Growth Marketing 101: How SEO, Paid Media and Inbound Work Together to Increase Sales

Digital marketing services work to help organizations achieve a number of goals. But ultimately, the main objective is to increase sales and secure a path for year-over-year growth. While companies have the best intentions when partnering with digital marketing agencies, they often ask for specific services based on assumptions, and don’t delve deeper to see how various digital marketing strategies will actually help them achieve their goals.

This article focuses on how a multi-channel approach from digital growth marketing agencies can help companies increase sales with the objective to help CEOs and organizational leaders get a better understanding for how they should value digital marketing strategies in relationship to growth.

How do You Really Know what Digital marketing Strategies Will Make the Most of Your Investment?

Most organizations make the mistake of assuming they need a specific marketing strategy. They will phone a digital marketing agency and say, “I need SEO services”, rather than start by addressing their growing pains and ask how various digital marketing strategies can help them achieve their specific goals. Ultimately, increasing sales is a common goal all companies share. But because every industry is different, and each organization has their own unique profile with specific customers who may not search for products and services in the same way, companies need to invest in digital marketing strategies that make sense, and not popular ones just because everyone else is utilizing it.

For example, SEO is by far the most popular digital marketing strategy, and most businesses think they need it. And while search engine optimization is indeed hyper valuable for most organizations, this doesn’t necessarily mean it is a good fit for all organizations.

Let’s look at this from another angle. In some cases companies will call and ask for SEO, and while indeed this might be an ideal strategy, it still might not be enough to actually achieve the desired goals. In other words, using SEO as a top-of-funnel strategy to feed an inbound marketing strategy with high-quality leads, and utilizing paid media to further increase lead quality into a marketing automation platform designed to convert leads into buyers through what is typically a lengthy sales cycle, is ideal because the ability to increase sales might make the investment a no-brainer. This is why contacting a growth marketing agency that uses a multi-channel approach to increasing sales makes more sense for thousands of businesses as opposed to just investing in a single strategy.

Better Data Equals an Increase in Sales

What does better data mean? Most internal marketing teams will look at the data and try to make sense out of it so they can create a next move. But savvy growth marketing agencies will first segment the data that actually matters, and they will identify opportunities for improving specific processes across multiple channels by leveraging that data.

Here is an example: when businesses invest in a Growth Marketing Stack, a custom set of tools and strategies that work together to achieve the same goals, a powerful CRM always serves as a core component where data is collected, leads are segmented, and marketing automation is run and managed. CRMs like HubSpot collect in-depth data on leads that Google Analytics simply can’t. For example, information like the lead’s name, place of employment and job title can be collected in HubSpot. Not only can this data be used to improve audience targeting in marketing automation efforts, it can also empower SEO and paid media strategies to better target higher-quality traffic, and increase the amount of contacts you will collect who will convert into sales. Ultimately, the data collected in a Growth Stack operation significantly increases sales and helps companies hit their high-revenue targets by applying a logic-based lens to reading and interpreting data, optimizing strategies in SEO and paid media that would otherwise rely on the opaque data provided by Google, and help companies and marketing teams better understand how their target buyers make purchasing decisions.

Growth Marketing Stacks Improve Buyer Personas

In order to increase sales, you need to have an in depth knowledge of how your customers make purchasing decisions. We already talked about how CRMs collect valuable data on leads that Google simply fails to do, and how this data can be used to improve SEO and paid media efforts so that the traffic they generate feeds the funnel and thus improves inbound results.

But in order to do all of this, buyer personas must be spot on so that SEO strategists and paid media campaigns can target cohorts of a high quality that will improve conversion rates.

When you invest in inbound marketing to work alongside SEO and paid media, you get a goldmine of data that helps SEO strategists get a better idea of which keywords convert better, the context keywords should be used in, and what content to rank for specific buyer groups. This allows SEO experts to rank landing pages that send traffic to a workflow where they become leads, are nurtured with intimate content written specifically to the buyer’s needs and pain points, and sends them to a conversion point where they are offered with the best solution to their problem. And the same approach allows paid media strategists to send segments of unique buyers to those same landing pages, alongside SEO, thus significantly improving the volume and quality of traffic.

Learn More About the WEBITMD Growth Stack and Your Sales Potential

There are a number of other ways that SEO, paid media and inbound work together to increase sales. Download this FREE guide on the WEBITMD Growth Stack, and learn all the benefits, see if the approach makes sense for your business, and then give us a call. Let’s see if there is a potential fit to mutual growth!