Neil Patel is one of the few experts that has broken ranks and suggested using both.

“Many marketers believe that you either use content marketing or PPC to grow a business – but rarely both. I’d like to argue that both approaches are valid and that neither approach has to be executed exclusively,” he writes.

He makes a very valid point. Even many very experienced marketers I know have a very binary view on PPC and content marketing. One of my old clients was very fixated on inbound, organic content marketing strategies. He believed that PPC marketing was the antithesis of his entire model.

I reached the same conclusion after reading a report from The Content Marketing Institute. This report showed that the biggest problem with content was that there wasn’t enough justification to create content. Data from PPC marketing could provide that justification. There are other benefits as well.

Understanding the Benefits of Merging PPC and Content Marketing

Inbound marketing and PPC advertising can be two complementary components of the same strategy. This approach has three major advantages.

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Accelerating the Results of Your Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing can have an exceptional ROI. However, it can take months to see results, especially if your strategy hinges largely on leveraging organic search traffic. The reality is that too many marketers have difficulty measuring their ROI. One poll showed 38% of marketers struggle to determine whether their content is effective at all.

[bctt tweet=”The last thing that you want is to spend months on a content marketing strategy, only to discover that your funnel doesn’t convert.” username=”relevance”]

When you pay for PPC ads, you will start attracting traffic immediately and this will help you validate the strategy. You can see whether your funnel converts well, so you know whether it is worth continuing to invest your efforts in content marketing. Since it can take four to six months to see results from content marketing, it is good to have this assurance upfront.

Test the Performance of Your Campaign and Make Gradual Changes

You may have a very promising campaign. However, you might need to make some significant changes to ensure its long-term profitability.

Campaign flaws often stem from inaccurate assumptions about your target buyers or the angles that they will respond to. Unfortunately, you would usually waste a lot of time building a content marketing strategy and trying to fix these issues along the way. You would probably spend months developing and syndicating content before getting enough traffic to discover that your original angle was off. At this point, you would not be able to easily modify your content to align with a more appropriate angle or tailor it to a better demographic.

It would be a lot cheaper to test your content with PPC marketing at first. You could create a small amount of content and run Facebook or Google ads to see how people respond. You could create five pages of content for each angle or demographic and see which had the best ROI. These results would help you decide which direction to take your long-term content marketing strategy.

You can compare the data you have generated from your PPC campaign with the objectives you outlined in your inbound marketing strategy. You will be able to verify that the demographics of your best converting customers are the ones that you were originally expecting. If changes need to be made, it’s best to do it at the beginning of the project.

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When is it Best to Combine Your PPC and Content Marketing Strategy?

There is no simple answer to this question. It all depends on the scope and long-term vision of your project. You have already learned that Inbound marketing and PPC advertising are strategies that complement each other in many instances, but there are some times when it makes more sense than others. Some scenarios that it would be good to merge the two include:

• When you first develop an inbound marketing project and need to assess the ROI. This allows you to validate the long-term investment of your content marketing strategy.
• When you introduce new elements to the campaign and need to determine whether they have positive or negative effect on your long-term ROI. One of the most common examples of this is when you make major changes to your landing page and need to split-test them.
• Your strategy begins to stagnate and needs an extra push to grow.

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How to Combine Various PPC Platforms with Your Content Marketing Strategy

There are a number of PPC advertising platforms that you can use to test various elements of your content marketing strategy. Here are some general guidelines for using each:

• Amazon has a PPC platform that is less competitive, so you can get better ROIs on certain campaigns. You can find actionable tips for your Amazon PPC management.
• AdWords is the most popular PPC platform. It allows you to segment users by demographic, device and region, so you can see how different users respond to your content.
• Facebook and Instagram Ads. Facebook is largest social network with an exceptional level of segmentation for configuring ads. It is ideal for all types of campaigns. You can test multiple demographics and see how they respond to various content.
• Linkedin Ads: LinkedIn is the professional social network that is best segmented and ideal for B2B campaigns. It allows you to make personalized and private contacts with the functionality of InMail. The cost per lead is the highest of all social networks. You can share content on LinkedIn, as well as run LinkedIn ads to content on your own site.
• Twitter for Business: Twitter for Business allows you to display ads in a very segmented and ideal for campaigns that promote services.

You need to monitor your campaigns carefully and make sure that you are getting the right ROI.

[bctt tweet=”Keep in mind that a campaign will probably have a higher ROI when you get organic traffic through content marketing, because you won’t need to pay for each click.” username=”relevance”]

PPC can still be a long-term strategy of its own, but it could also be worth running PPC campaigns at a small loss just to validate the effectiveness of your content strategy.

The post Is Compartmentalizing Your PPC and Content Marketing Limiting Your Growth? appeared first on Relevance.

Any marketer that looks at the statistics should be in awe. It seems like a no brainer that they should be investing their time and resources building email marketing funnels. Unfortunately, many people mistake the high ROI of email marketing with a misguided belief that it is easy to generate money with it.

The ROI reflects a minority of marketers that understand the nuts and bolts of email marketing and have used it to generate impressive returns. There are many other marketers that struggle to breakeven, because they don’t understand the logistics of email promotional funnels.

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Before you focus on email marketing, it is important to do your due diligence. You need to understand the mistakes that marketers make that prevent them from realizing a positive ROI.

Here are some of the reasons that many email marketers fail:

Driving the wrong traffic to their opt in page

Experts like Neil Patel often throw around the statistic on the profitability of email to make a point. Unfortunately, this is often counterproductive. They make it sound like you should be investing in email marketing over PPC, SEO, social, native or other types of marketing strategies.

The problem with this is that email marketing is not a substitute for other types of traffic. They all need to fit seamlessly into the same funnel. You need to invest in other types of traffic to build your email list first.

By putting so much emphasis on the benefits of email over PPC, some experts have unintentionally duped people into thinking that they don’t need to drive targeted traffic to their email subscription pages.

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One of the mistakes that I see a lot of people making is investing in low-quality PPV traffic sources or banner advertisements to build their email list. These types of traffic often have low initial subscriber opt-in rates and a low ROI at later stages of the email funnel. Instead, you should be focusing on using higher quality traffic sources. Facebook, AdWords and SEO tend to be the best. Certain native advertising traffic sources are also great.

Neglecting to segment your lists

Segmenting your email list is very important. You should be using separate landing pages for different offers. Many marketers get this part right. However, too many people then merge the subscribers into a single, consolidated list.

You need to make sure that each subscriber is placed into a funnel that ensures they will receive future offers that resonate with them. Almost all modern marketing automation platforms enable you to do this. Make sure that you take advantage of them. This should increase your click-through rate by 5% and other metrics can be impacted even more.

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Being too aggressive too early

The biggest reason that the returns on email marketing are so high is that you have an excellent opportunity to sell offers after building strong relationships. However, you can’t rush the relationship building process. If you start trying to sell to your subscribers too early, then you will face a lot of problems.

Ryan Deiss Discuss this in many of his guides on email marketing. He says that he usually provides two or three promotional emails before trying to pitch any of his subscribers. This system is proving to work pretty well. It certainly has a much higher ROI then trying to market at the very beginning.

Plan your email marketing funnel carefully

Email marketing is one of the best ways to build a brand reputation and generate sales. However, it is only effective if you have a solid strategy in place. Make sure that you understand your goals and have a seamless funnel to get the right ROI.

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The post Email Marketing Has a Stellar ROI – So Why Do So Many Email Marketers Fail? appeared first on Relevance.

Over 70% of customers make decisions based on the input of relevant social media influencers and nearly three-quarters trust them more than celebrities. My friend Ryan Kh recently wrote a post stating that, in 2017, marketers need the support of trusted experts with a strong social media following.

Engaging with social media influencers isn’t easy. Here are some case studies that will help you see what works and how to replicate it.

Case Study 1: Bach Flower Rewards Bloggers for Sharing Stress Management Tips

Bach Flower promotes a wide range of natural remedies, including RESCUE Remedy, a line of natural stress management products. They enlisted the support of a number of holistic living and lifestyle bloggers to endorse their products. These bloggers were given a free coupon for sharing their stress management tips, along with an endorsement for the RESCUE Remedy products.

By tapping these influencers, they were able to get over 130 million social media impressions and boosted their Instagram following by over 250%. This campaign proves that offering small incentives to a number of prominent influencers can have massive results.

Case Study 2: InspireBeats Demonstrates the Power of Influencer Outreach

Prominent influencers will rarely back your brand by themselves. I can count the number of times they took initiative to do so on one hand. Successful influencer campaigns require a strong outreach strategy. There are a number of tools that they can leverage, such as HootSuite. However, it will be a very involved process either way.

InspireBeats shows that you need to put in a lot of effort to earn an influencer’s attention, but it can pay handsome dividends afterward. Alex Berman, the Chief Marketing Sumo for InspireBeats, said that this outreach strategy helped the company generate over $12 million in B2B leads.

“I came on as the Chief Marketing Sumo over here – joining a small team and expected to make a huge difference in terms of new leads and opening up additional marketing channels. Since the company does outbound email as its core, I figured it could work for building brand equity as well. Marketing goals at a high level were to drive more leads to InspireBeats.com that were interested in using lead generation or outbound emails to help grow influencers. In addition to that overarching goal, I added a few KPI-driven goals: 10 podcasts, 10 blog features, and 10 guest blogs per month that I have the team aim for.”

Case Study 3: Leesa Finds Influencers that Cater to Their Target Market and Receives Over 100,000 Website Clicks

Leesa, a luxury mattress company that sells directly to consumers, wanted to penetrate the growing market of millennial consumers. They realized that every generation listens to different influencers, so they needed to identify a set of influencers that related to their target market.

The marketing team worked closely with a trusted vendor to identify a list of influencers that middle-class millennial consumers would listen to. They reached out to these influencers for support and received charitable responses. The company attributes its robust growth in 2014 to the campaign, which drew over 100,000 clicks to its website.

Done Right, Influencer Marketing Can Have Powerful Results

Influencer marketing has helped many companies boost their bottom lines. You can get great results by leveraging the right people. You just need to know who to target and how to pitch them.

The post Lessons from these 3 Influencer Marketer Case Studies appeared first on Relevance.