When creating a marketing strategy, is PPC or Inbound Marketing better for your business?

When it comes to creating a marketing strategy, you only have a limited number of resources for your campaign. The amount of time and budget you have are two of the most limiting factors when it comes to your strategy.

Two of the most effective lead strategies in today’s digital world are inbound marketing and PPC (Pay Per Click Advertising). Which strategy will acquire more lead generation for you? Which one will cost more? These are all factors you must consider when trying to obtain the best ROI for your business.

The following breaks down each strategy and can help you determine where you should spend your ad dollars.

Why Pay Per Click Is Better:

 Pay Per Click is a service offered by Google for businesses to show their ads on the top of the search engine results page (SERP). The photo below shows where your ads can be placed on a specific page. Rank is determined by a number of factors including quality score and budget.

For each ad, you determine the budget and the amount of time that you want to show your ad. Each time someone clicks your ad, you pay. The greater the budget you have, the increased amount of traffic that you will see.

PPC allows you to target customers based on specific keywords based on your product or service. When someone searches those specific terms, your ad may show, based on location and strength of your bid.

Bids are only half the battle. Quality score determines the strength of your ad and its relevancy to the landing page. When we typed in summer vacations, you can see that we received many ads based around summer vacations. This is considered good relevance. If you have an ad that talks about summer vacation but when we click on it, takes us to a page about astronauts, the relevance will be low and the ad will not be shown. The quality score is on a scale from 1-10, with 10 being the greatest.

PPC is not a “set it and forget it” type of strategy though. There are many reasons why your ad may not be approved or shown. You need to constantly check and pivot your strategy based on the results you are receiving.

With a good PPC strategy, your investment can help produce many leads and increased business for your company.

Why Inbound Marketing Is Better:

 When it comes to inbound marketing, you are building quality content in an effort to attract your ideal consumer. Inbound marketing helps solidify brand awareness, brand loyalty and turn those leads into customers.

Once your strangers become customers, you must attend to their needs and keep them happy and aware of how your business further enhances their life. The inbound methodology looks like this:

Strangers to Visitors: 

You attract customers using advertising such as blogs, social media channels, keywords and landing pages.

Visitors to Leads:

You connect visitors using calls-to-action, landing pages and contact forms to create inbound leads.

Leads to Customers:

You engage those leads and turn them into customers using email, lead scoring and CRM integrations.

Customers to Advocates:

You delight your new customers and turn them into brand advocates using social media, smart calls-to-action, email and workflows.

Advocates to Strangers:

Your new advocates will now start the process over attracting new strangers to your brand.

When using your methodology, inbound marketing is the most effective way to conduct online business. You attract inbound traffic when you align this content with your customer’s interests over time.

When customers build a bond with your business, your inbound marketing strategy makes you less of a business and more of a resource, building trust and loyalty.

The content you put out from inbound marketing can generate leads over time and across different platforms. The more relevant your content is, the more leads you will generate as a business.

Kraus Marketing’s Final Answer:

 As you can see, both PPC and inbound marketing provide two different types of ways to reach potential customers. A well-executed PPC campaign can bring in business immediately and provide the first steps into inbound marketing. PPC plants the seed and inbound marketing helps it grow.

The answer is that you need both in place to create the best ROI for your business. Both inbound and PPC provide your company with branding and ways to connect with your company.

Besides for these strategies, Kraus Marketing also helps companies with their search engine optimization (SEO) and social media strategies. To find our more about how Kraus Marketing can help you build your strategies, contact us at (973) 998-5742 or online at www.KrausMarketing.com