Can Paid Media and Inbound Marketing go together?

Can Inbound and Paid go together? Why not! Whether your company’s marketing is based upon an Inbound-first strategy, or you’ve just decided to go Inbound and it’s something completely new for you, you should still consider investing in Paid Media in any case. Actually, this combination is employed by 84% of organizations engaging in content marketing, with the additional investment proving worthwhile in terms of the greater reach it gets you.

1. The benefits of Inbound marketing

   Let’s speak about Inbound Marketing and the benefits it can bring to your business. As you know, it’s a methodology focusing on your prospects and clients by creating and delivering content that is valuable and relevant to them. These are just some of the features of Inbound Marketing you can benefit from and results you can achieve with it:

   • Inbound is timesaving. You can manage your whole Inbound strategy with just one tool. For example, HubSpot Add Add-on allows you to manage multiple paid channels, as well as analyze and compare results without having to switch from software to software
   • Inbound is cost-effective. According to HubSpot, you can reduce lead and customer acquisition costs by up to 61% compared to other forms of traditional marketing.

   You can read more about Inbound in our post dedicated to it.

   Inbound helps you get qualified leads by using tailor-made content
   
   

2.  Why invest in Paid Media?

It’s true that nowadays there are a lot of new channels and tactics to explore in the field of Marketing, but it does not mean that good old Paid is now outdated.

While Inbound Marketing is always a long-term investment (once you publish a blog post it stays with you forever), and therefore you’ll probably need some time to increase in results coming from Inbound, paid Campaigns are the best way add immediate results Additionally, there are some other reasons for (still) using Paid:

Paid search is great for driving sales quickly. 24% of marketers use paid advertising to impact direct sales.
Paid campaigns still remain paid; however, these campaigns are pretty affordable, and they pay back. Businesses typically earn $2 for every $1 spent on Google Ads.
They allow you to use very precise segmentation and reach your target audience
Paid Media can help you increase your brand awareness and visibility quickly.

As you see, there are many pros to invest both Inbound and Paid Media . The challenge is how to combine them successfully.

3. How to combine Paid and Inbound

Here are some important points to consider when including both Inbound and Paid in your Marketing Strategy.

• Set clear goals and define the budget. Determining how well these two can work together depends on your approach to paid advertising and your budget. Similar to the budget, your goals should determine the channels and products you choose to promote within those channels. The type of content as well as the paid channel you use will depend on whether your goal is to drive traffic to your website, generate more leads, etc. 
• As already mentioned, Inbound Marketing can take long time before it starts driving traffic and generating leads.Paid Campaigns can help you accelerate this process, so rather than separating the two, try to promote your great content and Inbound assets with some Paid campaigns. With Inbound and Paid Ads together you can get an instant increase in traffic. 
• As a consequence, Inbound and Paid combination can help you generate leads almost immediately. Paid will allow you to keep the business showing results until your Inbound Strategy starts to deliver consistent organic results. 
• Inbound marketing and Paid search together can help you dominate SEO. In order it to work, we advise you to tailor your SEO content. You have to address your target audience and your buyer personas, but not only: make sure to not forget about the audience outside of your segment as with Paid campaigns you can get a wider reach sometimes. 
• Of course, there are also some practices that should be avoided like buying lists, publishing artificial reviews, using repetitive, redundant keywords, etc. These tricks might seem to bring fast and cheap results, but in the long term your business (e.g., your website ranking) will probably be penalized for it.

That said, organic traffic takes time to help you generate leads and build relationship with them. Paid advertising, on the contrary, allows you to show your content earlier and to a wider audience, including them into your marketing funnel faster.

Without a doubt it’s very important to promote great content with Paid campaigns, as they won’t be effective if your Inbound Marketing isn't good enough. Otherwise, you would be just buying opportunities to get your message out and, without it being relevant, more people to likely turn away.

So, a more recommended approach, instead of just investing in Paid, is to invest more time and money in your Inbound Marketing, so it only takes a little bit of advertising to get significant results.

You can always count on professionals like mbudo to set up or optimize your Marketing Strategy, both Inbound and Paid included.