4 Real Reasons Your Business Needs Pay-Per-Click Marketing

So you have set up your business. Your plan for global market domination, endless riches and financial freedom is ready to take off. Your motivation and drive have never been this high since you decide to be an entrepreneur! You know that your website is vital to get the clients whom you exist to serve – it is ready to do the job. But wait, with millions of websites out there, how will yours stand out above the noise?

You could always work on your search engine optimisation (SEO) to get to the first page of Google search results. However, getting to the promised land of the first page of search results could take months or even years, if it ever happens. Of course, all of your target customers are on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. But how do you get their attention, build up your connections and better still, get them to visit your website to discover your amazing products and services?

Don’t despair; Pay-Per-Click (PPC) may be the answer because it is the fastest way to get visibility and traffic to your business both on search engines and social networks. In this post, you will discover why companies invest substantial amounts of their marketing budgets on PPC. Doing PPC is a mixture of science and art. When done correctly, the benefits of paid search can greatly outweigh the costs by getting you more customers, which then gives you time and resources to develop your other marketing techniques, and ultimately grow your business.

 

Why PPC is important

Whatever you search for on Google, the first things you see on the results page are search ads. When you play a Youtube video, most of the time, you have to watch an advert first. On your social media pages, you have Promoted and Sponsored messages on your timeline. All of these are Pay-Per-Click adverts that businesses use to drive traffic to their website. Regardless of the platforms, businesses pay the when people click on the ads, hence the name. I will highlight the significant reasons that mean small firms and start-ups must allocate a budget to PPC to survive and have a chance to succeed in today’s digital marketplace.

Many companies in every sector spend substantial amounts of money to get their adverts in this valuable space in search results because it makes them money. Google continues to be able to make most of its services free because of its profits from businesses like yours spending hundreds, sometimes thousands, of pounds on paid advertising. The fact is PPC gets more customers and helps companies make more profits quicker than any other marketing technique.

 

Benefits of PPC

1. Instant visibility

We have come a long way from the 1990s when the internet had a few thousand websites. In those heady pre-dot.com crash days, businesses could rely on doing the right search engine optimisation things to ranking relatively highly on search results rankings. The small online management consultancy I worked for, one of the first 300 e-commerce companies in the UK, would regularly be found on the first page of results for our keywords.

Fast forward to today when there are millions of websites with the numbers increasing daily. The challenge for the consumer is too much choice. While for businesses, we struggle to get found online. We know that just 6% web visitors look past the first page for their search result. Furthermore, an Optify study shows that websites ranked number one received an average click-through rate (CTR) of 36.4 percent; number two had a CTR of 12.5 percent, and number three had a CTR of 9.5 percent. All This means that if you are not in the top three search results, you are as good as nowhere!

Have you noticed that the big companies, directories and job sites dominate the first page of nearly every search results page? The challenge for most businesses, no matter how incredible their SEO, struggle to be visible online because there is simply no room for us on this valuable digital real estate. As if the mountain is not high enough, we are in an age where Google is forever restricting the number of organic search results on the first page of results. They consign the 5 or 6 organically-listed businesses to the bottom half of the page, effectively out of sight and out of mind! Companies running PPC adverts and in the local pack dominate the top half of search results pages above-the-fold.

Combine the challenges we face on search results pages with the algorithm trickery that almost all social networks have adopted which ultimately filters what your followers and fans see your content organically. They magically restrict the reach of your posts so that you would be forgiven for celebrating if more than 2% of your followers see your content.

 

2. Cost – effective marketing

Marketing budgets are precious for most businesses. The hard-earned money allocated must be spent efficiently on techniques that bring the biggest bang for our buck! Again, nothing beats PPC here! Because you only pay when someone clicks on your PPC ads, you are paying for leads. Businesses can set the amount they are willing to spend (per click, daily and monthly) to fit their budget so you do not risk paying more than you can afford. A good strategy is to calculate the value of each customer you get from PPC ads (that is, the amount they spend with you). You can then relate that directly to the cost per acquisition for each prospect so that you are forever making more than you are spending – that is the essence of making a profit, which to small businesses is pure magic.

 

3. Soft conversions

 Most people think PPC is only good for getting clicks on adverts from paying customers. While you rightly want your adverts to get as many website visitors as possible, PPC has many other benefits even if they do not all buy your product or service. It makes complete sense. After all who doesn’t want 100% of prospects to get their debit or credit card out and make a purchase before they leave the website?

The reality is a bit less glorious, however. A vast majority of website visitors will not always buy from you the first time for many different reasons. Charles Nicholls writes on Business Insider that The visitor-to-sale website conversion rate currently averages 2-3 percent for most e-commerce sites. It’s a simple measure of the percentage of visitors that land on your site and purchase in the same session.

Kissmetric Blog findings that Approximately 96% of visitors that come to your website are not ready to buy back up the low conversion rates of most e-commerce sites.

There is no doubt many things that can be done to increase conversions. However, the truth is that people need to know a business and trust them before they go reaching for their bank cards. Building trust takes time, so it can be more beneficial to aim for soft conversions in which visitors may instead sign up to your newsletter, download resources, become followers of your social media pages and download your app. This type of conversion gives you the chance to nurture them and build a direct relationship with them that can lead to them making a purchase in the future. Some of the best brands kick-start this process by offering gated content, which visitors can get at no perceived risk, in exchange for their email address.

While conversions – monetary or soft is usually the ideal outcome for businesses, there is arguably much value from PPC helping a business build brand awareness alone. Going from being a startup that is completely unknown to consumers associating your brand with their needs is priceless.

4. Testing ground for your leads tap

As a business owner, there is often as much benefit in learning what does not work as much as learning what works. In this context, we learn from our campaigns regardless of whether they brought Return on Investment or not. All of the PPC platforms collect a tonne of valuable date in every campaign because website visitors leave a trail of information about our products/services, website, business, marketing strategy and collateral that we can analyse and use to make decisions about any future marketing campaigns. Understanding analytics information provides valuable information to make improvements to your website and business that can improve conversions going forward. I for one can admit that I always learn something from every PPC campaign that I run, which benefits my marketing campaigns for my business and my clients.

 

Moving forward

They say that the best time to fix the leak in the roof is when the sun is shining. The same logic applies to marketing for your business. Even when money is tight, especially when you are just starting off in business, it makes sense to invest some part of your marketing budget to PPC. You see, Pay-per-click is quite simply a Lead Tap that guarantees you returns on your investment, regardless of whether those returns are in the form of purchases or more likely in the intangible positive outcomes such as brand awareness, credibility, email addresses and newsletter signups.

By the time you become more established or have more money for marketing, you will be able to benefit from as a result of having learnt as much about what works and what you don’t want to repeat.

 

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