You might not like and you may even refuse to engage in it but we’ve warned you already – paying for exposure will be insanely huge in 2016. That will mostly apply to content marketing but the old paid marketing tricks will remain under the spotlight, especially the star of today’s article – PPC. Pay-per-click has been a stable and popular marketing stunt for years – even for successful businesses.
Why so many brands use PPC? Well, exposure. And given the fierce competition for visibility in search results, many are using it because it works. That alone should have you already reaching for your wallet to pour some money on a PPC strategy. But if you still aren’t convinced, then perhaps these 3 reasons will show you why you should think of PPC for your small business.
Hey, stop right there! What’s PPC?
Alright, let’s start from the beginning. Pay-per-click is a form of advertising within the larger Search Engine Marketing (SEM) field. As a part of it, it’s one of the main ways your business has to reach to people making searches (especially through Google and Bing) related to your service or product. PPC basically shows your ads to people searching for specific things (your type of product, a specific service you offer in a specific area, etc.).
Its name is pretty self-explanatory. Whenever someone clicks on your paid ads, you have to pay a small fee. There are other ways you can pay for these ads (pay per impressions or pay per conversions) but they all work pretty much in the same way: your ads are shown and you only pay for visitors that actually interact with them. It’s a fairly direct way to engage with your target audience.
Now let’s go to the reasons why this apparently simple method should be among the tricks up your sleeve.
1 – It’s effective
PPC has proven amazingly effective in pretty much all industries out there. Regardless of size or goal, PPC marketing has driven fantastic results to all kind of businesses. The key to that success? To understand that PPC is a tool and not a magic spell. In other words, you can spend a gazillion dollars in PPC and still don’t make anything off of it simply because you’re using it wrong.
To prevent that from happening, you have to start little and adjust along the way. Optimizing your campaign will take time and some serious effort in measuring all the results you can. But if you do this right, you’ll see that the profits you make will be greater than the cost of the investment. Measuring clicks, impressions, visits and conversions is at the heart of a good PPC strategy. Of course, if you don’t know what any of that stuff means, perhaps you’d be better off with a SEO expert helping you out.
After your adjustments, there’s another essential component to success – administering your budget. Knowing which campaigns are profitable and investing more money on them is what you need to do here. Learning which campaigns to let go won’t hurt you either. You have to spend your money wisely because is easy to start overspending when PPCing.
2 – It lets you reach your audience more quickly
PPC, like SEO, is all about getting people to know you. But even that isn’t enough to justify the “pay” part in PPC. You don’t want just traffic. You should want targeted traffic with enough potential to become a business for you. Both SEO and PPC are after that but only PPC can deliver fast results.
Given that PPC lets you define specific keywords, demographic characteristics and other important criteria, you can make an effective campaign that reaches your audience and your audience alone even if your organic results suck (of course, the effectiveness of your campaign will also rely on how good your products, services and site actually are, but that’s another story).
While SEO will take you months to start showing off some results, PPC might give you a boost in a day’s time. Again, it isn’t a magic spell, even if the results feel magical. You shouldn’t, however, rely on PPC alone. SEO and PPC working together is the best strategy you can have, simply because they will complement each other to get your business to a broader audience.
3 – It combines perfectly with other marketing channels
PPC might get your more mobile installs for your app, more email data for your email marketing campaign or some valuable data about the keywords you should be looking at when developing a SEO strategy. What we are saying here is that PPC is a great team player that works amazingly well with other marketing channels, boosting their performance.
The only way to get good results when marketing your products and/or services is to use them all in various degrees. It’s the opposite of the infamous “all eggs in one basket” scenario and PPC – given its long history of actually working for many businesses – is an essential part of a healthy marketing scheme.
As you can see, 3 reasons are more than enough to show you that PPC should be among your top marketing priorities. And while there are many more things to consider when making a PPC campaign, having these in mind should get you in the starting line. If you still don’t want to use it, that’s your call – as long as know that you’re missing an incredible opportunity to make your business grow.
Photo credit: derosieres via Flickr / CC BY–SA 2.0
