Justin Brooke is the owner of IMScalable, a boutique ad agency for direct response businesses. While his clients are mainly concerned with paid advertising, he generates the majority of his own business using inbound marketing. This article discusses how he mixes both outbound and inbound practices to achieve incredible results. 

I feel like a HubSpot black sheep sometimes. I do all of the blogging, social posting, and lead nurturing like any other inbound marketer. However, it’s the little bit of extra curricular activities that I do with my inbound assets that makes my methods a little different.

As inbound marketers we often poke fun at people using banner ads and other dying forms of paid advertising. However, I’ve found a way to merge both worlds.The benefit of my way is that geeting over 1,000 leads per month costs me only $2 per lead.

Here’s How I Do It

I start out by browsing Quora.com, a popular question-and-answer forum, and search for commonly recurring questions in my market. This helps me discover what the more common pain points are in my audience's minds.

Then I use a headline swipe file full of the greatest ad headlines ever written to help me come up with a really good blog post title. This step is actually more important than it sounds.

If your blog title is no good, your blog post doesn't get read, retweeted, or shared. It's critical that you spend a lot of energy coming up with the best title that you can. I write these articles like case studies about how I've approached solving the recurring problem that I found on Quora. At some point in the article or at the end of the article, I slip in a link to one of my landing pages. Obviously, I'll choose a landing page that leads the reader to the service that most closely matches the services mentioned in the case study.

Here’s Where I Cross The Wires

Waiting around for a blog post to be “discovered” can be deflating. Even when I post it to your fan page and tweet about it, sometimes I'm still left with just enough interactions to question whether it was even worth the effort. That’s why I like to be a little more proactive with my inbound marketing.

I take that article and post it to my fan page, but then I also go into Power Editor and turn it into a newsfeed ad. I use a daily budget of $5 - $20 and target people with interests that match my buyer persona.

Here is an example of one of my ads...

Turning This Into Leads & Sales

These visitors click on our ad and go to our blog post, where they are given value up front. They are introduced to our brand without us asking for something first. Since we’ve done the research on popular questions and written a great piece that solves a common problem, many of the visitors love the article and look around for more of our stuff.

They become fans of our fan page...

They click our social share buttons on our blog...

They read additional articles and subscribe to our blog...

Best of all, they find those links to our landing pages, where they can become qualified leads.

Then We Take It To The Next Level

We also use retargeting codes on all of our pages. Not every reader will be ready for your services, but as inbound marketers, we know that's part of the deal. So the next thing I do is drop a retargeting pixel on my blog post page.

I use a company called PerfectAudience for this, and this gives me the added ability to display related ads to my readers after they leave my page. 

Here's an example of one of the retargeting ads that we use:

On average, we spend about $100 per week, using these two very low-budget advertising methods. I've been able to create more leads than I can handle, and my little boutique agency is packed full of clients each month.

All I’ve done is taken the same blogging and landing page tactics that we normally use, and poured a little gasoline on the fire. 

It's been effective for me, and I'd love to hear your feedback.