3 Reasons Why Paid Search Will Dominate Inbound Marketing in 2015

On a regular day, inbound and outbound marketing would each stand at either end of the spectrum. Yet, in a real sense, integrating both forms of online marketing offers the best path to attaining robust goals such as increasing sales, leads, revenue, and visibility.

In an increasingly dynamic digital marketing world, savvy marketers are finding ways to support their paid search campaigns using inbound marketing techniques and vice versa.

In 2015, the trend is towards merging paid search (PPC and display) and conventional inbound marketing to stay competitive. Here are the reasons why you should synergize PPC and inbound this year:

The rise and rise of the perceptive consumer

According to a PricewaterhouseCoopers’ multichannel shopping survey, over 80% of consumers undertake online research prior to purchasing products. The survey also indicates that consumers make buying decisions relatively fast, with most making a decision within two days.

Typically, consumers will search for products and information about products on the search pages.  As soon as they gather information, they are likely to click on an ad on the search pages to go to the next step, which is to place the product in the shopping cart.

What’s next for your customers after they search for your product organically? PPC ads help to nurture these customers from the product evaluation stage to the actual purchase stage.

The increasing popularity of retargeting

Retargeting was really popular in 2014 and the trend will continue this year. This strategy involves serving display ads to people who have interacted with your brand previously.

Retargeting can help to bring back traffic that bounced from inbound platforms such as a website, social media page or a blog. Marketers who use retargeting see higher ROI for the marketing dollars spent on paid search.

In many ways, inbound marketing alone cannot be effective in supporting conversions.

In fact, up to 90% of traffic that comes to your website will not convert the first time. Investing in display ads allows you to re-engage this traffic, bring them back to your inbound properties and pushing them toward a solid conversion.

The growing synergy between social and PPC

It is no news that social media has completely revolutionized the digital marketing landscape.

The inclusion of paid search is not just a way for social media owners to make some revenue; it also offers marketers an unprecedented opportunity to not only share social content but to also make their products visible to millions of targeted users.

The integration of paid search with social can be effective in engaging the targeted user across different channels. In particular, social retargeting through native advertising allows you to engage the user without diverting their attention away from the content stream.

One area that is underutilized is retargeting users who abandon their shopping carts. Retargeting them through native display ads on social media offers several benefits. Users are able to see social proof comments, likes and feedback others have left. Retargeting is also a great way to serve up any new branded content that may prompt the targeted user to complete the purchase.

Examples of social paid search opportunities that support inbound efforts are Facebook’s right hand ads, native ads within the news feeds, sponsored pages and posts just to mention a few. Facebook’s Ad Exchange facilitates retargeting of ads.

On Twitter, available platforms include lead generation cards, promoted profiles and promoted tweets. While on LinkedIn marketers can run text ads, pay for sponsored job listings and status updates.

Staying ahead of the game

Inbound strategies such as email, search and content marketing are tried and tested methods of traffic and lead generation. However, these alone are not enough to nurture leads towards important conversions. In 2015, integrating outbound and inbound marketing will be the winning strategy.