As a business owner, it’s important that you recognize the undeniable power of PPC marketing. You’ve no doubt heard about it, amongst a slew of other marketing techniques that are pushed as “necessary”. Before we get into different reasons that PPC marketing is essential for business growth, let’s define exactly what it is.
Simply put, pay-per-click marketing is a strategy in which businesses can buy listing space (advertising space) on a search engine to have their page or site appear near, and ideally above, the organic search results. If you’re up against competition that isn’t utilizing this form of marketing (or failing at it), you can gain a powerful, financially rewarding edge.
How Does PPC Marketing Work?
Being one of the fastest marketing strategies that companies can employ (more on this shortly), the process of setting up a PPC campaign is fairly simple. First, you have to decide on which keyword(s) you want to target and rank highly for in search engines.
Second, you build your campaign for the keywords you’ve selected through Google AdWords and enter the bidding stage. Now, this is where things can get a little tricky and a lot of companies overstep their budgets. Depending on how competitive the keywords are, the bidding price can swing from outrageously affordable to budget busting in no time.
As long as you’re the top (or one of the top) bidders for the keywords you’ve built a campaign around, your advertisement will begin popping up in search engines with prime real estate that can begin immediately drawing targeted traffic to your landing page and getting inbound leads.
Common Mistakes That Are Easy to Avoid
PPC for business is one of the most lucrative tools that companies have at their disposal, yet so many fail to successfully utilize it. One of the biggest reasons that companies leave with a bad taste in their mouth comes down to the keywords they targeted.
Targeting Competitive Keywords
As we touched on briefly above, targeting highly competitive keywords is the equivalent of entering a bidding war with Warren Buffett. When there’s a lot of bidders for the same keyword, naturally, the cost per click will begin to go through the roof. This is a surefire way to rapidly diminish a campaign’s ROI and burn a hole through your marketing budget.
Performance Tracking
We’re going to talk about this more in-depth shortly, but without tracking the performance of a PPC campaign, you might as well be gambling blindly with your marketing dollars. PPC is one of the easiest marketing strategies to track and optimize.
Failure to Optimize
Even if you have the number one spot and an awesome product or service for consumers, if your ad copy sucks, it’s not going to matter. Too many companies only focus on raking in traffic. Go for quality over quantity, that’s what gets the sales and makes money.
Here’s Why PPC Marketing is a Business Essential
1. It’s Easy to Measure
As a business, you already know the importance and power of properly tracked marketing campaigns. Unlike the measuring difficulties that other marketing strategies face, PPC campaigns give you all of the tools and metrics that you need in order to track, adjust, and optimize advertisements for the highest conversion rates.
Having this ability removes a lot of the guesswork and ultimately saves you precious marketing dollars. Additionally, not only does it keep your ROI healthy, but it also gives you the unique ability to track and learn about your target audience and the way they interact with your content.
2. Flexibility
With other popular marketing strategies, it generally takes anywhere from weeks to months before you start getting results and effecting a change. Google AdWords allows you to set up a campaign and launch it within as little as 24 to 48 hours. It’s perfect for time sensitive offers or when you simply need immediate traffic.
You also have the ability to customize the campaign down to the finest details. However you want it to look and feel when it’s seen by consumers, you have the power to make it happen. Even more important, you’re easily able to make changes mid campaign in case something needs a little tweaking.
3. Market Testing
Being able to get almost instant results from PPC campaigns kicks the door wide open for market testing. Before investing in a new product or service, SEO campaign, or whatever you come up with, it’s always a good idea to test the target market and make sure it’s viable and worth pursuing.
Pay-per-click marketing makes it easy to test the water before going all in. You can gauge the interest and response from consumers, and even try out keywords for use in other SEO campaigns.
4. Get an Edge Over Competition
No matter what your business is, you’re going to have competition. If you absolutely need to rank first for a specific keyword that your competition is strongly dominating, PPC strategies are perfect for getting the upper hand.
Even if they’re comfortably seated with years of organic SEO content, a well placed PPC ad can easily begin siphoning off large chunks of their traffic. If the competition is too fierce, don’t dwell on it and try out some other keywords. In the online world, there’s always an opportunity ripe for the picking.
5. Target Your Exact Market
Fitting in with the unique flexibility PPC marketing allows, you can also single out specific target markets and niche groups. You can customize campaigns by location, time of day, demographic, and even employ retargeting ads to collect some of the low hanging fruit that’s already been to your website or landing page.
Where do PPC Management Companies Fit In?
As easy as we’ve made all of this seem, the harsh reality is that most companies and their marketing departments simply don’t know anything about AdWords management or how to build a good PPC strategy. There are dozens of moving parts that all need to align in order for a campaign to be successful and effective.
We exist to help companies build custom PPC strategies from the ground up. Everything from keyword research and competitor analysis to ad design, tracking and optimization, we’re here to give you the extra help and ensure your marketing dollars are going the furthest. Schedule a consultation.
