Pay-per-click advertising: What is it and why should I do it?

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is not a new concept. Believe it or not, despite only gaining mainstream buzz recently, it has been around for 20 years. 

We know what you’re thinking, ‘If I hear one more thing about PPC, I’m going to…[INSERT NASTY THING HERE]’ 

If you can stay your wrath a moment, we’re here to help cut through the noise and decide if PPC is right for your business’s marketing strategy.  

What is PPC?

PPC is a type of paid advertising where you place bids for your advert to reach users on a search engine or social channel. 

You pay for every click that your ad receives. So, you are basically paying for visitors to come to your website. These visitors are potential leads and customers based on your marketing personas. This is particularly useful in the early stages of building your brand and website traffic.

How can PPC benefit my business?

A well thought out PPC strategy can benefit your business through increasing your brand awareness, website traffic and more. In particular, there are three main benefits to PPC.

Targeted audiences

Within your PPC campaign, you can target specific audiences. These are based on things like; location, demographics, behaviours and interests. There is a range of audience types for different ad displays.  

You also can install tracking codes on your website, like the Google Analytics tag. These allow you to retarget certain audiences that have visited your site. Using this information, you can build custom audiences around your previous website visitors, leads and customers. 

For B2B, targeted audiences are essential as you can filter out the general public and only have an audience of business owners, IT professionals or CTO’s that are actually interested in your product or service.

Lead generation

By using PPC you are putting yourself in front of your ideal potential customers. You can target people who are likely to engage with your business. This increases the likelihood of them becoming leads. In addition to this, at the very least, it creates more brand awareness for your business. 

Once they’ve clicked your advert, visitors are taken to a targeted landing page where you can gather information. This is usually done via a form that they fill out so you can convert visitors to leads.

Budget control

PPC is a bidding war, the cost of which depends on both your budget and how contested your target audience or keywords are. If you’re competing over a highly contested audience your spend can slip away from you.

That’s why a great benefit of PPC is the ability to set both daily and lifetime budgets, as well as maximum cost per click meaning you can readily control what you spend. 

What’s next on your PPC agenda?

Despite being an inbound marketing agency, we believe that PPC is an important part of any marketing activity. 

Indeed, if you want amazing results, your PPC and organic content strategy should complement each other. It’s all about being in the right place, at the right time, targeting the right people. If you get this right, you will see a significant increase in conversions. 

With PPC, experimentation is key. As Jack Canfield said, ‘The more things you try, the more likely one of them will work.’ 

Or, if it seems like too much work, just hand it over to us and we’ll do it for you. After all, we offer full PPC campaigns as part of our inbound marketing services. If you’d like to know more about how Articulate can help you find and convert customers, why not book a meeting with us? We love meeting new people!