If you believe that inbound marketing and paid ads are incompatible strategies, you're missing out on a lot of opportunities to grow your brand.
We usually associate Social Ads andGoogle Adswith outbound strategies, but this does not have to be the case. If we use paid online advertising intelligently, it can contribute greatly to ourinbound campaignswithout altering their essence.
Social Ads and Google Ads, an accelerator for your inbound marketing
Inbound marketing is a methodology based on attracting customers with valuable, useful, and relevant content at each stage of the customer journey, which consists of four distinct phases:
- It will attractusers interested in your brand or products. Generally, we will have carried out a preliminary study of ourbuyer persona, that is, the type of user we want to attract.
- Convertinterested users into leads or sales opportunities using the different techniques proposed by this methodology. Normally, this phase revolves around a value proposition that is relevant to our buyer persona.
- Closethe process, converting leads into actual customers using automation techniques such aslead scoring and lead nurturing.
- Delightcustomers with an excellent experience to build loyalty and turn them into brand ambassadors.
As you can see, this methodology is not associated with any specific tool, but can use a variety of resources at different stages of the process. These include Google Ads and Social Ads.
Within an inbound marketing process, paid ads focus onoffering valuable content, for example, directing the user to a video of interest or to a landing page where they can download content that interests them. Among their possible strategic uses, we can find the following:
- Enhance your content marketing strategycontent marketing by directing targeted traffic to articles, videos, infographics, etc. Creating quality content requires a significant investment of time and effort, so it makes sense to ensure that it reaches as wide an audience as possible. This is where paid advertising can help us to quickly disseminate this content to the audiences that interest us most.
- Getting leads. A proven successful strategy in inbound marketing is to create a landing page that encourages users to download content that interests them in exchange for providing their details. This way, visitors become part of our user base and we can start sending them personalized marketing content. Paid ads allow us to send quality traffic to these landing pages and thus accelerate lead generation.
- Reactivate users from our database. A super useful feature of Google Ads and Social Ads is remarketing, which means targeting users who already know us with highly personalized messages to move them forward in the conversion process. For example, both Facebook Ads and other social media advertising platforms allow us to upload an email file in .csv format to find these people within the social network and target them with segmented advertising.
In general, the usefulness ofSocial Ads and Google Ads within an inbound marketing campaign is tospeed up the entire process. In many cases, generating organic traffic through SEO and social media takes time, unless we become a viral success. This creates the problem that it is very difficult to get started, generate critical mass for campaigns, and validate the concepts and models we have created to see if they work well. Paid ads allow us to quickly generate that initial injection of traffic and get everything running smoothly.
Another benefit of accelerating the process is that you can start generatinginbound marketing assetsright from the start. Inbound is a long-term investment that generates more and more value as we develop our campaigns. With proper use of Social Ads and Google Ads, we can accelerate the creation of some very useful resources for marketers, such as an email database, a community of users interested in the brand's products, or better positioning.
Another advantage of incorporating online advertising into your inbound marketing is that it allows youto multiply the reach of your campaigns with highly accurate segmentation.
When we launch an SEM campaign with Google Ads, we can define exactly which keywords we want to associate with our ads. This way, we directly target users who are already actively searching for topics related to our products and services, and who are therefore potentially interested in us.
Social Ads campaigns are not far behind, as they allow us to segment very accurately based on user demographics, behaviors, and interests. We can even search for people who have already expressed interest in competing brands.
Last but not least, Google Ads and Social Ads allow us to tailor our strategy to different stages of the conversion funnel, from initial interest to conversion and after-sales. A whole host of advantages you can't afford to miss!
