Title: less familiar to marketers just starting out.

Title: Why PPC Should be part of your Inbound StrategyorWhy is PPC (pay-per-click) gamechanger for your business? Successful Inbound Marketing Campaign should encompass a range of different elements, on various platforms and channels. While certain aspects, like blog posts and email marketing campaigns, are widely used and extremely well-known, others may be less familiar to marketers just starting out.

In particular, PPC (Pay-Per-Click), an advertising model, that target users with company ads based on their web search queries, can be an extremely valuable tool. How Does Paid Search Marketing Work? Paid Search marketing (also known as Pay-per-click marketing, PPC marketing, Cost per click marketing, or sponsored advertising) is one of the best ways to help business get consistent traffic from relevant search results and other websites. How it works: Let’s take an instance: 1. Consumer goes to google.

com and types in a search for “ left handed golf clubs” 2. Google will yield two main type of search results: a) organic results and  b) sponsored results3. Consumer will click on the most relevant ad for what they have searched for. Fact: People are more likely to click on organic results rather than sponsored results. However for highly transactional purchases or items like electronics, shoes, clothing etc. people seem to find more use out of the sponsored results as they are usually more targeted to specific product search queries. 4. By clicking on a sponsored advertisement the consumer is either taken to a landing page or the homepage of the advertiser’s website to find specific information about the exact thing they searched for.

Tip: Don’t send traffic to your homepage as it is usually not the most specific, targeted page on your website for each individual product or service you are selling and advertising. 5. On the advertisers’ end, when a consumer clicks on one of their advertisements, the advertiser will be charged for that one click. Click prices vary depending on the key phrases used to trigger the advertisements. Tip: To get an approximation of what a specific key phrase might cost you per click on Google, check out Google’s Traffic Estimator tool. https://adwords. google.

com/KeywordPlannerAnd that’s it. Pretty simple right? Well, almost. There are many other factors that go into these campaigns, but the basic model is this: 1. Advertiser picks key phrases that they want their ads to show up for.

2. Consumer performs a search, sees advertiser’s ad, likes it and then clicks on it. 3. The advertiser is charged for that one click. 4.

If advertiser decides to stop paying for key phrases then the advertiser’s ads come offline. or, if the advertiser decides that they want their ads to show up higher or more frequently then they increase their bids on their selected key phrases and also increase their daily ad spend budgets to allow for more clicks. Recommendation: Hire a PPC Professional to set up and manage your paid search marketing campaign for you. You will save time and money. You will also prevent yourself from having a bad experience with paid search marketing and thus, shunning it forever, which is a big mistake. Through PPC advertisers pay only when a user clicks on their ad; these clicks increase site traffic, and ultimately also increase the chances of converting these leads into buyers. Unlike outbound marketing, which involves pushing your message out to potential customers, PPC is inherently inbound, since it brings potential customers in. As with another inbound marketing methods, PPC has a high success rate and is quickly growing in popularity.

In fact, 74% of small businesses have invested in PPC or planning to do so in the near future. Unsure if PPC advertising is right for you? Below are five compelling reasons you should consider incorporating this strategy into your marketing campaign. 1. Immediate Traffic: An advertiser can realistically set up a PPC campaign on Google, Yahoo or Bing (Microsoft adCenter) in less than 30 minutes if they know their way around the platform. This translates into advertisers being able to get advertisements for their website on the first page of the main search engines within an hour of campaign setup and activation (again, given they know what they’re doing). This is great for brand new websites that have little to no exposure to the search engines already.

2. GeoTargeting and Ad SchedulingA couple great features that the top paid search marketing platforms provide advertisers with are geo-targeting and ad scheduling. Geo-targeting allows advertisers to select only specified locations all over the world to display their ads to. For example, if you had a local pizza place and only wanted to show ads on the search engines to cities that you could deliver your pizza to, then you could select these areas and your ads would only show for those specified locations. This allows your ad budget to go further as it is only targeted relevant locations. Ad scheduling allows advertisers to select specific days and times of the day to run their ads.

This is extremely helpful for marketers who are very familiar with when they get the best response from consumers or when they are able to respond in a timely manner. For example, if you have a Live Chat feature as the main component of your website then it might be more beneficial to run your ads during the hours that your Live Chat is online. 3. TrackingIt still amazes us that so many companies spend thousands of dollars each month on traditional marketing methods that have absolutely no tracking whatsoever.

Take newspaper advertising for example, full page can be relatively expensive compared to online marketing and worst of all, there is no accurate way to track how successful these expensive ads actually are. With paid search marketing, every ad, every keyword, and best of all, every dollar spent can be tracked down to the cent. This allows for very accurate ROI and ROAS tracking and makes paid search marketing that much more essential for any business. 4 RelevanceSearch results are all about relevance, or at least they should be. When someone does a search, they should only get the most relevant results for what they searched for. Google, having the most advanced algorithms to detect relevancy, do a fantastic job of delivering relevant results to users.

Google’s sponsored ads, like the natural results, are weighted very heavily on relevancy – from the key phrase to the ad text to the landing page. This creates the best user experience for the end user and also allows advertisers to target and receive very refined and qualified traffic. 5. TestingOne of the most overlooked advantages of paid search marketing is the ability to test online marketing campaigns through the vast amount of features and data that the available platforms provide to marketers. For example, if you want to know whether a specific product campaign you are launching is received well with a new marketing campaign, run the ads for at least 30 days, and then analyze the data to see if they are successful.

As a matter of fact, many professional SEO firms actually use or recommend paid search marketing as a primary step in determining the best key phrases for conversions and return on investment. 6. Targeted VisitorsWhen you manage an online business you need traffic, not any type of traffic but targeted traffic that can potentially lead to more sales and business. SEO is the first thing that comes to mind when talking about targeted traffic but we all know that it takes time to work so the next best alternative that can get you targeted traffic fast is PPC. With PPC, you can choose for which keywords to show your ads and these will appear on the top of Google search results (or in the right sidebar on the desktop).

We work with a number of businesses that make a lot of money online through PPC without having good organic rankings. Their success has to do with 3 things: The quality of products they are offeringHighly converting websitesHighly optimized PPC campaignsWe’re not saying that is easy to get these areas right from the beginning but this is the recipe for online success. SEO can certainly help with conversion optimization and PPC optimization but SEO alone cannot help a new business grow fast. It may take months or years for SEO to bring in targeted traffic while PPC is almost instant. Of course, the benefits from achieving high organic rankings are enormous but you need to be patient and have a good SEO plan to get there.

7. Retargeting: One of the most effective ways to increase conversions is to use retargeting. Retargeting or remarketing is a technique where you create campaigns and target people that have already visited your website but did not convert. For example, assume that you have a website selling engagement rings. Customers looking to buy engagement rings online go through a buying process which includes searching for the products they want and taking a look at different websites.

The timeframe to make a decision can expand to 30 or 60 days since the products are expensive and the available sellers a lot. This is a classic case where retargeting can generate great results. By adding a piece of code provided by Google Adwords, you allow these networks to identify through cookies people that visited your website but did not purchase a product from you. You then have the opportunity to create campaigns targeting those people and offer them incentives to re-visit your website and complete the purchase process.

You can learn how to set up retargeting here: Google Adwords https://support. google. com/adwords/answer/2453998? hl= en, and take advantage of this advanced feature of PPC campaigns. Conclusion: Launching and enhancing your website is only the first step. Implementing an ongoing marketing strategy that includes Pay-Per-Click advertising is an important part of small business success within the digital landscape.

In short, the takeaway message is that PPC is a must use tool for almost any business and if you don’t yet use PPC, you are missing out on big opportunities for growth. If any part of your PPC advertising efforts feels daunting or confusing please feel free to reach out to our team for guidance.