PPC strategies are important for growth these days.
However, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, and inbound marketing are the things that normally come to mind when we think of the growth of content marketing. What all these strategies have in common is that they are all free.
Marketing professionals create content, publish it on their company’s website, and then they can access it anywhere in the world whenever they want, at no cost to them or to the publisher.
But when it comes to PPC, pay per click, someone is paying and that is the publisher. In fact, there are two main differences between the PPC and the more “traditional” content marketing. The first is that all the traffic that comes from a PPC campaign has a cost per click, while the organic search traffic is free. The second is paid search advertising, those PPC ads that appear on the top of a SERP, above the organic lists, and there will often also be more PPC ads on one side of the page.
How Does PPC Boost Content Marketing?
A PPC campaign provides the marketer with important insights on providing useful data to develop a more effective content marketing strategy. Questions to answer after running a PPC campaign include:
- What are my favorite products?
- Which geographic region is most interested in my offer?
- Which gender is more interested in the products?
- Which age group should I primarily address?
- What are the relevant keywords that represent my offer?
- What is my competence? Is it high or low?
The fact that PPC offers marketers a huge amount of data, with everything measurable and manageable, makes it a critical component of any digital marketing strategy.
New PPC Strategies and Tactics
As with any marketing discipline, there are some evergreen PPC strategies that will remain in force in 2019, but it is also worth analyzing some new strategies!. The following are the most effective SEM strategies to test this 2019.
Track your conversion actions
PPC is a proven method to attract leads and generate new sales, but it’s worth noting that not all potential customers you attract with your PPC ads are at the same stage of the buyer’s journey. The effectiveness of the CTAs that you use for your PPC ads will depend on the stage potential customers are in. When you create your PPC campaigns, you’ll want to know which conversion actions make the most sense for each stage of the funnel.
Take note of the CTAs you are using and where they are assigned. Start thinking about what potential customers might want and what they might find valuable, and not just what you have available immediately. This can help you find weaknesses in your PPC campaigns that you can address with better CTAs, better content or better deals. Examples of conversion actions: calls, downloads of applications, actions within the application and visits to the website.
Basically, any action that a user can perform is technically a conversion. Some of your campaigns may be more for the brand and a visit to a home page or website to get more information about something may mean that a click on the ad is your conversions, in other cases, form fill or a download can be a conversion. Think about what you want your user to do and make it as easy as possible for them to do it!
Try new channels
In PPC campaigns, most companies stick to the major search engines like Google and Bing. PPC campaigns for major search engines like these are a great way to attract new prospects, build brand awareness, and increase sales. However, there are many other channels that offer paid advertising.
Social networks also have payment options and yes, they count as PPC. It is worth running some PPC ad campaigns on channels that offer paid advertising options, such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, NextDoor, and Reddit. These social channels have huge audiences that you have not yet accessed, and you may discover that a large part of your target audience lives in a channel that has not yet been tapped. A social channel that is not receiving as much attention as those mentioned above is Quora. Quora’s paid advertising platform is only one year old, which means that not all advertisers have taken advantage of it yet. However, you should give it a try, since there are an estimated 300 million active monthly users in Quora. With such a large audience and little competition so far, 2019 is a good time to start testing PPC campaigns on Quora.
Use date ranges to retarget audiences
One of the common mistakes that advertisers make is to group all users in the same retargeting audience. However, there is a big difference between potential customers who clicked on an ad but did not convert yesterday and those who did the same thing a month ago. The possibilities of successfully reorienting a prospect that did not develop in the last days are much better than converting a prospect that did not convert months ago. To make retargeting more effective, create new audiences based on date ranges for retargeting purposes.
PPC advertising campaigns can provide value in many different ways and, because of the way they are set up, they are a great value for your money.
Conclusion
Keeping this in mind, these are three new PPC strategies that are worth adopting for your PPC campaigns this year. PPC strategies are only as strong as the energy and work you put into them. Google and other platforms have made it incredibly easy to leverage their platforms and automate offerings and goals for users with little or no PPC knowledge. PPC is one of the disciplines that require hand holding – and with good reason.
I’m Cartez Augustus, a content creator based in Houston, Texas. Recently, I’ve been delving into different content marketing niches to achieve significant website growth. I enjoy experimenting with AI, SEO, and PPC. Creating content has been an exciting journey, enabling me to connect with individuals who possess a wealth of knowledge in these fields.
