The world of paid advertising may feel daunting, there are many ways to utilise it as part of your overarching digital marketing strategy – and in many ways, it really should be something that works in tandem with your SEO to complement your marketing efforts. You will find several articles arguing about whether to invest your time, efforts and money into PPC or SEO… but really we recommend leveraging them both.
PPC can help you achieve many of your business goals, often providing instant results and producing data that can be used to project what future campaigns could bring. A huge benefit of PPC is that it can be measured and tracked, meaning that the data provides you with the information you need. You don’t need to second-guess a PPC strategy, the results speak for themselves. Whereas SEO can be a slower burn and is something that needs to be tweaked and changed regularly over a long period of time to bring a return in investment, PPC is instant. It delivers.
Another benefit of PPC is the control you have over your campaigns. You set the budget, how long you want your ads to run for and you can tweak and change the settings at any point. It’s something you can evolve and adapt over time. For example, you may start with a lower budget search ad campaign and increase your budget over time if the results are pleasing. On the other end of the spectrum, you may decide to abandon a campaign you don’t feel is delivering the results it should be.
You can use a PPC strategy to attract brand new visitors and increase brand awareness, which is the aim of the game if you’re using search ads. However, you can also use it to bring back previous users – in the form of a remarketing strategy. It’s a common occurrence, for example, for online shoppers to add items to a basket, only to abandon the cart. A remarketing campaign can work effectively at coaxing those users back online to pick up where they left off and submit their order.
It’s important to remember that if you have decided to add PPC to your marketing strategy, your web presence needs to be up to scratch. The success of your ads relies heavily on your website, social media and other platforms housing good quality content and to be optimised well for search engines. As with organic search results, your PPC adverts will only be served to an audience if it is the most relevant answer to a query. If your web presence isn’t good quality, you’re setting up your PPC to fail, particularly if you’re in a highly competitive industry.
Want help with creating a cost-effective and smart PPC strategy? Get in touch with us today.