Many small and medium sized businesses might assume Pay Per Click campaigns are not an option for their particular business or perhaps think they are too complicated and expensive. However, there are many ways to “target” specific markets, geographic areas, times etc. to limit expenditures, improve effectiveness and reduce risks of Pay Per Click campaigns.
An effective Pay Per Click campaign can be thought of as a 'reverse' Direct Marketing Campaign. Instead of pre-selecting your market, and engaging in targeted direct marketing activities, you are pre-selecting "keywords" and "filters" to narrow the audience that sees your targeted ads. So, you only pay for those people, in your "curated" or "filtered" audience, who are interested enough to click on the targeted ads--Reverse Direct Marketing!
dlb PLAN- The strategy & execution of a PPC campaign is similar to that of other Direct Marketing campaigns. Engaging a Pay Per Click campaign not only generates new leads but is also a very beneficial exercise for developing a deep understanding of your buyers. The key steps for setting up an effective, and efficient, PPC campaign are:
- Target Market & Keyword Research (the “who & what”)
- Campaign Strategy (the “when & where”)
- Ad Creation & Landing Page design (the “how”)
The resulting insights & knowledge will have a positive impact on other areas of your direct marketing and sales efforts as well. The approach of researching and defining buyer “key words”, non-buyer “negative key words”, “geographic targets”, “day, time or seasonal based targets”, and then developing landing pages that “fit” the buyer keywords, creating ad copy that grabs attention etc. will not only lead to a very efficient Pay Per Click lead generation program but will also inform and improve all other direct marketing and sales efforts for your company. It’s worth considering.
THE RESULTS- Attending all of Google’s in-person Pay Per Click training sessions laid the foundation for a solid understanding of the new world of PPC. It’s an ever changing “digital” world and I’m thankful to also be rooted in the fundamentals of traditional direct sales and marketing as a “compass” for navigating it. Success should always measured in bottom line results–even in the “digital” world. I have recently translated all lessons-learned to combine Amazon’s Pay Per Click and Facebook Advertising to generate leads for a products offered exclusively on the Amazon Marketplace. The fundamentals are the same and results impressive (See Amazon Case Study).