If you’re using an Inbound Marketing strategy to promote your niche B2B business, I’ll bet you’re struggling to generate enough organic traffic to put your lead generation machine to good use. No, it's not you. It's simply the nature of promoting new, obscure, and niche ideas in a vast digital space.
Niche businesses often face the following scenario when kicking off with inbound:
Your business offers a range of products, services or solutions fit for a particular audience within a giant industry. What makes your proposition irresistible is that it’s tailored to resolve a number of critical business issues that nobody else has managed to crack. While you have the answer to your buyers’ greatest needs, industry channels are so flooded with the noise of the giants that your buyer personas can’t hear you.
In addition to competing for keyword rankings with corporations such as Microsoft and Cisco, your personas are (un)blissfully unaware that there even exists a solution tailored to their niche requirements and the size of their budget.
Using Paid Media as Firelighters in your Content Campaigns
Are you starting off cold with inbound marketing, battling to promote a niche offering in a loud industry, or looking for a way to accelerate your inbound programme? Paid media could be the fire lighter you need to ignite your marketing campaigns!
While paid media tactics (for instance, advertising via Google AdWords, LinkedIn or third parties) are most commonly utilised within an outbound, or push marketing strategy, today’s blog is about repurposing paid media channels to serve your inbound philosophy.
But, how do you turn a push marketing tactic into an inbound activity?
Well, you can think about it this way: Paid media fulfils the role of kindling or firelighters for exposing your solid stack of inbound timber (content assets) to the hot flames for long enough that combustion (traffic and user interaction) can take place.
The Boundaries of Using Paid Media within an Inbound Campaign
While paid media tools are adaptable enough to be used within your inbound campaigns, it’s important to have a clear understanding of the boundaries of the fire pit before you strike the first match.
The Difference Between Inbound and Outbound Paid Media Strategies
The first aspect we need clarity on is how inbound paid media differ from traditional paid advertising.
The outbound game plan is to employ paid media to strike as many shots as possible, hoping that some might hit a target, any target.
The inbound game plan, on the other hand, is to present a very specific audience with a preview of the content you have created to be of value to them. Buyers who are eager to engage with your content are invited to access them on your website or to sign-up to receive similar assets.
Fire Starting Equipment
Now that we have a top-level picture of our strategy, let’s look at the equipment we’re going to need to get the inbound paid media fire started with optimum results: Detailed buyer personas, quality content assets, proper tracking.
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Detailed Buyer Personas
A thorough understanding of who your ideal buyers are, their needs, and the online channels that they frequent, is critical for ensuring that your paid marketing activities meet the inbound requirements. This full buyer persona picture will guide you in:
- Selecting the right content assets for promoting through paid advertising,
- Creating the right ad copy for engaging your specific audience,
- And selecting the right keywords to ensure that your ads are displayed exclusively to the audience you intend to reach.
If you’re just starting with content marketing, the reality is that you probably don’t know your buyers as well as you think you do. It’s important to dig deep and to focus on detail.
Take heart; you already have three valuable resources readily available! These
Invite your Sales team to join your persona creation sessions, interview or survey your existing customers, and analyse your marketing data to get an idea of the content assets your buyers find most engaging.
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Quality Inbound Campaigns
Not all wood is good for starting a fire.
Are you aiming to produce a long burning nurturing cycle that generates a bed of red-hot coals? What you need is a sufficient supply of solid inbound campaign material.
The following elements are essential to a campaign that ignites swiftly and burns slow and long:
- Highly volatile content offers to attract the attention of your buyers.
- Long-burning matches, or landing pages that excel at converting clicks into leads.
- A decent fan, or lead nurturing workflows to guide your buyers to progress through the Sales funnel.
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An Inbound Mindset
Hard selling has no place within the inbound methodology, especially not when you’re using paid media channels. The purpose of using paid media within the inbound framework is to light the fire so that the lead nurturing cycle can begin and run its course.
The content offers you present on paid channels could vary greatly in terms of form and substance. When you’re reaching out to buyers in the awareness phase, you could promote a blog article or eBook outlining your buyers’ most painful business hassles. When you’re targeting low-hanging fruit that
Whichever offer you present, steer clear of
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Proper Tracking
Making your way to launching your assets on paid media is a special milestone, but your inbound campaign is far from over.
Once you have published your ads, make sure you track and measure how your target audience engages with your content and which of your offers deliver the highest conversion rates. This will provide you with new user insights to flesh out your buyer personas, allowing you to improve the focus of your ad campaigns and the value of your content assets.
Critical metrics to measure to determine the success of your campaign include user engagement, social sharing, lead generation, and
Inbound methodology from A to Z
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