What are the six pillars of inbound marketing and why are they important?

The six pillars of inbound marketing are a set of activities that, when deployed together, create a multiplier effect on marketing effectiveness.

Inbound marketing centres on drawing visitors to your website and then converting those visitors into customers. The key to the six pillars is that they all work in unison. Remove one of the pillars, and you severely weaken the structure and effectiveness of your inbound marketing strategy overall.

What are the six pillars?

The six pillars consist of:

1. Content - blogging, guides, interactive content
2. Email marketing
3. PPC (Pay-per-click advertising)
4. PR
5. Search engine optimisation (SEO)
6. Social Media

The great thing about the six pillars is that they complement and elevate each other. Each pillar grows as one of the other pillars is put to work.

For example, a strong social media presence helps aid your visibility in search, a good blog post gives you content to boost your social media profiles, a good press release helps elevate your return on your pay-per-click advertising spend, and so on and so on.

Case Study: PortfolioMetrix

From accessing our experience in managing marketing automation, to turning content production into a fully formed content strategy, PortfolioMetrix plugged into the core of our capabilities.

The challenge for a lot of businesses is capacity and budget, and yet, if you only do one activity and not the other five, you seriously impact the ROI of the one you are doing.

For example, if you do PPC, but don’t work on your site’s SEO, then you will have to spend more on clicks for people to find your website. PPC should be used to complement your website’s SEO, if not, your PPC becomes the only means for people to find you and, long-term, that’s very, very expensive.

The solution is to apportion whatever level of budget you have effectively, but not necessarily evenly. Remember, not all activities cost the same. By doing what you can in-house, you can reserve budgets for the more technical or time-sensitive activities that existing resources cannot support.

At the end of the day, if you deliver on all six pillars, you will generate a larger return on your marketing budget thanks to the multiplier effect. Only invest in one, and that one becomes more expensive and may fail to generate the return you had predicted.