Inbound marketing is a form of online marketing where your potential customers find your selling proposition, as opposed to actively seeking to sell to prospects.

Inbound marketing is more effective than traditional outbound marketing methods because you aren’t interrupting people to get their attention, with emails, cold calls, commercials, and so on. With inbound marketing through the Web, you create a useful, informative website and social media presence and let visitors find and come to you. Your leads self-select. The term is popularized by HubSpot's CTO and founder Dharmesh Shah.

A common myth about inbound marketing is that it’s a mysterious, dark art that can only be done by the search marketing elite. Nothing could be further from the truth. Inbound marketing is something that, with the right system in place, you can do yourselxf. And WordStream can help you get there with online marketing assistance.

Creating an Inbound Marketing System with WordStream

At WordStream, we’re firm believers that search marketing is the most effective method of inbound marketing. Since search marketing is largely a data-driven activity, given the right search marketing tools and processes, we feel that anyone can transform their website into a highly effective, inbound marketing, lead generation machine. The key is to continuously expand and optimize your pay-per-click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) efforts over time.

Many companies execute PPC and SEO, yet they fail to transform their websites into powerful inbound marketing machines. Why is that?

The reason is they don’t take the right approach, which is to use PPC to guide your SEO efforts, and vice versa, and then make it continuous. In a nutshell, the more you learn about your keyword taxonomy, the better you understand:

• How people are looking for the products and solutions you’re providing, and;
• The value of all those different keywords.

With this knowledge, you can better execute your PPC and SEO efforts. And if you then keep it up by making your PPC and SEO activities iterative and continuous, the results over time can be staggering!

The WordStream inbound marketing system is specifically designed to help you accomplish this.

Inbound Marketing: SEO Informing PPC

The WordStream approach to creating your own inbound marketing solution is to start by using your organic SEO data to inform your PPC or paid search efforts:

1. Start with Organic Keyword Data – Most companies today are already doing some work on SEO. But there are probably many other search queries out there they could be ranking for. So how do they find those keywords? WordStream discovers them for you by aggregating all of the real search queries that have lead to traffic or conversions on your website. Then, if you buy those keywords on search engines and apply a broad match, your ads will show for other related keyword search queries. In addition to buying more Web traffic, you’ll to gain a better understanding about all the keywords that are important for your business for which you’re not already ranking on.
2. Group and Organize Your Keywords, then Act – Buying keywords on Google AdWords is more involved than just uploading a list of keywords. If you care about ROI, then you’ll need to intelligently organize and group together your keywords, creating tightly-related keyword groupings and marrying them with highly targeted ad text and optimized landing pages. WordStream provides online marketing tools for doing all of the above.

Using WordStream, it’s easy to leverage valuable keyword data arising from SEO to inform PPC campaign creation and optimization. This process is a simple, step-by-step approach to realizing and bidding on the keywords you may be missing out on in your existing SEO efforts.

Inbound Marketing: PPC Informing SEO

Most companies engage in PPC marketing efforts, in some form or another. But only WordStream can help you transition to an inbound marketing system that generates more leads from natural search than paid search. The key to achieving this transition is to leverage your PPC data to inform your SEO efforts. How do you do this?

1. Start with PPC Keyword Data – WordStream gives you the power to aggregate all the keyword search queries that occurred from running your PPC campaign. You can easily conduct keyword research to identify which keywords (and more importantly, which groupings of keywords) are producing clicks and conversions on your site.
2. Group and Organize Your Keywords, Then Act  – Once you’ve determine which keyword-proven groupings are the most traffic and goal-producing, WordStream’s SEO Tools help you prioritize and author keyword-specific, narrowly-focused SEO content for more engaging, conversion-friendly landing pages.

So now, instead of paying to rank in the SERPs, you can let your organically-ranking pages pull in the traffic.

Imagine the money and resources you’ll save when you’re able to flip a steady stream of leads from pay-per-click to SEO?

So What’s Next? Make Your Inbound Marketing Efforts Continuous

Once you’ve got your inbound marketing system in place and running smoothly, you can’t fall asleep at the wheel. Remember, this is not a one-time activity, where you can “set it and forget it.”

If you want your inbound marketing efforts to yield ever-growing results, you must continue to act on and repeat the above steps that got you in this position. If you don’t, you’re marketing will stagnate and your competitors will gain the upper hand.

Thankfully, WordStream marketing software is geared to help you continue to iterate your PPC and SEO activities so you see real, exponential growth.

With WordStream, you can continuously expand and optimize your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts over time. The possibilities are endless!

Try the WordStream Inbound Marketing System FREE Today!

WordStream provides the tools and the workflow for any user to build their own Inbound Marketing Machine around their own niche market. Our powerful online marketing tools, expert workflow and intelligent automation solutions greatly reduce the time, effort and money required to realize a successful inbound marketing campaign.

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