Pay Per Click Marketing

ULTIMATE GUIDE TO PPC MARKETING STRATEGY FOR SMALL BUSINESSES

PPC marketing strategy for small businesses is an essential strategy to grow quickly. If you are a small business with a website looking for leads through online marketing, terms like PPC marketing strategy and PPC marketing agency won’t be new for you.

But what exactly is PPC (Pay-Per-Click) marketing? How will it help your small business in achieving its goals?

Read the Ultimate Guide to PPC Marketing for Small Businesses by Clickworthy to get all the answers.

What defines a Small Business?

In the US, a small business is classified as one with less than 500 employees, while in Canada, a small business is a firm that has between 5 and 100 employees.

Whatever their definitions may be, small businesses form a significant part of the economy and employ most of the workforce in both the US and Canada. In the US, they use 49.2% of the total labor force, while they employ 64% in Canada.

Why is Digital Marketing essential for a small business?

Digital marketing helps reach customers, engage with them, and evaluate each digital touchpoint’s efficacy in their buyer journey. Never before scenes took place during the Covid-19 pandemic, as small businesses increased their adoption of digital marketing with:

31% increase in the use of social media and video platforms
24% increase in digital ads (PPC marketing)
22% increase in SEO spends

What is PPC marketing?

PPC or Pay per Click Marketing is an online marketing strategy where the advertiser pays a fee on every click on the ads. It is a paid service on Search, Display, and Social by platforms like Google and Facebook to provide website visitors vs. SEO, a long-term strategy to attract organic visitors.

Let’s say you own a shoe store in New York, and Molly is searching for shoes online. Molly searches on Google, “shoe store in New York,” and sees the first four search results, which are ads (Marked as “ads” by Google). One of these ads could be yours, which means Google has served your ad to Molly. But if she doesn’t click on the ad, you don’t have to pay Google anything! Only if she clicks on it and takes some action (e.g., visits your website) do you need to pay for it.

PPC plays a significant role in helping your small business reach the right customer at the right time, and at the right place, like the Google search results page.

The reason PPC marketing (especially Google AdWords PPC) is essential:

97% of consumers go online to find local products and services
Appx. 70% of all online searches are Google searches

If done right, PPC marketing strategy can give a high return on your ad spend and help grow your small business.

Are Google Ads and PPC the same?

The simple answer is No; they are not. Google Ads is an advertising solution offered by Google to help you reach customers who use Google Search, Display, YouTube, and other Google Network products. On the other hand, PPC is a broad term that includes Google Ads and solutions from various service providers, such as Amazon, Facebook, Bing, and Affiliate marketers that allow you to pay-per-click (i.e., pay only when a user clicks on the ad).

Google is the world’s largest search engine and where most users go when online to accomplish tasks or search for information. Hence, a small business must use Google AdWords PPC to present their ads on the Google search results page when users enter queries related to their business. Google enjoys an overwhelming 89.04% market share in North America due to its large, extremely active user base. So, this is where businesses should direct their PPC spending.

Why Should A Small Business Owner Use PPC Marketing or PPC marketing Strategy?

In marketing, the three stages of a customer’s purchase journey are – awareness, consideration, and conversion (like purchase/app download/newsletter subscribe, depending on the nature of your business). PPC, especially Google AdWords PPC, can help you achieve several business goals across the funnel:

Awareness

Generate leads for your business that your sales teams can follow up on
Build awareness around your brand/product/service among potential customers

Consideration

Help users explore your products and services – benefits, prices, attractive offers, store locations, and more

Conversion

Increase online sales
Increase physical store sales
Increase app downloads (if you have an app)

It can also help increase website visits, engagement with content such as videos/tutorials and newsletter sign-ups. These are just some of the significant ways in which PPC can help grow your small business. Depending on the nature of your business and your goals, PPC can help you in many other ways.

The Google Ads keyword planner tool and performance reports are handy to help you see the marketing efforts producing results and the ones that are not working.

Key components of a PPC Campaign for a Small Business

There are five key components for a small business when getting started on a PPC Campaign. These are:

1. Pick your Ads based on your business goals

PPC Marketing can help you achieve a wide range of business goals. Here are a few examples:

Search ads: Clara of Cosmo Dental wants more people to book appointments at her dental clinic. She can search ads so that anyone searching for a dentist near her area sees these ads and book an appointment through them.

Shopping ads: Marvin runs La Vida Fashion, an online clothing store, and wants to increase sales. He can run Google shopping ads, displaying product images, prices, and discounts so that users searching for apparel online can see these, explore her products quickly and make a purchase.

Local campaigns: Thomas has an offline goal to attract more people to visit his Cafe Basil. He can run local campaigns targeting Google Maps, YouTube, and other places to achieve this.

2. Decide your keywords

In-depth keyword research to make sure that your ad appears for the right keywords. It increases the chances that a user searching for your product/service clicks your ad., E.g., If you sell wristwatches for men, you need to ensure that your ads don’t show up when a user searches for “women’s watches” or “children’s watches.”

3. Make sure you have the compelling ad copy and a remarkable landing page

It all gets down to your ad copies and whether these grab users’ attention and get them to click on the ads. The landing page experience will drive the conversions.

4. Create Analytics and Measuring Goals

You must set your conversions in Google Ads and create goals in Google Analytics. By linking the two properties, you will get deeper insights into your customer’s behavior.

5. Campaign Budgets

Are you investing an adequate amount in running a campaign and getting the results you want? Are you aware of what costs to bid for a specific keyword, how can we optimize spending? Reach out to a small business marketing agency.

Ultimate PPC Marketing Strategy Checklist for Small Businesses

Can you run your PPC campaign?

Yes, you can,100%. But would it convert the first time? No. There will be a lot of marketing dollars that would go to waste before you turn into a PPC expert.

It’s best to leave it to an expert, like a PPC marketing agency. Here are a few reasons why that’s the best bet:

Full-service digital marketing capabilities

A PPC marketing agency is a full-service digital marketing setup that uses learnings from other digital marketing strategies such as SEO or Social Media Marketing. That helps your small business PPC marketing plan fit in with the rest of your digital marketing strategy.

Expertise and experience

Learnings over time are critical to getting things right with your campaign and saving those precious marketing dollars. You don’t have to go through painful learning curves or struggle with trial-and-error. A PPC marketing agency can help you hit the ground running, run focused experiments, get results, and optimize.

“No two small businesses are the same; therefore, no two campaign research should be alike either. At Clickworthy, we go the extra mile to ensure your PPC advertising plan is unique and optimized for delivery.” ~ Sai S (Co-Founder, Clickworthy)

Save time and costs

Specialized small business marketing agencies like Clickworthy, have a clear idea of the time it takes for ads to start showing results. You need to apply learnings from ongoing campaigns and their years of experience to improve your ROI from PPC.

You are a crucial part of your PPC marketing plan because no one knows your small business and your customers better than you do. You will be working hand-in-hand with your agency to create a PPC marketing strategy, implement it and make changes to meet your desired business goals.

Campaign Optimization

During a PPC campaign, we can never sit back. We need to do periodic optimizations of your campaigns to stay ahead of the competition. You can discuss the performance of your various ad campaigns with your agency, see which ones you should focus more on and which low-performing ones you should pause/stop.

Get ready for some Clicks

We help small businesses get more clicks on their campaigns while ensuring the quality of web visitors. Our website offers a PPC Marketing service that covers the A to Z of running Pay Per Click campaigns.

If you’re interested in working with professionals to run your PPC campaigns, contact us for more information.

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