of Attraction, Engagement, and Delight - bringing many elements of a traditional ‘outbound’ approach into play across the buyer’s journey to find and convert prospects..

Why is change more pressing than ever in the inbound world?

Traditional inbound techniques are struggling to cut through for various reasons:

• Content saturation: AI-generated content has flooded the digital space - homogenised content is everywhere and increasingly easy to ignore
• Zero-click searches: AI-powered search engines now provide comprehensive answers without users needing to click through to websites
• SEO disruption: Traditional SEO strategies are becoming less effective as search algorithms evolve

• The proliferation of B2B social has disrupted the attention economy - eyeballs are being pulled away from our websites and conventional marketing

New research from the CMI shows inbound in stasis

The Content Marketing Institute's latest study into the state of the discipline in the B2B world, concludes that traditional content  marketing (with all its inbound energy) is finding it hard to deliver exceptional results.

Over half say their strategy is not very effective, or only moderately effective.

B2B inbound marketers embrace more outbound in 2025

But the most switched-on businesses are evolving their content targeting and distribution techniques to ensure  offerings remain visible to prospects and customers at key decision-making moments in their buying cycle. 

This entails using inbound and outbound efforts to target interactions that can ‘move the dial’ when it matters most.

Enter Account-Based marketing

In sectors like manufacturing with long sales cycles and hard-to-reach audiences, companies are now looking to pre-qualify and target accounts that they know will be a good fit for their services. 

With a mix of outbound and inbound techniques - they are building 'account-based experiences' for prospects and customers that are more orchestrated than ‘organic’.

With detailed profiles of target accounts, as well as the tastes and habits of the individuals you want to engage with, you can become highly deliberate in your marketing activity.

Using intent data to target and nurture prospects

By combining your own analytics with intent data from the likes of ZoomInfo, companies can drill down on the prospects, and customers are most likely to convert and score them appropriately in your CRM.

The detail of intent data you can extract will help you prioritise resources and create the bespoke content and campaign that will resonate for each target account as they navigate their sales cycle. 

With this intelligence you can target the delivery of outbound email promotions, advertising activity, downloadable offerings and more.

Building highly personalised campaigns and content

The inbound elements of marketing are now more important than ever - building helpful content and interactions that speak to your buyer's needs is still hugely valuable. These might include:

• Video (both long and short-form)
• Interactive content 
• Podcasts and webinars
• Digital and in-person events

In the world of ABM, these content offerings can be promoted sliced, diced, repurposed and personalised throughout the buying cycle to speak directly to your target accounts.

The content you create can be delivered and promoted to your target accounts in ‘outbound ways’,  but with high levels of precision and intent.

Account-Based advertising: targeting and re-targeting

Paid advertising was once an anathema to the inbound B2B methodology - but these outbound techniques can be deployed in a much more personalised way to draw customer’s attention to your offerings. 

Using data analytics, it can deliver hyper-personalised ads across platforms like LinkedIn, Google, and , as well as targeted email campaigns. These ads are tailored to their online behaviour, appearing in environments and formats they prefer. This refined strategy increases brand visibility, strengthens engagement, and boosts the likelihood of conversions by resonating with their past interactions.

Account-based retargeting (ABR) re-engages decision-makers from target companies who previously interacted with your brand but didn’t convert.

MarTech for personalisation

B2B marketers can utilise their martech stacks more effectively for upselling and cross-selling. This involves delivering personalised updates and recommendations based on customer behaviour and preferences, at every stage of their post-sales life. 

Using customer service touch points to make content suggestions, suggest events to attend, new equipment demos to watch etc - can help you keep the sales wheels turning in an organic way.

Become a brand that is trusted and recognised

Use social to brand-build

Becoming more adept at social media and standing out as your ideal customers scroll their feeds is essential. Learning how to lever your social feeds to micro-blog in compelling ways will help you build a following that you can continue to educate and entertain, beyond the sales pitch.  

David Hieatt’s Micro-Blogging system - teaches a way of promoting and ‘selling’ your individual and corporate philosophy - that builds an audience who actively ‘tune in’ for your unique insight and expertise.

Create more brand-focused content

What are the original success stories that only your brand can tell? What are the unique ways in which they can be told to appeal to your target audience?  

As we build our content out to be consumed through different platforms from social to AI, they should carry our brand messaging more prominently and better prime our prospects and customers for conversion.  

Build multi-media content that can be served up as part of images and video packs on AI search results - and ensure the messages and insights but ensure you from your customers and success stories are prominently featured.

Nothing’s changing in B2B marketing - but everything has changed

As it becomes more difficult to be found in the digital world - highly targeted outbound tactics and strategies are becoming part and parcel of the inbound philosophy.  

Part of the process of 'becoming known' in your sector is now also, undeniably one of brand building.

As Robert Rose from the CMI put it in this article many years ago now:

“The job of marketing in today’s more expansive, multi-channel, digitally transformed world is to create customers AND create audiences that subscribe to your brand. Both can create wealth for the business.”

Modern marketers need to use all the tools at their disposal to ‘be there’ for prospects and customers in their professional lives.  They need to create a content strategy that speaks to an audience that is easily distracted and disloyal - unless they are given good reasons to be otherwise. 

Joe Pulizzi - co-host of This Old Marketing podcast with Robert  Rose, points out that this needs to be achieved by an open-minded and creative approach to the challenges of the modern market place:

“There is no black and white in marketing; it’s all gray. There are no silver bullets. Marketing objectives sometimes need to be solved with a combination of efforts, not by putting all your eggs in one basket.”