Can I Use Advertising to Support Inbound Marketing?

Inbound Marketing: Attracting qualified leads to your company by creating content specifically for your target market. This form of marketing is focused on being helpful and relevant, rather than disruptive and invasive. 

PPC and Advertising: Purchasing ads and search engine placements to drive new visitors to your site. For example, targeting specific keywords with a PPC (pay-per-click) ad, or purchasing a sponsored blog post (native advertising).

Can I Use Advertising to Support Inbound Marketing?

Although advertising/PPC and inbound marketing reflect two very different marketing ideologies, they actually complement one another quite well. In fact, advertising and inbound marketing can be mutually supportive.

We advise the companies we work with to leverage both forms of marketing to achieve the best results. We’ve found that doing so is a terrific way to expand brand visibility and ensure success from marketing efforts.

With that said, here are the four ways we recommend using paid advertising to support inbound marketing:

1. Amplify your inbound marketing content. Advertising isn’t a magic bullet that can make up for lackluster or nonexistent content. It’s a strategy that works best to promote content that has already proven to be organically successful.

For example, let’s say your website is converting well due to a carefully implemented inbound marketing strategy. In this case, branching out into native advertising with sponsored blog posts or by targeting hyper-specific keywords would be a great way to reach new audiences and drive more traffic back to your site.

Another way to use paid advertising to amplify your inbound marketing success is though PPC ads. PPC allows you to target prospects by keyword, location, time of day, and other behavioral factors. It’s a worthwhile investment if your site is already performing well, because there’s a higher likelihood that your new prospects will convert.

2. Target high-level keywords. Pay-per-click search advertising makes it possible to target high-level keywords, thus making it easier for prospects to find your company.

The reality is that it’s very difficult to show up in an organic search result for a high-level keyword like “IT consultant” or “IT software”. The competition can be very serious for a startup or a company that lacks a solid SEO strategy and content foundation. PPC makes it so that when users search for those competitive keywords, they’re able to find your company.

By using PPC to target keywords, you can also speed up your research process for SEO. Adwords is a powerful research tool and should be employed on inbound marketing campaigns.

3. Generate leads. You can configure your PPC ads to drive traffic to gated content on your website. Once users arrive, they will be prompted to enter their contact information in order to gain access and download the content. This simple proposition is a powerful approach to generating qualified leads.

Once you’ve captured their information, you can then leverage the proven power of inbound marketing to nurture those leads with targeted content, offers, and marketing emails.

Inbound marketing strategy is critical to lead generation with paid search. Just because you are driving traffic to your website using relevant keywords does not mean they will convert. You have to create fantastic and attractive content to convert visitors via paid search. Likewise, you need a tested landing page strategy to gain conversions with paid search. Managing PPC campaigns is only part of the equation.

4. Test new content and landing pages. Paid advertising is an efficient way to test new initiatives. Rather than investing time and resources to see if a page will convert well organically, you can leverage a paid search campaign to drive a large number of users to your site. Once they arrive, your team can analyze the conversion and click-through rates; evaluate whether or not the content is working; and adjust as necessary.

Learn more:

• Using Inbound Marketing for IT Companies
• What is Marketing Automation?
• The purpose of a website landing page