Why Your Inbound Marketing Strategy Should Include Both Free and Paid Digital Marketing Tactics.
According to HubSpot’s 2015 report on inbound marketing, 75 percent of businesses have inbound marketing as the core of their marketing strategy. In fact, a lot of these are small businesses with a close-knit group of talented individuals at their disposal. The effectiveness of inbound marketing has been proven time and again in fetching higher ROIs.
If you are of the opinion that inbound marketing constitutes blogging, social media marketing and other free tactics, here is news for you: CPC and CPA are equally part of inbound marketing. CPC, such Google AdWords or Bing ads, is intent-based marketing. Your relevant ad shows up when a user actively seeks products or services similar to yours. That’s what inbound marketing is: giving people an answer to questions when they looking for one. In fact, even Facebook ads can be an inbound marketing tactic, with precise targeting and retargeting.
If you have been ignoring paid efforts in your inbound marketing strategy thus far, here is why they should be part of a healthy mix of free and paid tactics.
Expand Your Reach Quickly
So you have created long-form content on your blog, which ultimately takes readers to a landing page in order to subscribe to your newsletter, or simply buy a free trial. While you can always use social media and SEO to promote the content, the problem is, both the strategies take time. Setting up a Google AdWords campaign on the other hand, with keywords related to the blog, can be a quick way to find leads and boost conversions for a small business. But, on the other hand, if you are in the agency or publisher space, this may imply that you are managing hundreds, even thousands of paid campaigns- luckily for you MatchCraft has a scalable, flexible and data driven solution for this in our AdVantage platform.
Mine Data for Better SEO
Optimized SEO means identifying keywords that fetch you optimal value and maintaining top ranking for those keywords. However, it’s easier said than done, especially with new keywords that you think might bring you value. For instance, let’s say you are a digital agency. You want to know, between “web development” and “web design,” what’s the better keyword to rank for?
You could set up an A/B test CPC campaign for both the keywords and let it run for at least 250 to 300 clicks. Compare the results for conversion rates, impressions, and click-through rates to decide between the two. Even if a keyword is fetching good conversions at a premium price, it could still be useful in your SEO strategy.
Improve Your Content Strategy
CPC data can always be used to refine your content strategy, be it Facebook ads or Google AdWords. You could use AdWords data to analyze keywords that fetch maximum impressions and CTRs. You could then create content around these keywords to boost your inbound marketing efforts. In fact, you could also identify keywords that aren’t performing very well but are important to your business. You could then formulate a content strategy to complement SEO efforts for those keywords.
The same goes for Facebook advertising. Analyze feedback on your posts to learn the kind of content that resonates best with your audience. Once you know what works, keep doing more of it. For example, if infographics get the most shares and likes on your page, you know your design and research team have its task defined.
Follow Your Audience
An average customer makes almost 70 percent of his or her buying journey online. That’s an opportunity for you to educate him or her with great content, and push relevant offers in order to make a purchase. Google’s Remarketing and Facebook’s Retargeting are paid inbound marketing tactics that allow you to pursue customers who are further down the sales funnel.
Essentially, inbound marketing that’s a mix of free and paid tactics is likely to increase your conversion rates, given the 360-degree approach involved.
Looking for a scalable solution to your paid inbound tactics? Schedule a demo of MatchCraft’s AdVantage Platform and test out our powerful taxonomy, bidding algorithms and conversion driving paid search capabilities.