Although inbound marketing alone can optimize your search rankings and promote your brand presence, there are numerous benefits of advertising. Integrating paid advertising into your inbound strategy can quickly help you maximize your success. By utilizing paid ad campaigns alongside your inbound marketing techniques, you can successfully place your content in front of your target audience for improved visibility and engagement. Your target audience will have more opportunities to explore your website, blogs and other content types with the paid ads acting as key reminders.

To successfully pair your inbound marketing techniques with paid ad campaigns, you must take a smart approach to the management of your new dual digital marketing strategy. You can get started by utilizing this informative guide to learn how to use online paid ads to improve your inbound marketing success.

The Benefits of Advertising for Inbound Marketing

At its heart, paid advertising reaches your target audience to inform or remind them about your products and services. The reach and influence of paid ads directly supports the success of your inbound marketing campaigns by promoting your brand presence. With this multi-faceted digital marketing approach, your content and paid ads work together to advertise your products and services while boost brand loyalty and trust.

As you get started with inbound marketing, you may find that the process takes months before you start seeing any results. You can speed up this process by paying for the delivery of ads directly to your target audience. The ads can reach clients at any stage of the buyer’s funnel to support their journey from first contact with your company to closing the deal. As the ads drive visitors to your site, your content will support their buyer’s journey and help convert those leads into completed sales.

All About Inbound Marketing

Inbound content marketing strategies revolve around the creation of buyer personas to follow customers through every phase of the buyer’s journey. An effective inbound content marketing strategy helps position you as a thought leader in your industry, which in turn builds trust and loyalty. In addition, inbound marketing capitalizes on the utilization of search engine optimization, or SEO, techniques to increase organic traffic to your site and social media accounts.

With inbound marketing, you simply produce SEO content for your website, blog and other digital works to boost search rankings and engage your target audience. As your blog grows, and your content is shared across many platforms, your online brand presence will start to take a life of its own.

Until that happens, however, it is in your best interest to utilize all the digital marketing techniques you have at your disposal to achieve success in this realm. Paid ads are an amazing way to instantly drive traffic to your site to jumpstart your inbound content marketing success.

Advertising’s Role in Lead Generation

Paid ads have an incredible influence on the quality of all leads that come to the attention of your business. Approximately half of all potential customers who arrive at your site from paid ads are much more likely to complete their purchase, as compared to organic visitors.

Inbound content marketing casts a wider net that can bring in visitors who do not fit your target buyer personas. As a result, these individuals will usually visit the site before leaving without making a purchase. With paid ads, you can rest assured that your visitors match your target audience and are far enough down the sales pipeline to complete their purchase.

The sheer quality of the leads you receive from paid ads helps to optimize your expected return on investment, but only if you are using the right ads. Explore the different ad types and their purposes to choose the perfect paid ad platform for your business goals.

Types of Paid Ads That Work Best for Inbound Marketing

Although there are many different types of paid ads available, not all work optimally with inbound marketing techniques. Here are a few that do, so you can immediately start achieving your digital marketing goals.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

The pay per click, or PPC, ad model regularly positions your business in front of target audiences, but you only pay for click-throughs, not visibility alone. The PPC ads appear at the top of the search results when users input keywords that match the ones used for your ad campaigns. Research has shown that that these search engine advertisements have the power to increase brand awareness by a stunning 80 percent. These ads can help you cover more areas in a short period of time, as you work on creating SEO content that will have a similar effect. You can also use these ads to see how well specific long tail keywords help to promote site visitors and conversions.

Social Media

More than 2.5 billion people worldwide utilize social media daily, making this the perfect advertising venue for your business. The social media platforms offering paid advertisement opportunities include:

Facebook
YouTube
LinkedIn
Pinterest
Twitter
Instagram
Snapchat

You can pay to sponsor or promote content that allow you to reach the widest audience possible with each post. In your posts, you can promote brand loyalty and engagement by choosing to share images, videos and blogs with your target audience. To have the greatest impact, your promoted or sponsored content must speak to the pain points of your buyer personas – and position your products and services as the ideal solutions. And, since this ad format has plenty of space, you should include a call to action on your posts to encourage high click-through rates.

How to Select the Best Paid Ad Platforms

You must weigh your marketing goals to determine which paid ad platforms will offer the biggest benefits. You do have the option of utilizing all three options, if your budget allows, but just one will likely have enough impact to make a positive difference.

Look at how you will need to interact and manage each ad model to see which options will best fit into your current marketing plan. If you have a strong social media presence, or want to establish one, then social media advertisements may support your goals the most. Select just one social media platform at first, starting with the one with the most users in your target demographic.

With 73 percent of adults across all age ranges using YouTube and 68 percent on Facebook, these two social media platforms are a sure bet for companies in almost every industry. With a deeper look, however, you can really home in one your target audience simply by using their age range. If your target audience is in the 18 to 24-year-old range, for example, then you can benefit most from building your brand presence on Twitter, Snapchat or Instagram.

PPC ads can help you drive traffic to your site as you work on creating and posting SEO content on your blog. As you cover your most relevant SEO keywords in your educational and entertaining content, you can move onto other promising keywords in your PPC ad campaigns. Paid directly listings simply provide additional traffic to your site to help you create a strong following of people in your target audience. With great sharable content, you can fully take advantage of the new traffic from paid directory listings, especially if your content ends up going viral.

Best Practices in Utilizing Paid Advertising for Inbound Marketing Campaigns

The approach you take in utilizing paid advertising campaigns will determine how well your efforts pay off. You can utilize the following best practices to use paid ads to boost the effectiveness of your inbound marketing campaigns.

Utilize Your Buyer Personas

Your buyer personas will help you craft your content and paid ads to assist your target audience with their buyer’s journey. In addition, by using these personas, you can discuss the pain points of your target audience and introduce your products and services as the leading solutions. To achieve this feat, simply take the demographic information and input it into the paid advertising targeting system.

While using Facebook’s paid advertising system, you can direct your ads using key demographics, including location, gender, relationship, age, education, employment and financial information. Furthermore, you can select to send your ads to people with particular interests, behaviors and connections to boost the quality and quantity of your leads.

Integrate a Visual Element

Although the written word alone can act as a powerful motivator, visual elements capture attention fast and keep the audience engaged through the advertisement. Ads with visual elements tend to sway the audience’s perception of the content in a positive direction.

In addition, the visual elements can convey vital information that propels your customers through the buyer’s journey faster than any other medium. You can create custom videos and promote them on social media or create image ads for your PPC campaigns.

Long Tail Keywords are Key

Although short and long tail keywords likely grace your inbound content marketing campaigns on a regular basis, paid ads benefit most from long tail keywords alone. The highly-specific nature of these keywords attracts customers who are further into their buyer’s journey and practically ready to make a purchase.

These keywords also reduce your competition in attracting and engaging your target audience, which helps keep your costs to a minimum. You should regularly try to build your longtail keywords around your most promising organic search terms. Utilize location optimization techniques as well to create long tail keywords that will attend to the needs of your local customer base.

One Ad Group Per Keyword

Although it might seem tedious, creating one ad group per keyword could help you learn about your most effective paid advertising strategies. The single keyword ad groups allow you to customize your paid advertisement content to that specific product or service. With one keyword per group, your ads only land in front of the people who are searching for information on that subject, in particular.

Furthermore, the people who click through those highly-specific advertisements are usually ready to commit to their purchase during their visit to your site. By watching how each single keyword ad group performs, you can determine which ads provide the greatest return on investment to better focus your marketing efforts.

Optimize, Not Rotate

With PPC ads, you have the choice to rotate your ads indefinitely or optimize them to show the best performing ads most often. Although you likely want to give all your paid ad campaigns a fair chance at performing well, the reality is that some will never help you boost traffic and conversions. Therefore, you should take advantage of the paid ad platform’s ability to optimize the ads with the best performance metrics.

With this option, you can actively monitor the performance of your ads to help guide the future creation of paid advertisements for your products and services. Furthermore, as machine learning weighs ad performance and makes optimization changes, you can divert your attention to creating exceptional SEO content for your website, blog and social media channels.

Prepare Your Landing Pages

Your paid advertisements will undoubtedly fall flat if your landing pages do not fulfill the needs of your target audience. Craft beautiful and functional landing pages with excellent copy to engage, educate and even entertain your site visitors. All your content should be informative and supportive to help foster a sense of trust and boost brand loyalty. Verify that all navigation buttons and links connect to the correct routes to support prospective buyers in making their purchase.

Every page on your site should have a strong call to action listed within the copy and navigation buttons to encourage visitors to move through the buyer’s journey. The call to action should help streamline the purchase process or help visitors get into direct contact with your company. Always aim to optimize the load speed of your landing pages to ensure your site instantly engages visitors and help boost your ad ranking.

Measuring the Return on Investment

Most paid ad platforms make it really easy to measure your overall return on investment by providing key performance indicators within the system interface. You can review the frequency, relevance and reach data to verify that your ads arrive on your target audiences’ screens an optimal number of times.

The total leads and conversions data helps you see the direct connection between your paid ads and the leads collected and sales achieved during that time period. Finally, these platforms tend to outright provide cost per lead data. You can compare this data to your prior advertising costs to verify that you are receiving a positive return on your investment.

Watch your website analytics as well to determine how the paid ad traffic impacts your most important metrics, including new and repeat visitors, bounce rate and time on site. When you are on the right track with your paid ads and inbound marketing content, you should notice a marked increase in all your key performance metrics.

Boost Your Inbound Content Marketing Success with Paid Ads

When you decide to integrate effective paid ads into your inbound marketing strategy, the sky is the limit in the traffic you can drive to your site. With this dual digital marketing approach, you can position yourself as a thought leader in your industry with your content while utilizing all the tools available to drive traffic to your site. In short, you’ll start receiving the benefits of advertising.

Although it is possible to maximize site visits and conversions on your own, partnering with your leading digital marketing experts can accelerate your success. The services and solutions from Verge are designed to help you elevate your website performance, boost your brand presence and optimize your inbound marketing strategy. You can fill out our online form to request a consultation for immediate assistance from skilled digital marketing experts.

How Paid Ads Can Boost the Success of Inbound Marketing Strategies