Every marketer wants to open up the inbound marketing floodgates, or so they think. But, when you get down to doing inbound marketing what is tactical and what is strategic? This really begs the question: which inbound marketing tactics can you do relatively quickly and without too much effort versus those that require more effort but offer long term results potential?

Our parents taught us that anything worth doing is worth doing right. We were taught “if _____ was easy everyone would do it.” By no means am I suggesting that inbound marketing is easy. But, let’s look at some inbound marketing activities that might be considered tactical and those considered strategic.

Tactical Inbound Marketing

Pay-per-Click Advertising (PPC)

Some call this SEM. This involves setting up search marketing campaigns in Google Adwords or Bing whereby your ads are displayed for certain keywords for which you bid an amount you’re willing to pay each time someone clicks on your ad. Setting up one or two campaigns properly takes a matter of hours. Getting Google or Bing to approve them also takes hours. Generally within a day or two you can have a few PPC campaigns up and running. Some will argue that PPC is strategic. For those brands that make a serious commitment to PPC with ongoing monitoring and optimization it can be strategic. That said, PPC campaigns could be turned on and off based on need and budget.

Optimizing Current Your Website

Undergoing an “on page” optimization exercise of your existing website content is also tactical because it is focused on the existing content. Depending on the size of your website the effort may take days, or weeks or even months. The result may be improved discoverability of some of your website’s pages in search results, which could result in more traffic to your website.