Are you focused on your inbound marketing as the key to reaching your target audience? A lot of marketers today see inbound as the gold standard, often at the expense of other channels like PPC. But the truth is that there’s a huge opportunity for crossover and collaboration between these two channels; when done right, it’s a surefire way to boost your campaign results. Here are 5 ways to combine inbound and PPC for all-around better performance.
Keyword Collaboration
Marketing teams spend countless hours on keyword research, both at the beginning of a campaign and as an on-going process for website optimization. Inbound marketing provides almost real-time data on the effectiveness of keywords. Tracking the social media graph yields instant insight into target audience response to a piece of content. Think of this as crowd-sourcing your keyword research, another tool to complement more traditional methods. Once you’ve identified your most effective keywords on the organic side, a paid search campaign can amplify its success and increase exposure. On the other hand, keywords that aren’t as effective organically, can be targeted with PPC campaigns to expose your campaigns to a new audience.
Remarketing
Even if you are cautious about using traditional paid search and display marketing campaigns, you should have no doubt about using remarketing campaigns. These campaigns can show paid text and image ads to the same audience that has been exposed to your inbound marketing campaign. This is a great way to bring those visitors back to your site who have not converted before. In fact, a study conducted by Criteo found that visitors who experience remarketing ads are 70% more likely to convert into customers. You can target visitors with different, but complimentary, offers and assets giving you another opportunity at converting them into leads. Remarketing is also a great way of keeping your brand in front of users who have previously shown an interest in your product or service.
Boost Your Branding
Inbound marketers are intimately familiar with buyer personas; they analyze demographic data, Facebook Insights, Twitter dashboards, and Google Analytics to create targeted content that appeals to your customers. They have a unique understanding of your brand’s voice and story. Aligning these insights with your paid efforts helps ensure a consistent message across all channels that nurtures prospects and creates a sense of trust and familiarity with your brand. This boosts conversions and increases overall campaign performance.
Share Assets Between Paid Search and Inbound
The renewed focus on Inbound Marketing ROI means that teams are constantly strapped of resources for developing assets for use in campaigns. This is where PPC and organic really support one another. By coordinating the efforts between these two channels, assets such as design elements can be repurposed in landing pages and banner ads, and creative assets such as white pages, eBooks, checklists and how-to guides can serve as a focal point in paid campaigns. There is also the additional benefit of streamlining the planning process for your PPC campaigns; you can stretch your ad budget when you coordinate campaign planning between these two channels.
Leverage Your Landing Pages
Your inbound marketing campaigns use well designed and optimized landing pages, and chances are good they’ve been thoroughly tested and tweaked to deliver excellent opportunities for engagement. Leveraging these powerful assets in your paid search, display and remarketing campaigns makes good sense from a financial and creative perspective. Why not extend the reach and effectiveness of your inbound landing pages by incorporating them in your paid channel?
Inbound marketing is definitely the main pillar of your online marketing strategy, but you can boost its effectiveness and reach with a coordinated PPC strategy.