Wouldn’t it be great, if there were a quick and easy way to generate high-quality leads? And better yet, what if it were inexpensive or at least cost efficient? That way, you only pay for what you need.
Actually, this ideal marketing solution exists. It’s called pay per click (PPC) advertising. PPC ads can help start-ups and small business generate qualified leads and quickly boost sales.
If you’re not using PPC, then it’s time to reconsider you marketing strategy. Here are three compelling reasons you should start advertising with PPC.
#1: PPC Generates High Quality Leads
– The major search engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo feature PPC ads, also known as paid search. Google dominates the search market, so obviously, it has the most popular PPC program – Google AdWords.
But, Bing and Yahoo also supply more than ample search traffic, so you shouldn’t ignore PPC advertising on these search engines.
In any case, the universe of searches for your products or services are vast. PPC advertising allows you to write ads that target your message to prospects who need and want your product or service. Namely, your ads target a specific demographic. That automatically increases your lead quality.
You accomplish that by writing relevant ads. And that’s done by selecting the keywords your prospects use to find your product or service.
Besides targeting a specific market segment, you can also target specific locations: locally, regionally, nationally or internationally. And you can even target specific times you want your PPC ads to run. They can run selected days of the week and certain times of the day.
This further ensures you advertise to the right segment or group of prospects. You’re no longer advertising to the masses. The more targeted your ads, the more click-throughs you’ll get, reducing your costs. With PPC, you’re now advertising more efficiently, but more on that below.
#2: PPC Ads are Highly Measurable
– When you want to know which PPC ads work and which don’t it helps that you can run split tests on your ads. Also known as A/B testing, you can run one ad and check its performance. Then run another ad to see how it compares. After selecting a winner in a comparison test, eliminate the loser and write another ad. Then run that against the winner.
Using this deliberate process, you can improve marketing over time. To get the best results, it’s best to run no more than two ads at a time. Use Google’s free tool, website optimizer, to run your split tests.
You can test for click-throughs (CTRs), which is a good starting point. As testing becomes more advanced, you can test for conversion rate as well as cost per conversion.
The bottom line: testing allows you to improve your CTRs and lower your costs.
#3: Control Costs with PPC Advertising
– As you know, most advertising isn’t cheap. Start-ups and small businesses alike appreciate this and keep a close eye on their marketing spend. That makes advertising with PPC ads even more valuable.
Looking at Google’s AdWords, businesses can bid for keywords while staying within budget. Some keywords are more expensive than others, but as more prospects click on your PPC ads, the lower the cost of future bids.
Google rewards you for writing relevant ads that generate high CTRs. So as you test and improve you ads over time, you’ll also benefit from reduced bid rates.
Additionally, as mentioned above, you can run your ads at times when it’s most effective to do so. If running an ad is better in the mornings, you can advertise, say, between 9:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. Similarly, if your prospects are online in the evening hours, you’d shift your run times to the evening.
Another way to reduce cost is by selecting certain geographical locations – those locations where your prospects are located. If you run an overnight delivery business and you’re located in the Northwest then you’d want to target your city and your region.
It doesn’t make sense to target customers in the south or east, if you only do business in the Pacific Northwest.
Is PPC Advertising Right for You?
If you want to increase the quality of your leads, and do it quickly and relatively inexpensively, then PPC advertising is tough to beat.
PPC advertising offers businesses flexibility and quick results. And it helps smaller companies compete against larger companies with deep pockets.
