Small Business Marketing Using Pay Per Click
Hi, Happy New Year. It’s January 2nd, 2016 and today I just want to talk to you a little bit about pay-per-click marketing for small businesses. Pay-per-click is frequently called PPC. A lot of times people think of it as Google AdWords and there are a lot of different pay-per-click options out there, but for the most part, pay-per-click and Google, in my mind, Google AdWords, are synonymous.
Pay-per-click marketing is something that you can use in conjunction with search engine optimization to get your company out there to targeted buyers who are looking for your particular product or service. The main reason why small businesses should consider using pay-per-click marketing is quite simply, it works. It’ll bring in customers that you might have otherwise missed with traditional advertising and marketing. It’s something definitely to consider, so we’ll talk a little bit about that.
The first benefit that I want to talk about is low investment cost. You can set up a pay-per-click campaign by yourself, though you probably won’t optimize it correctly, pretty quickly and cheaply. That’s one thing versus some other traditional advertising mechanisms for a small business, a lot of times it requires sizable investment. You can set a pay-per-click one up with basically $100 or so. At least get something started. You get instant results. You’ll know pretty quickly whether or not it works or not, and you can target specific locations. If your shop can only service people within five miles of an area, you can just target your pay-per-click advertising there, so you’re not paying for advertising that’s in other parts of the county or area. The other thing is you get accurate and real-time tracking, which is also very useful.
There are a lot of different pay-per-click networks out there. You’re probably familiar with Bing, etc. I’m just going to talk about AdWords, but mainly try to talk in general terms. The first thing, what you want to do is you want to have a budget. It’s very important to have a budget when you’re doing any kind of marketing. When you’re doing pay-per-click advertising and you obviously want to set a budget per day, since that’s typically how they do it, so if you want to spend $300 a month, you’re going to spent about $10 a day in pay-per-click.
After you’ve established a budget, you’ve really got to research some keywords and create a list. It’s really probably the most daunting task that you do as part of your pay-per-clicking. You need to do that, so you can research different keywords and try to figure out what people are looking for, how they’re looking for it, and also, related words. There are a bunch of different examples I could talk about, but let’s say you’re a florist. You want to put “florist,” “florist’s website,” “florists in the state,” “gifts,” “funeral items,” “things to buy a person you love” — all those kind of things to start developing your list of keywords that you’re going to be using.
Once you have your list you’re going to have to eliminate a few of them so they can have a list of the most effective keywords. You can have 500 different keywords to start, but you really want to focus on a core list of ones that are probably going to work fairly well.
You’ve got to make sure you have content to support the keywords. Don’t just have a keyword and then have on your website nothing related to the keyword.
For every keyword you’re going to have to bid. The way the pay-per-click ads work is it’s kind of an auction. You’re going to bid against other people who want to advertise for that particular keyword and depending on some factors of the quality of your ad, the quality of your landing page, the quality of your keywords, etc., that’ll impact your final price that you bid for that particular ad.
This is done all automatically since you’re not going to be sitting there monitoring all these ad words.
You want to write outstanding ad copy. One of the true things you do is you want to have keywords in the ad, but you don’t want to necessarily always sacrifice quality ads. We’re all people. We all react to good advertising and good copy, so that’s very important. That’s where somebody like me, a marketing professional, comes in. You’ve got to do that.
Make sure you have your headlines with as many keywords as possible, but also try to be creative as well at the same time. You’re also going to have to have a creative landing page, not a creative, but an outstanding landing page that really ties into the keywords you’re advertising for. Don’t talk about, “We offer free cat grooming” and then on the landing page that the ad takes you to it talks about dog grooming or cat products, it never mentions cat grooming. You really have to do that there.
You got to track your campaigns. Some other tips I want to talk about is, you’ve got to constantly be optimizing your keywords again and again. You can’t just set it up and leave it. You need to go back and look at it like you’re farming. You always have to do something. Make sure your target audience is there. You want to be targeting the right audience.
I think a lot of times, when possible, you should think about your location in those keywords. If you’re a florist in Putnam County, for example, make sure you have a “florist, Putnam County” in there or if you’re in a town, that kind of stuff.
You’ve got to generally be honest with your keywords. Don’t put something in a keyword and not have the actual product or service on the landing page. With all the limited space you have, you try to tell as much as you can about your business for people. Also you can do this with AdWords, you can see what time of day your ads seem to be most looked at.
I think that’s about it, what I’m going to talk about today. If you’re looking for some help in doing your pay-per-click advertising efficiently and effectively, we do that as part of our overall marketing plan and marketing plan implementation for clients. It frequently is a very useful tool we can use to not only get clients business, but help us develop better materials to reach audiences in other advertising mechanisms.
Thanks. Hope you had a good New Year’s and we’re looking forward to working with you in the future.
