If your company runs a PPC campaign, it may be time to change the way you think about how you leverage PPC as a successful marketing tactic and start to think of it as more of an inbound marketing tool. 89% of advertisers buy ads for keywords that they already rank well for on Google.
When people think of PPC or Google advertising a lot of the time they think of ecommerce and direct sales, but think of all the other people who are doing their research, this can be a great opportunity for you to attract your prospects at the three different buying stages.
Research phase, establishing buying criteria and evaluating vendors
The problem with PPC is in the wrong hands it can become very expensive, not always because the PPC isn’t working but the site it is sending traffic to, does not have a sales engine.
1. Building the sales engine
If you do not have a sales engine on your website any traffic that PPC sends you could be wasted. You need to have correct call to actions, landing pages and lead nurturing to reap the benefit from PPC. If you are just starting out with inbound marketing I would forget PPC for the moment, first you need to concentrate on building your engine.
Once your sales engine is in place you can think about using PPC to drive traffic (the fuel) to your website. You would be much better leveraging SEO to generate your leads as shown in the graphs below comparing PPC to SEO courtesy of Hubspot.
However if you are already using PPC and it is generating you leads I would not recommend you just stop it. Once your inbound marketing starts to take effect you can begin to reduce your budget.
2. Why landing page are essential in every PPC campaign
According to Oil Gardner from Unbounce every marketing campaign needs to have landing pages and this is especially correct for PPC. Far too often people send all their paid traffic to their homepage and people are left scrambling to find the information they are looking for.
Make it easy for them by sending them to landing pages that are laser focused to the offer and demonstrate the benefits of the products or services, include short videos, testimonials and relevant calls to actions to help your prospects move through your sales funnel.
By creating landing pages you will find that you will have higher conversion rates which means more people will be entering your sales funnel. You can also optimise these pages to help increase conversion rates further.
3. Testing Feedback
PPC can be very good at getting instant feedback on a new product or service before launching. It can also be great to get feedback on a new whitepaper or eBook.
For example, writing a couple of chapters and seeing the feedback you get can be a great indication of what direction you should take your new content.
4. Test conversion by keywords
This is also a good idea if you want to see how well your keywords perform, a small PPC campaign can quickly show you which keywords convert and which do not. This can help you to discover the topics you should be writing about and which keywords to include in your content.
5. Promote short term events
If you have an event that is only running for a short period of time then PPC can be great at getting quick exposure and interest in your event.
6. Test new products
Similar to feedback PPC can let you test a new product or service to test the water before running a full blown campaign. This can save you a lot of time and money in the long run.
Conclusion
Inbound marketing is a very powerful way to attract and convert the right kind of people. PPC should not be forgotten about in all of this and you should test everything to see the kinds of leads it generates. It is also a great way to test new products and services and get instant feedback.
Now it’s Your Turn
What are the biggest challenges you face with PPC? Let me know in the comments below.