There are plenty of similarities between inbound marketing and pay-per-click. For example, both approaches start with the customer in mind. Both use tools to connect everything. And both campaigns work in any situation. But can these two forces work together?

Having successfully combined inbound and PPC for our own clients, we know that it can. So in this article, we’re going to discuss how inbound marketing and PPC can work together successfully – and why it’s in your best interests to combine them.

• Collaboration of keywords

Your marketing team will, no doubt, be working incredibly hard to define which keywords seem to be working incredibly well for their inbound marketing campaign. They will, no doubt, be keeping all sorts of data about which keywords seem to be converting well and which keywords, not so much. This information can be used for a PPC campaign. You can take your most effective keywords from social media, SEO, and whichever inbound techniques you are using, and embed them into a PPC campaign which has the ability to push your conversions through the roof.

In addition to this, there is a pretty decent chance that the selection of keywords for your PPC campaigns can be brought into inbound marketing. There are many marketing teams out there who will check keyword success rates through cheap PPC campaigns. If they notice that it is making conversions, then they will know that this keyword is something that they may wish to incorporate into their inbound marketing strategy.

Basically, having a PPC campaign in place is going to have the ability to boost the effectiveness of your inbound marketing campaign.

• Remarketing

There is no technique more effective than remarketing. Almost all large companies are engaging with it to some degree nowadays. Now, you may not like traditional PPC campaigns, this is fine. However, remarketing is not like a traditional PPC campaign. Here, you will be displaying adverts to the people who your inbound marketing brought it. It ensures that you are able to continue to reach these people, even if they have long since left your website. Basically, PPC, in this instance, is going to give you an opportunity to grab leads that you may otherwise have missed out on. It also ensures that you can keep your brand on the minds of a person, which leads us onto our next point:

• You can build your brand with PPC

If you have worked hard on your inbound marketing, and we have no doubt that you have, then you will already know which content your users respond to and which content they actively avoid. You will have worked incredibly hard to build up your brand. You can apply these techniques to your PPC campaign. Basically, you will be keeping your brand message consistent over a number of different channels. On a basic level, you will be building up brand recognition and this is absolutely key for a successful business.

• You already know your landing pages convert

If you have been piling a lot of resources into the creation of your landing pages, perhaps making small tweaks here and there, you will start to realise that your inbound marketing efforts are converting incredibly well. Why not use the exact same assets for your PPC campaign? You already know that they work well. So, you will be making money from it and, of course, the more money a business makes, the better, right? Obviously you should ensure that inbound marketing continues to be your main focus, but making a few extra pounds here and there for only a little bit of extra effort is going to be worth it.

In addition to this, you will be able to share the elements that you use to create your inbound marketing campaigns between pages. The same eBook that you are using to pull in leads through inbound marketing can also be used to attract people to click on your PPC adverts and to generate leads this way. In addition to this, you can use the same design elements. Images that you are using to generate leads elsewhere can be tied into your PPC campaign. Basically, you will be drastically reducing the amount of work that is needed to have two different campaigns running.

If you wish for your inbound marketing and PPC campaigns to be as effective as possible, you need to be running them ‘as one’. You need to share data between the two campaigns to ensure that both are effective as possible. If you run them separately, you will be spending a lot of money on something which is delivering next-to-no benefit to your company. If, however, you ensure that the campaigns work in tangent with one another, you will be fighting off business at a rapid rate.