4 Reasons Paid Search Should Be Part of Your Inbound Marketing Strategy
September 20, 2017
At this point, it’s hard to deny that inbound marketing should be playing a central role in your marketing strategy. Making your brand’s presence known throughout a buyer’s journey significantly increases the likelihood that that searcher will become your next client. To that end, there are several methods that you can take advantage of in order to get your messaging in front of the right people at the right time, and one of the more powerful tools that should be in every marketer’s belt is paid search. Here we will discuss several reasons why your inbound marketing strategy can benefit from and should be benefiting from paid search.
1) Instant Traffic
With paid search, you can instantly increase or decrease traffic to your site at the flip of a switch. Newer sites or companies can especially benefit from this feature. Whereas organic optimizations and content writing can take months to start noticeably affecting your traffic portfolio, there’s no waiting for paid search traffic. This is also a wonderful feature for advertisers that are targeting specific organic terms that they aren’t currently ranking for, because with enough budget or crafty targeting, you can achieve great positioning for these terms almost immediately.
2) Be Where Your Potential Customers Are
There are multiple options for placing your ads so that you can be sure that your brand is visible where and when you want it to be. Do your customers frequent Facebook? Or maybe a specific industry forum? With paid search, your ads can get directly to your audience, with almost limitless possibilities.
3) It’s the Perfect Testing Ground
Paid accounts grant marketers an agility not seen in other marketing avenues, and when paired with paid search’s ability to quickly drive actionable data, this can make for a powerful testing ground for your various marketing strategies. Utilizing paid search, new messaging strategies, landing pages, and workflows can be “proved out” in real-world situations before pushing them live in other marketing initiatives that might have longer lead times. This feedback also means that marketers can pivot away from strategies that aren’t as effective, saving time and money for what’s working.
4) It’s Effective
Arguably the most persuasive reason why paid search should be playing a large part in your inbound marketing strategy is that it works! Well-optimized paid search accounts can significantly increase the effectiveness of your overall marketing portfolio. When paired with paid search’s ability to drive very attributable traffic, it is also easy to communicate the success you are driving in your accounts.
When looking at these reasons alone, it is clear that paid search should have a rightful spot in your marketing strategy. That said, there are innumerable other reasons why you should consider folding paid search into your traffic portfolio. What successes have you seen incorporating paid search into your inbound marketing strategy? Share your stories in the comments.
About the author
Jacob Havenridge was formerly the Director of Paid Media at SmartBug. He is a Denver-based digital marketer with over 6 years of paid search experience. He has successfully managed millions in monthly media spend for household names nationwide in both B2C and B2B verticals. He has a strange affinity for data and numbers, loves a long day in the mountains, and has one child, Norman, a grumpy old Wheaten Terrier. Read more articles by Jacob Havenridge.