Even as the digital marketing landscape continues to evolve, online marketing tactics are quickly changing with it. Today, successful marketing is all about building a relationship that organically develops into one of provider-customer over time. These three tools – inbound marketing, content marketing and SEM – will help your business achieve its marketing goals and are key attributes of managed search engine marketing services.

Inbound Marketing Defined

The term “inbound marketing” refers to any advertising or marketing action that draws visitors to a company’s website. This type of content marketing can include blogs, videos, infographics, social media posts, webinars, ebooks, white papers and more. The most successful inbound marketing content offers solutions to what marketers frequently call customer “pain points” – problems that need solving. When content can answer a question, clear up confusion, solve a problem and offer a solution, it will be successful at generating inbound traffic. This marketing method builds rapport with consumers, strengthens a company’s position in a marketplace and establishes the value of product or service. Search engines rank solution-based content highly making inbound content marketing a double win – benefits to consumers and traffic from search engines.

What is the Difference Between Inbound and Outbound Marketing?

This is a common question companies have. Outbound marketing services are often also called “push marketing” because it refers to actively going out and soliciting new customers through use of bought aids such as direct mail postcards, flyers, television and radio ads, print ads, telemarketing, “spam” email and other less desirable means. This is also known as “interruption” marketing because, well, it is pushed on a consumer in the advertiser’s time-frame. Inbound offers solution-based content when the consumer has a problem, needs help and actively searches for answers.

Because outbound marketing literally skips over the “relationship building” part of converting a prospect into a customer, it delivers less reliable results, lower conversion rates and (frequently) irritated prospects who block that company in any way possible from contacting them again.

This is why, whenever possible, companies today are opting to use inbound rather than outbound marketing to achieve their customer conversion goals.

Using Content Marketing for Ranking Purposes

Content marketing and inbound marketing have a lot in common. Both focus on easing a customer’s “pain points” by providing relevant, valuable and easily shareable content that is free to access and use.

But customers aren’t the only ones who love high quality content. Search engines are also quite ardent to find highly relevant content to better serve customers who are browsing for information and solutions. It is not enough to just have more content on your site than a competitor – you must also provide more relevant content in order to achieve a higher ranking in search engine results. Managed search engine marketing and content creation services can provide businesses with quality informative content designed to reach specific audiences. These targeted leads enter into a sales cycle already pre-educated on the value of product.

Here is how this can work to a company’s advantage. A prospective customer opens up Google and begins to browse for solutions to a problem. In her search, she is at the research stage of the buying process and is looking for information. Search engine marketing (SEM), along with marketing via social channels, places informational based content in-front of a targeted consumer base. The web user sees the content, reads the information and is educated about a service or product and can quickly learn how it can solve their pain points. Rapport between customer and company has been built and at this point a call-to-action (CTA) drives a sale, encourages a contact or inspires a social media action (Like, Share, ReTweet, etc…)

Adding substantial informative content is also relevant because websites with more content typically have more pages. Sites with more pages and valuable content typically rank higher. So building a website that answers questions, solves problems and offers free content to consumers in a logical fashion, will gain customers but also boost rankings in search engine results. Content marketing is the new SEM.

Where Managed SEM (Search Engine Marketing) Fits In

SEM begins with keyword research. All marketing campaigns are built on data and understanding what potential customers are searching for and what their pain points are is the cornerstone of a solid SEM campaign.

Once marketable keywords have been identified, content, images and pages are then built to target these specific phrases. One page of focused content per key word with valuable content written to outline the benefits of a service or product. Experienced agencies providing managed marketing services have tools to uncover keywords, copywriters to construct targeted content and designers to created pages with calls-to-action to increase conversions and create leads. One of the most important aspects of managing SEM is having a well-designed sales cycle in place. How does a business control traffic and push then in the right direction once they land on a site? That is where the sales cycle and calls-to-action within managed content play an important role.

Why Good Content Is The Best Form Of SEM

Most marketing and SEM agencies offer search engine optimization services that consist of taking already written content and altering titles and text to jam key words onto pages it was never written or designed to rank for. Conversions are low because the content doesn’t answer a question or provide what the user is looking for. Search engines reward sites with quality content, conversions are higher and consumers enter into a sales cycle pre-qualified and more educated about a company offering. This can shorten the sales cycle making purchases more efficient.

2 The Top Marketing offers managed SEM services, inbound content marketing and copywriting services designed to convert site traffic into clients. Our motto is: “Better content is better SEM”