Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing works exactly as the name implies. You pay to show your ads to potential customers until you get a predetermined number of clicks. Banner ads, search engine ads, and online video ads can all fall into this category depending on the service provider you use. And while PPC marketing does have its fair share of limitations, its strengths still make this type of marketing exploring. Here are some of the reasons why you should give PPC marketing a try.
1 – Understand your audience
One of the main advantages of PPC marketing is just how targeted it can be. Your experience will vary depending on where you place your ads, but digital marketing behemoths like Facebook and Google all offer a shocking amount of targeting options for brands looking to place online ads. You can target ads based on age, location, interests, sexual preference, occupation, and much more. If you are interested in exploring PPC in Newcastle, you can explore the tailored advertising solutions available in that area as well.
This is useful if you’re running a marketing campaign with a very specific target audience in mind. But it can also be useful if you have a new brand and want to figure out which type of client you should be targeting. Working alongside an experienced data agency with PPC marketing experience, you can set up multiple small marketing campaigns in order to gauge how different target demographics react to your product and sales pitch.
Learning about your audience in this way can not only inform your future PPC campaigns but also any other marketing efforts you have in mind.
There are, of course, a wealth of other options when it comes to trying to understand your audience. Market research and customer surveys are two popular ones, and just monitoring the behavior of consumers who visit your website can also teach you a lot about which parts of the site interest them more. And while all of these methods can work well on their own or in conjunction with PPC marketing, none of them can yield results quite as fast as PPC campaigns. Nor are they as affordable.
Keep in mind that PPC campaigns can drive up sales on top of giving you data, meaning it’s entirely possible for you to end up learning more about your customers and turning a profit at the same time.
2 – Sharpen your sales pitch
Another use of PPC is to help you sharpen the company’s core message, sales pitch, and landing page. You can try different variations of all of the above and use PPC campaigns to test how the changes you made affect conversion rates and consumer behavior and try approaches meant to boost your results with specific demographics. It’s a much better way to figure out which banners, slogans, and sales strategies work best for your business. And it is much more direct than trying to figure out which direction to take internally through discussions among your team members. Instead, you can just pick the 3 or 5 best options, and let regular web browsers decide which one is more “click-worthy”.
3 – Get fast and reliable results
While other forms of marketing can take weeks or even months before they show results, a strong PPC marketing campaign can be set up in a couple of hours. And depending on how broad your target audience is, the campaign may be done in a matter of minutes. It all comes down to how you set it up.
The bottom line is: PPC marketing allows for quick and predictable results with plenty of room for customization. You will get exactly as many clicks as you paid for, and if you know your store’s conversion rate, you can even predict how many sales you’ll likely make before you even start the marketing campaign. This level of reliability is rare in traditional marketing, and it is one of the reasons why digital marketing spending is expected to grow.
4 – Manage your workflow
It’s possible to set caps on how many clicks you want to receive every day or every hour. This ensures that the inflow of new leads won’t overwhelm your customer support team. Of course, customizing your campaign also allows you to make it so that your campaigns are only active during your team’s business hours. This ensures you won’t be getting a bunch of leads right when your team isn’t there to act on them.
All of this means that if PPC marketing is your company’s main source of leads, you can tweak the settings of your campaigns in order to match the workflow of your company. This helps you get the most out of each cent spent on your campaign.
5 – Limit traffic to your page
Being able to decide how many clicks your PPC campaign will receive each day can also help limit how much traffic you’ll receive. There’s also an almost zero risk of a PPC campaign going viral and leading to a sudden influx of traffic.
Getting sudden spikes in traffic can be a good thing for some businesses, but there are reasons to want to avoid it. If your order fulfillment operation can’t handle large orders or you’re trying to keep your sales representatives from being overwhelmed, having a slow and steady inflow of web traffic can be advantageous. And PPC allows you to get this type of traffic reliably.
6 – Control your spend
The costs of PPC marketing are predictable by nature. You can pay in advance for your campaign, and it said campaign will continue going until you have gotten enough links to match the amount of traffic you paid for. And while in a perfect world advertising companies would be equally as responsible and precise with your money, many business owners end up surprised by hidden fees and expected costs in their marketing bill at the end of the month.
7 – Data tracking
Data is incredibly useful in the digital marketing world. It can help you measure how well your marketing efforts are going, as well as helping you decide which areas you should improve. And PPC campaigns usually generate a ton of useful data, on top of helping you understand what said data means and how to progress from there. This is a service that PPC marketing companies are basically forced to provide since data is the best way to prove that they have actually done what you paid them to do.
The cloud-based nature of these platforms also means that there is little risk of you losing your data due to a hardware failure. As long as you still have your password, you can log into your account anywhere and see both how your current campaigns are going and what the results of previous campaigns were.
Of course, PPC service providers can’t keep track of data related to your sales and profit. But there are third-party software solutions out there that allow you to combine both data sets for a clear picture of exactly how much you profited from previous campaigns.
