Are you thinking of using paid advertising to support and amplify your inbound marketing campaigns? You’re not alone. Many marketers are incorporating paid advertising into their inbound marketing strategies and using it to drive traffic to their highest quality content.

Successful inbound marketing is all about attracting your target audience at the right time in the right place, with the right content. You’ve got the quality content, but how do you get it in front of your target market when they need it most? By utilizing paid advertising, you can target your prospects precisely based on the keywords they searched for, their interests, or demographic information.

Below are 3 ways that you can use paid advertising to optimize your inbound marketing campaigns:

  1. Drive Traffic to Gated Content for More Leads

You’ve spent a lot of time creating a premium piece of content like a whitepaper or eBook, so don’t you want it to be seen by as many relevant people as possible? Using paid advertising to drive traffic to gated content on your landing page or website benefits both your visitors and your business: your visitor receives a quality piece of content on a subject that is relevant to them, and you get a new lead and possible content promoter. Make sure your landing page is optimized for conversions and include “social proof” features to make your visitors feel that they can trust you with their personal information.

  1. Use the Data to Refine Your Strategy

You can use data pulled from your paid advertising campaigns to help inform and bolster your inbound strategy, especially for SEO. Paid advertising provides you with measurable results more quickly than SEO, and so your paid advertising campaigns can be a good way to test the effectiveness of your SEO keywords. Analyze these key metrics:

  • This will inform you how popular your keywords are. A low number of impressions means that you should look for better quality keywords.
  • Click-through rate. This shows you how relevant your offer is to searchers. A low click-through rate is a sign that you may need to better align your keywords with your offer.
  • Conversion rate. This tells you how many people clicked your ad and also went on to complete the CTA. A low conversion rate is a sign that your keywords and CTA may not align.

Through this data you can identify the keywords driving the highest conversions in your paid campaign and alter your SEO strategy accordingly, ultimately leading to more successful inbound marketing campaigns.

  1. Use Remarketing to Reengage Organic Visitors

Use remarketing to reengage a visitor based on an interaction with your website or landing pages. As site visitors browse other sites across the internet, you can target them by placing ads for your content offers, giving them another opportunity to come back to your site.

You can remarket to anyone who has visited your site and even show targeted ads to visitors based on a specific page or set of pages that they’ve visited. Best practices for creating a remarketing ad include:

  • Segment your audience and personalize ads to their specific stage in the buyer’s journey
  • Ensure that your offer and ad copy are relevant and compelling to your individual audiences
  • Avoid ad overexposure by testing the frequency with which it appears

I hope these 3 tips for including paid advertising in your inbound strategy will get you jumpstarted and on the road to an even more successful inbound marketing campaign.