Most businesses know that PPC marketing can drive their success, but not all are sure how to approach a PPC marketing campaign. There are many different elements to consider, so let’s explore a few handy tips.
Determine your goals
When you are planning your PPC marketing campaign, one of the first things that you need to do is to determine your goals. There are several common goals for PPC campaigns, including:
- Driving traffic: Driving traffic to your website is usually a top PPC goal. In the modern business world, your website is just about your most important marketing tool. It’s here that you’ll impress visitors with your products and content, but first, you’ve got to get them on your page!
- Improve sales and leads: Improving sales and leads is one of the most common PPC goals. Increasing traffic to your site is desirable, but what you really want is as many leads as possible.
- Improve brand awareness: Improving brand awareness is a long-term goal that focuses on boosting your reputation and establishing trust and credibility. PPC can support you to extend your reach and get people talking about your business.
Targeting Your Audience
Once you’ve determined what your goals are, you’ll need to decide how you are going to target your audience. Audience targeting usually involves a combination of social media and Adwords. It’s advisable to target your audience based on search intent. Search intent falls under three key categories, including navigational, informational, transactional. It’s important to make sure that the ads you display are appropriate for your sales funnels.
Social media advertising should be a key part of an effective PPC plan. When you show your ads on platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook, you can target your audiences based on detailed personas. Facebook has many different options for audience targeting, one example is ‘custom audiences’.
It’s a targeting feature that allows you to reach individuals who have expressed an interest in your products. There’s also a ‘lookalike audiences’ feature, allowing you to target people who are similar to your existing audiences.
Customer research
Your customer research is a key stage of your PPC marketing campaign. You need to find out what your audience wants and figure out how they search for it. For this stage of the process, you should look at your buyer personas; a detailed buyer persona will help you choose which keywords to use. If you need to improve your buyer personas, try looking closely at your contacts database. See if you can find any trends which show you how certain customers use and find your content. You can also interview prospects and customers to discover what they like most about your product.
Another way to enhance your buyer persona is to collect feedback from your sales team. Ask your team which leads they have frequent interaction with. Ask if they can make any generalizations about the customers who are most suited to your product.
Perfect your keyword research
To improve keyword research, you’re going to need the right tools. Luckily there are plenty of free options out there; these are some of the top picks:
- WordStream’s Keyword Tool: With Wordstream’s keyword tool, you can target groups of keywords, gain relevant suggestions, and put words into groups according to common themes.
- Soolve: Using Soolve, you can discover the most popular keywords on multiple different search engines. Soolve bases its answers on the initial keyword that you provide. You can also use Soolve to brainstorm new ideas. Simply type in an idea and Soolve will auto-generate a related concept of its own.
- Google Keyword Planner: Google Keyword Planner is the most popular tool for conducting keyword research. Here you can also access stats about monthly searches, cost per click, and the competition level. As well as keyword suggestions, you’ll receive synonyms as extra ideas.
Once you’ve decided on your keywords, you’ll need to organize your words into appropriate groups. With relevant and tight keyword groups, it’s far simpler to measure performance and design relevant ads.
Determine your PPC metrics
When it comes to PPC marketing, there are several different metrics you can use to measure your performance. It’s essential to understand which metrics are the most important and to include these as part of your PPC marketing roadmap. Some of the most important PPC metrics are:
Return On Investment
Return on investment is a simple metric that is vital to the success of your campaign. Ultimately, you want to gain a good profit on your marketing efforts over time. To boost your ROI, you should focus on reducing your CPA and increasing your conversion rate. You’ll need to set a strict budget for your PPC campaign and revise this budget regularly. Tweaking your spending every now and then is how you’ll make savings.
Conversion Rate
A conversion rate is one of the most vital PPC metrics. CR refers to the percentage of site visitors who end up converting. When we are talking about conversions, these could either be product sales, subscriptions, or another end goal on your site. Part of your marketing plan should focus on improving your conversion rates. You can enhance CR by:
- Using pop-ups: Adding a pop up to your site can help you to boost your conversion rates. Just remember to make an ‘easy to close’ pop up (otherwise people can get a little annoyed)!
- Zero distractions: A website with too much going on can increase bounce rates and negatively affect your conversions. Create a site that’s simple, clear, and easy to navigate.
- Use testimonials: People can be wary of buying a brand new product, yet lots of glowing reviews and testimonials will quickly change their mind!
- Improve your headlines: Improving your headlines is another way to boost your conversion rate. If users aren’t drawn in by a headline, it’s less likely that they will read the rest of your content. You can use A/B testing to try out different options.
- Try video: Using video on your site can help to engage your users, entertain them, tell your brand story, and drive leads.
- Value proposition: A clearly stated value proposition is another good way to increase conversions. Let your visitors know precisely how your product is unique and why it should be chosen over a similar product.
Click-Through Rate
Click-through-rate is a metric that monitors how many overall impressions you get vs how many clicks. There are a few different ways that you can plan to improve your CTR:
- Try timers: Using countdown timers can help to improve your CTR. It’s suggested that this is because timers create urgency, leading users to take action ‘before it’s too late!’
- Try ad extensions: Ad extensions are a fab way to improve your click-through rate. You could try using location extensions, (showing the distance from the user to your store). Review extensions are another popular choice to boost CTR.
- Use the main keyword in the URL: When you use the main keyword in the URL of your ad, this indicates to the readers that your ad is the most relevant result.
There are plenty of other PPC metrics to take into consideration from impressions to session duration and cost per acquisition.
What compliments a PPC Marketing Campaign?
Competitor Research
Analyzing the moves of your competitors is useful when creating your PPC marketing plan. It’s your competitors who you need to stay one step ahead of, so their own PPC strategies should inform yours. Of course, you’re looking to be better than your competitors, simply copying their strategy just isn’t going to cut it!
It doesn’t matter how much time you spend on your keyword research; it’s still possible to miss things. If you take a look at your competitor’s keywords, you could well find a move or two that you’ve missed.
SEO Marketing
SEO and PPC use different ideas; however, they do support each other. For example, it’s valuable to use data from your SEO marketing to help you with your PPC. Your SEO marketing will include keywords that are high performers. There’s nothing stopping you from using this data to drive the success of your PPC campaigns.
A PPC Company
To improve the success of your PCC marketing, it’s advisable to work with an expert PPC company. When it comes to PCC marketing, there are so many considerations to make, strategies to adopt, and metrics to track. With the help of a professional PPC company, you can supercharge your efforts and see an improved ROI.
A talented PPC service can support you to perfect your digital marketing strategy and boost your conversions. Most PPC services will be able to support you with your overall digital marketing strategy including SEO and web design too.
You might know a little about digital marketing, but best practices are developing all of the time. With plenty of competition out there, it’s wise to call in the professionals to help you to promote your business.
