If you read our blog regularly, you have probably noticed we love inbound marketing, or better known from HubSpot as “Marketing People Love.” An Inbound Marketing philosophy is all about attracting potential customers by offering relevant and remarkable content that they are looking for, instead of interrupting them with annoying ads, cold calls, or spammy emails they aren’t asking for.
With inbound marketing you attract your traffic more naturally based on high quality content, and work with a comprehensive process in order to get SEO (showing up on Google naturally), email marketing, landing pages, lead generation, social media, blogs and more to work together. We have seen a lot of success using an inbound approach to marketing, for both our own company and our clients.
Here at Half a Bubble Out, we use HubSpot to manage all of this. It is a leader in the inbound marketing field and has developed “all-in-one” marketing software that is very helpful in pulling it all together. You may be wondering with all of this talk about inbound marketing where paid ads fit into the picture. Here is an answer to that.
Paid Ads Can Work Well
As you likely already saw in the title, this article is about the fact that paid ads can work well along with inbound marketing. Maybe you already do this in your business, or maybe this is a new concept (and you are shocked)! You may be asking “aren’t paid ads interruptive and the opposite of an inbound approach?” The answer is “not necessarily,” if they are the right type of ads.
If you're using search engine PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ads, they will likely be well targeted to specific terms people are searching for. So you are only showing up where people need you to. Carefully crafted social media ads can fit right in as well. In the end, you want to be helpful to your customer base and be able to advertise your services and products. Paid ads can be a great way to gain additional visibility among your customers and effectively reach your target market.
If Paid Ads Are So Great, Why Use Other Marketing?
Don’t forget that paid ad models cost money for all of your traffic, and the minute you turn off the budget or reduce it, your traffic goes down or to zero. Inbound marketing has many benefits, including getting natural search engine rankings (free traffic) and helping your brand build authority with your customer base by showing your expertise through creating great content.
This is why inbound marketing is important for your business, and will continue to be crucial to our marketing strategy here at Half a Bubble Out. Paid ads work great in a lot of situations because they complement your inbound marketing efforts, but they don’t replace them!
The Other Big News: HubSpot Gets an Update to Include Paid Advertising Management
HubSpot, the leader in inbound marketing that we mentioned earlier, has seen this benefit, and just this week announced new integration with paid ads. It has noticed a large percentage of HubSpot users creating effective paid ad campaigns, and that the ads aren’t interruptive but are helpful to the customer. It has also found that social media ads are a great place to share content.
So…THIS WEEK, starting with LinkedIn, you will be able to create and manage your paid campaigns all from within your HubSpot portal! This will allow you to easily create, manage and track your paid campaigns in one place.
This makes sense and adds to the convenience, since you can already manage your email marketing, blogging, social media, search engine optimization and more in HubSpot. Now you can not only easily create and manage your paid advertising, but you can get a better view of how it works alongside your other inbound efforts and make sure that you are getting a return on your investment.
In the end, your goal as a business owner or marketer is to be a great value to your customers and let them know how great you are. A comprehensive inbound marketing approach is a perfect way to do this, and complementing it with paid advertising can not only make sense, but be done easily with HubSpot’s new integration. It’s worth considering for your business. To learn more about new HubSpot launches click below:
Since 2002, Half a Bubble Out has been dedicated to providing marketing, advertising and small business consulting that meet the needs of our clients. We specialize in powerfully telling stories through Inbound Marketing to grow your business filled with more passion and provision. Based in Chico California, we serve clients throughout Northern California and across the country to New York.
