With all the hype around content marketing and social media, are pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns still relevant to digital marketing in 2016? Absolutely!
While SEO tactics and content marketing are important for building long-term marketplace dominance, these strategies won’t deliver overnight results.
PPC campaigns remain a critical component of any well-rounded marketing program and are especially important for building initial traffic for a new business. These campaigns rapidly deliver a high number of qualified leads, thanks to advanced targeting segmentation. Even better, since PPC can easily be tweaked in response to marketplace dynamics, PPC gives businesses the flexibility to go after new markets and clients while mitigating risk exposure.
Just ask Oleg Calugher, the co-founder of MyUKMailbox, a U.K.-based mail and package forwarding service for U.K. expats. Calugher used PPC campaigns to drive highly qualified leads to the company’s website. By targeting specific search phrases like, “UK mail forwarding” and “London package forwarding”, MyUKMailbox.com grew its business by x percent in y time frame.
Thanks in part to early PPC marketing success, MyUKMailbox.com has expanded its business, opening U.K. retail channels to international shoppers and forwarding mail and parcels to 200 countries. They also offer a Personal Shopper Service where staff can purchase goods for customers overseas called the “BuyForMe” service.
Read on to learn Calugher’s top PPC marketing secrets and tips for startup business success.
The More Specific, the Better
When most people hear “PPC,” they think of Google AdWords campaigns. And while these campaigns are useful, PPC campaigns are not just about search engine results. Industry-specific sites and social media networks are ground zero for highly targeted PPC campaigns. Use all the targeting tools at your disposal, including demographic, geographic and device-specific information, to craft an effective PPC campaign.“PPC is all about reaching the right customer at the right moment with the right ad,” said Calugher. “We use location targeting and keyword targeting to connect with UK ex pats abroad.”
The best PPC campaigns use long-tail keyword phrase combined with geo-targeting and device optimization to drive the most qualified leads directly to your website.
Tweak Performance Instantly
Unlike organic search, PPC results are pretty much instant. “You can start a PPC campaign on Monday and performance and conversion results by Tuesday,” said Calugher. “This instant feedback is truly invaluable. We were able to tweak our keywords instantly, optimizing performance without having to invest significant time or financial resources the way we would with on-page optimization.”Instant feedback is great, as long as you use it. PPC is not a set-it-and-forget-it strategy: your team needs to be ready to tweak PPC ads immediately based on campaign feedback. For maximum ROI, they require daily monitoring by experienced PPC campaign managers.
Align Ad Content with Landing Page Content
PPC campaigns can bring leads to your website, but the campaigns can’t force leads to convert to customers: that’s your job! The average landing page visitor decides in just seven seconds or less whether they’ll stay on your page or hit the “back” button on their browser. Optimize your landing page so leads immediately know they’re in the right place:
- Mimic PPC language and design on the landing page for a seamless experience
- Eliminate visual “junk” that crowds the call-to-action
- Summarize your unique selling proposition in five lines or less; use bullets whenever possible
“While we generated steady traffic from PPC campaigns, we realized early on that our landing page wasn’t doing a great job converting,” said Calugher. “Fortunately, since we monitored our PPC campaigns closely each day, we were able to spot the problem and immediately correct it. One idea we are playing with in the future is the use of a short, animated video to quickly explain how we work and build customer trust.”
Bottom Line
Today’s competitive marketplace demands an integrated strategy for effective lead generation and rapid business growth. And while PPC is certainly a quick-generation strategy, PPC is useful for the life of your business. Even when business is booming, PPC is there to keep driving leads and boosting revenue. From highlighting new products to advertising special seasonal cost savings, PPC should be a critical marketing channel for your brand.
Pay Per Click Image via Shutterstock
Aira Bongco
PPC can be quite scary especially if you are just starting out. But it is an art that can be learned with experience. It takes time to know how to make it profitable, but once you do, it gets easier.
Thank you Brian for the mention and a wonderful article 🙂 will have to share this with my friends on facebook 🙂 good job
It’s a HUGE help if you know how to manage PPC well. It can also be really budget draining if you’re not careful about it.
True that the more specific, the better, as you want to clearly identify and target your prospects and not hitting open fields. If its DONE right, surely it pays off in the future.
Great posts Brian! Will add this to my sharing schedule.
Cheers,
Tom
Hi Brian,
Great piece. PPC is like the trap all newbies fall into. I would love to see the statistics on how much of newbie revenue is taken from PPC from newbies every year!
I love this article because it’s actually educational, instead of promoting how easy it is!
Naomi
Great to see mention of alignment between PPC ads and the landing page (as well as some advice on simple, clean landing pages.) This is a key component of PPC that requires the website people and the PPC people work together. If you’ve got them in silos things aren’t nearly as efficient.
If you are in a competitive market, the landing page you use is the make or break it for your campaign, it is just too easy to go back to Google to find something better. This indeed is the most “common” mistake people make as they don’t get how conversion psychology works and convince themselves an investment in a good lander is a waste of money because there fairly expensive to create as it takes a special someone to do it right.
Easily 80% of your success is just having spent the money on a good landing page that has good direct response principals built into it. #2 Ad Copy #3 Keyword Selection