We’re often asked "why should I market my business with inbound, when Google Adwords is generating a consistent level of traffic each month?"
To answer this question I’ve pulled together the five biggest reasons inbound trumps pay per click advertising, and why more and more businesses are realising the benefits of inbound marketing over traditional outbound marketing methods.
First off what is inbound?
Inbound is a way of repeatedly attracting qualified leads to your business, with content that answers the questions and problems your potential customers face when researching and sourcing a product or service.
Whatever product or service you market, it will solve a problem or need for your customers. Inbound is about identifying these problems, creating content about how your product or service answers them and publishing this content where your potential customers research and source suppliers. Content can take the form of a blog, or a whitepaper an eGuide or a factsheet.
What is Adwords?
Adwords is a pay per click (PPC) advertising service offered by Google. It is a method of generating traffic to your website by creating ads instead of content, based upon a selection of keywords or phrases. The position of your advert is governed by the bid price per click you’re willing to pay. Keywords with a lot of competition are more expensive than keywords with low competition.
What are the benefits of
inbound marketing?
5 benefits of inbound marketing over Adwords
Inbound positions your business organically.
Website users trust organic search results
more than paid results.
In a survey of 1.4 billion searches conducted by 28 million UK citizens across Google and Bing, overwhelmingly 94% of users clicked on organic search results compared with with only 6% who clicked on paid ads.
Less than 2% of PPC visitors actually buy.
Pay per click advertising only has a conversion rate of 2%, which means that while PPC will generate traffic to your website, only a very small proportion of this traffic will convert into customers. Inbound is targeted at your potential customers which ensures that the organic traffic your website achieves is more relevant to your business and consequently has a higher conversion rate.
Adwords is expensive.
In industries where there is a lot of competition for broad keywords and phrases PPC is expensive if you want to be positioned at the top. Add this to the fact that without organic search positioning you have to pay Google month in month out to retain your ads position, this makes it a temporary solution.
Inbound is particularly suited to products or services
with a long sales lead time.
Some products or services have longer sales lead times than others. This may be because of the intricacies of the product, the price or its suitability to the end user. Inbound is ideal for keeping the product top of mind as the buyer journeys through the sales pipeline.
Content that is initially created to address buyer questions and problems works for subsequent customers as it ranks organically. If this task was left to PPC, campaigns would need to run for extended periods to ensure that the business remained prominent in the buyers mind throughout their decision making process, again making paid advertising a costly option.
Final thought
Inbound is the most effective marketing method for doing business online, but PPC does have a great role to play. In short bursts, advertising is a great way of kick starting a new company with no domain authority, while inbound and organic search positioning takes hold.
It’s also worth noting that while PPC is expensive, it is quick to set up and get traffic to your website.
Inbound marketing requires more investment initially in terms of budget and resource to create great content, but will yield more qualified traffic and will represent a better ROI for your business.
