Digital Marketing Power

Some people in the web marketing space have suggested that PPC shouldn’t be included in “inbound marketing” because you have to pay for placement. But this doesn’t make any sense.

The whole point of introducing a term like “inbound marketing” is to create a more nuanced distinction than just “free marketing” and “paid marketing.” Any marketer who manages a budget knows that no form of marketing is truly “free.” HubSpot, one of the first proponents of inbound marketing, sells a product that helps you do it – how is that free? They know that if they called what they’re selling – a platform for blogging and SEO – “free marketing,” it would  be a contradiction in terms. Of course, you can do inbound marketing without HubSpot (duh), but you’re either going to be paying someone or a team of people to do it (a blogger, a social media manager, an SEO specialist, etc.) or you’re going to be doing it yourself, as the business owner, and any time you spend on inbound marketing is time you can’t spend on other business activities, so all those activities have a cost. That’s why “free marketing” doesn’t cut it.