Digital Marketing is not just about paid marketing or pay-per-click marketing, per se. Today, no matter how big houses like Amazon believe in and practice PPC, there are many businesses that are running away from it believing it to be exorbitant. The common notion that goes behind businesses refraining from PPC is that it is costlier than other, more subtle forms of digital marketing, like content marketing, search engine marketing, social media marketing, etc.
Well, any digital marketing agency or even a PPC marketing agency will usually offer all of these services. But, then you must understand that all the elements of inbound marketing may have the same aim (leads, conversion, and re-conversion), but they do not have the same function. While each element is right and effective, not all of them are suited in all situations. There are some scenarios where only content marketing would work, some that need SEO, some that need SMM, some that need all of these, and some that need PPC to speed up the process for all the rest.
PPC or pay-per-click may sound very much inorganic to the believers of organic lead generation and conversion, but let’s face it. There are always going to be marketing situations that will necessitate PPC. And, trust me, there is no reason why you should feel bad about using PPC. Even the bigwigs like GoDaddy use it.
So, here are 6 marketing situations when PPC is the best bet:
1. When Startups Need Results
If you are running a race against time, PPC is for you. And, since it is the case with most startups today, it makes all the sense for the startups to go in for paid marketing. SEO, content marketing, SMM and the like are great tools, but they deliver results only in the long term.
Agreed that it takes the time to break even, but PPC adverts are one effective medium to speed up this process from say, 2 years to say, a year or even lesser. Every business banks on results and expects returns on investment. However, for startups, breaking even is a bigger challenge than increasing the ROI. In the short term, it is PPC that can take your online game a level further in a shorter span on time than other media of inbound marketing.
As for the businesses that are already established, PPC adverts can still come in handy. It’s a month left to the year ending, and you need to achieve the sales targets. How do you do it? By investing in paid ads that promote sales or great offers which can promote your products/services. None but paid ads have the power to come to the top of the first result page real quick to let you achieve your sales targets real quick. They can get you massive leads and higher conversion rates.
So, when you need a high number of sales in days that you can count on your fingers, PPC advertising is what you need.
2. When Someone Else is Banking on Your Name
So, how often has it happened to you that you type the name of your brand in a search engine, but what you see in the result is an advert by some other company with the same name? Trust me, I have been there, and it is not a pretty place.
When that happens, it actually means that someone else has outbid you on your very own name. Hurtful, but true! There are businesses which do that on purpose. It is like stealing your identity or sorts. Your brand’s ad should be the one that must pop open when users perform the brand search.
All it will take for you to kick out this kind of spurious business stealers is, making some sanctions for PPC in your marketing budget. Setting a small budget for paid ads can do damage control almost immediately if your competitors are targeting you with the same name paid ads. But make sure that the campaign runs on as many variations of your brand name as possible. And, don’t miss out on misspellings either. The bids you make for these will not be very exorbitant because you aren’t bidding on other high competition keywords.
Why you can’t beat it with SEO is, pretty simple. SEO will work for you only in the long run. Google AdWords or Bing Ads take only an hour or two to set up. Even if your campaign is complicated, a good PPC agency will take only a few hours. The bids work as quickly as the setup and deliver results in a day or two. Depending on the results you can keep making changes to your ads and the campaign too.
3. Tracking the Effectiveness of Your SEO Efforts in a Short Span
So, you are investing a great proportion of your marketing budget in SEO. Great is that! But, while your SEO goes on to invest time and effort in keywords to target a particular audience, do you actually know how your audience reacts to a particular keyword? Also, do you know what they had been searching for before they land on your website? Do you know what your target audience’s preferences are; how they behave and what they actually buy?
If not, you cannot know if your SEO is going great. The conspicuous results of SEO become visible only in a matter of months. Running a paid ads campaign can give you access to all this and more information about how your keywords are performing and how your audience is responding to them. It can substantially inform your SEO strategy not only in the short run but also in the long run. By using tracking tokens you can look at the data contained in the CRM and see what kind of leads and sales are attracted from what ads.
The keywords that present the highest click-through rate (CTR) are the ones you should base your SEO strategy on. Since such kind of observation can be done in 3-4 weeks of a campaign, it can actually make your SEO steady within a short frame of time.
4. Finding the Perfect Audience
If you know your audience, that’s very good. But, what if you do not? Even if you know the location you are targeting, it can be a challenge to know which type of audience may actually be interested in buying your product/service. Paid ad campaigns through AdWords are, in fact, a flawless way to get this done. Bidding on highly relevant keywords will fetch you the most clicks from searches. So, all you need to do is study data from the ads that have the highest clicks. This kind of bidding on the most relevant keywords actually gets you the attention of the most relevant audience.
5. Gaining Local Visibility
If you are a service based company or a product-based business that could benefit a lot from the local market, you should definitely invest in gaining local visibility. Well, you are doing local SEO and social media. That is all fine. But, you are actually not leveraging the biggest scope for gaining local visibility through searches.
Suppose you are a restaurant or a travel agent in Michigan, you’d rather look for clients in your local area. Also, Google searches go as advanced as letting the users find places near them – “gas station near me” or “diagnostic lab near me”. In that case, the only way to stay on top of the SERP (search engine result page) is paid ads. You also have the prerogative of showing your ads only in particular locations that can go down to the minutest location on the GPS. You can even exclude certain locations to make sure that you do not spend on a market where there is no potential.
6. When You Need Effective Leads through Social Media
Social media does seem to possess endless powers in the present scenario. PPC, you must remember, is not only about Google Ads and Bing Ads, but also about social media ad campaigns. Social media is accessed by a large number of audiences world over. If you are familiar with Google or Bing Merchant Centers, running ad campaigns on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram should be easy for you.
These networks work on demographic data out and out. This is how Facebook and Twitter show content to its users, based on their past and recent preferences and activities. And, this is how you can leverage the power of social media too. With this data, your ads will be visible to those who care for it, who have been interested in it before, who have similar preferences as those who have already interacted with your existing ads. Since this kind of advertising does not work on searches, you have a greater chance of using this demographic data and making your ad appear to the most likely audience.
You social media effort may have been working well otherwise, but if you want lead generation from here, PPC is indeed the best bet.