Most small businesses spend their marketing budget on SEO and website development, broadcast or print media, social media marketing, email marketing, and maintaining their storefronts in the hope of gaining more foot traffic.
In today's highly competitive market, a lot of small businesses must look for new customers, and turn those existing customers into loyal ones.
According to Forbes, if small businesses wants to generate more leads, it would be a huge mistake to start it off with SEO. For you to generate long term brand awareness (and results!) Forbes recommends that you start with an aggressive pay-per-click (PPC) campaign so that you can make your brand grow and generate long-term results.
In this post, we'll explore the five ways how PPC can help grow your brand:
Cost-Effective
According to Wilson Lin of Voy Media PPC Company,
“When your PPC advertising is managed correctly, smaller businesses can gain a higher ROI as compared to other forms of marketing. The most essential advantage of PPC is that you can measure everything through conversion metrics and precise data analytics.”
Therefore, when you spend more on your campaigns, you'll know what's working and what isn't. That way, you can better optimize your campaigns for the long haul.
Ideally, you should only increase your budget if your campaigns are profitable and then spend on search terms or keywords that will help you generate profit.
Having this degree of control is significant especially if you're just a small business with a limited marketing budget.
Quick ROI
Pay per click advertising has become a game changer for small businesses.
Let's say, you're spending a dollar on advertising, and it only generates $0.90 in sales. Then, you're suffering a negative return on investment. But if every dollar you spent generates $10 in sales, then your money in advertising is obviously well-spent.
PPC advertising might lead to increased overall costs in marketing, but the improvement in client engagement justifies the means.
For example, you're paying a rate of $1 per click, and one out of 10 users who click your ad ends up becoming one of your paying clients, helping you earn a profit of $100. Basically, your business just has to spend $10 (on 10 clicks) to drive a $100 profit.
Pretty impressive, right?
Data-driven Results
With PPC, everything that you do has a clear and measurable target. In fact, you can measure anything related to running your PPC campaign. From profits, costs, visits, clicks, and so much more.
From the moment that you start your PPC campaign, you immediately know how much you've spent, and whether or not you're generating a significant profit or loss.
Several KPIs and reports will help you with all the information that you need ‒ all the data that's important to CEOs and department heads.
Targeted Audience
Unlike other forms of marketing, PPC helps you precisely target your audience by utilizing location, keywords, along with specific times and days that your ads will be shown.
For a lot of small businesses, the ability to show ads to people who are more likely interested with their products and services is already a significant advantage, because it reduces the risk of spending ads on uninterested audiences.
What's more, it's especially useful if you're a small business because it has the option of targeting audiences by location. Therefore, you can benefit from it by directing your ads only to local customers that you want to target.
In fact, Google has stated a couple of times that research has shown that 3 out of 4 shoppers who come across local information on search results are most likely to visit a particular store.
Brand Awareness
When a small business utilizes keywords directly related to a specific industry, users who are looking for those keywords can see those ads.
Although these are general keywords, and might not create a lot of sales and conversions, it can help boost brand awareness and can help establish your business as an authority in your niche.
PPC campaigns help your small business, especially if it doesn't have a solid presence online to be noticed a lot more quickly, rather than improving site's SEO so that it will appear on top of the search results.
Fast Results
It's natural for every business to be eager to earn as much profit, as soon as possible. For this to happen, you need to focus your efforts on ads to get quick results on your marketing tactics.
PPC advertising is the fastest way to build an advertising campaign and then get a quick turnaround.
Over to You
When used the right way, PPC is the best thing that can happen to your business, no matter how big or small it is. Unlike other forms of marketing, you can generate fast results, control your marketing budget, raise your brand awareness, and get more leads.