Whenever you need to generate some quick leads and give a short-term revenue boost to your business, the first thing that comes to mind is Pay per Click Marketing. It is one part of digital marketing that gives you instant traffic on your website and provides you leads that have better chances of converting.
Another reason why businesses choose PPC over other methods is that it is one of the most cost-effective ways of reaching out to your audience.
The benefit of PPC Marketing, however, is not only limited to costs and short-term gains. This method can easily become a part of a comprehensive online marketing strategy and contribute to the long-term Branding and marketing needs of your company/organization. But, for that to happen, you need to develop a PPC strategy that is coherent and is made keeping in mind the larger vision of the business.
Here is a simple 5-step process that can help develop and execute an effective PPC campaign that has all the necessary components:
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Step 1 – Define your Goals
Before you start planning your PPC campaign, you first need to determine what you wish to achieve from it. Pay per click campaigns is mostly used for lead generations, but they can also be used for achieving objectives like raising brand awareness.
Whatever goal you wish to achieve be it increasing traffic on your website, driving sales, or brand awareness, there are specific types of PPC campaigns meant for each type of goal. If, for example, your objective is to increase traffic and generate leads for better sales, PPC tools like search advertising & remarketing are suitable; for e-commerce sites, provisions like Google shopping ads work very well.
On the other hand, if you are looking to achieve objectives like increasing brand awareness by reaching a target audience, techniques like display advertising and social media advertising will be appropriate.
If you are clear about what you wish to achieve from the campaign, choosing the right PPC techniques and figuring out other components of the PPC campaigns will become a whole lot easier. A PPC campaign is a sum of many parts like keyword research, budgeting, copywriting and landing page optimization, etc. And, if the goals that you set are crystal clear, all these activities will be carried out without confusion.
Step 2 – Map your Competitors
An effective PPC campaign is generally backed up by thorough research. One of the best and the easiest ways to research is to observe the campaigns being carried out by your competitors.
There are many ways in which competitor analysis can help you design a PPC campaign. Especially if you are new to PPC, it can help you understand the basic needs of developing an effective PPC campaign.
By carrying out comprehensive research on your competitors, you can create benchmarks for various components like keywords, Cost of carrying PPC campaigns and landing page metrics, etc, and ensure that your campaign keeps up with the standards. It can also help you identify opportunities that have not been exploited by your competitors yet, which may give you a winning edge over them.
Researching your competitors can also be helpful in creative work. You can make a note of all your competitor’s ads that are doing well and observe their creative components. You can take inspiration by looking at various ad copies and add your unique twist to create clickable pay per click ads.
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Step 3 – Keyword & audience research
Once you have mapped your competition, the next important research objective is to accurately identify the right target audience and in the case of search ads, keyword.
When it comes to search ads you need to have clarity of what people are looking for so that you clearly understand the intent behind search queries and you can identify keywords that will give the best results. Apart from Keyword targeting, Google ads also offer other audience targeting options like affinity audience, life events, remarketing audience, in-market audience, and custom intent audience, etc.
Once you have identified the right keywords and have a buyer-persona in mind, you can use both keyword targeting and audience targeting to develop a comprehensive PPC campaign.
If you are planning Social PPC campaigns for your business through social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, etc, your ideal audience can be targeted based on their demographics, interests, and other data collected by these platforms.
Step 4 – Finalize your Strategy
After you have established your objectives and are done with the research part, it is time to put all the pieces together. This is the time you put the campaign strategy on paper by clearly defining all its components.
The content framework, the roll-out schedule, the budget, and other important strategic aspects of the campaign must be put together in this stage.
While finalizing the campaign strategy, ‘clarity’ is the most important aspect to keep in mind. The team working on the campaign should be able to take one look at the campaign plan and understand the needs without ambiguity.
Step 5 – Create and run Ads
This is the stage in which you put on your creative hat and develop PPC ads that capture the attention of audiences. When it comes to search ads, you can experiment with multiple ad copies and see which one fits the best. For display advertising, you can try different visual elements to enhance the ad copy.
As important as the creative aspects are optimizing the PPC ads. While running a PPC campaign, you should ensure that you make the most of the money you have invested in PPC adverts. ‘Cost’ is one of the core benefits of PPC marketing, and not running an optimized PPC campaign pretty much defeats that purpose.
No ad campaign is over until its output has been assessed, and this factor stands true for PPC campaigns as well. Many metrics can help you evaluate the performance of the campaign like click-through rate, quality score, conversion rate, cost per click, cost per acquisition, and impression rate, etc.
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