Should PPC be in Your Marketing Budget?

You may be wondering why you should allocate any of your budget to PPC (Pay Per Click); after all, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has become more of a popular way to market. The truth is that pay per click can still be an asset to your company. This fact is especially true when it comes to acquiring new clients or customers.

What You Should Be Asking

  • Does my company have the resources to budget PPC?
  • Is the goal of using PPC to gain new customers, build your brand, or both?
  • Will the lead gained from Pay Per Click be less than the cost per customer acquisition?
  • Are you using PPC to enhance your SEO?

The key thing to remember if the cost of PPC is less than acquiring a new customer or the cost to hire an SEO expert then it makes sense to use PPC. The cost factor aside, there are many good reasons to use PPC.

Using PPC to Build Your Brand

There are a few ways you can use Pay Per Click to build your brand. In a purely marketing sense, this could be an expenditure with no return to create brand awareness. If you want to bring in new customers to your site quickly, nothing works better than giving them something for free.

A digital download or coupon is a great way to attract new customers. You can use this opportunity to have them fill out a survey to gather customer demographics. The drawback in using a poll in your PPC is that it may be too tedious for the customer and they will leave.

Give Aways

If your company’s goal is strictly to build its brand, then a giveaway along with PPC is the best route to take. Make sure whatever you’re giving away is related to your company’s core purpose in some way. If you are an ice cream company don’t give away potted plants, give coupons for a discount or free ice cream. It is important that your PPC ad and giveaway is relevant to your company. If you decide to expend the capital on this kind of campaign you need to realize its ROI may not be visible for weeks or months.

Using PPC to Enhance SEO

PPC campaigns can enhance your efforts to drive results from organic searches. The two work together very well. Pay Per Click gives you instant control of your targeting, ads, and landing pages. This kind of power is impossible with organic SEO campaigns. Which means that if you are not yet using SEO or if your SEO campaign isn’t going as well as you thought it would, PPC can show you the way to the results you want.

Just because you are getting a lot of traffic through SEO doesn’t mean that it is successful. The bottom line is it hasn’t converted visitors into customers than your SEO campaign is not working.

The Right Keywords

PPC can save you time and effort in determining if you are using the right keywords. If you are not getting high rankings for your site based on a term, spending your way onto the first page of Google can help you evaluate if a keyword is worth targeting organically. If you set up your PPC campaign to track conversions you can find out what percentage of potential customers who visit your site from a keyword convert into actual customers.

SEO Campaign

When a keyword has high search popularity but doesn’t convert, it is a significant indication that the keyword is not something that you should include in your SEO campaign.  PPC is, therefore, an excellent way to bolster your SEO campaign. Be sure to check often to see how different keywords work and then use the successful ones to be added to your SEO efforts.

Conclusion

It really comes down to what your company’s goals are and how much they can spend on PPC to see if it worth the cost.  Is your PPC strategy working for you? If not, MosierData can help. Contact us here or call 863-687-0000 to find out more. 

Spread The Word!

About the Author

Though his chief ambition is to one day control the entire Internet, Jim busies himself in the meantime running our little web development and marketing agency. He's a certified super nerd who ranks coding in old, outdated languages and watching Star Trek reruns just a bit too high on his list of fun things to do. Outside of work, Jim enjoys Hockey (Tampa Bay Lighning, to be specific), more genres of music than most people realize exist, riding his Harley (he calls it "two wheel therapy") and exploring the world through travel.