Guest Blog by Charlene Burke, CEO, Search By Burke
Thanks to uncreative and unimaginative advertising and marketing agencies, PPC or Pay Per Click tends to have a poor reputation as an online marketing tool. Let’s face it, many business owners and entrepreneurs have been led down the primrose path that online ads, including PPC (Pay Per Click) are simple. Many mistakenly see the activity as creating text or a photo that consumers will click, which will in turn take a “ready to buy” visitor to their website and once they are there, a sale will occur. We can’t tell you the number of horror stories we are told about the hundreds or thousands of dollars spent on Google Ad Words or Facebook Ads that generated some great website traffic, but NO lead generation.
Just thinking up a catchy phrase, finding a unique graphic and throwing money into a PPC (Pay Per Click) account isn’t enough. If you are considering the integration of PPC (Pay Per Click) into your marketing campaign and want to keep your online reputation in tact, we have a few simple questions to help you get started thinking about the big picture.
- Do you have a strategy? Without an overall strategy for your PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign, your online reputation will suffer and you will spend far more money than you need to. If you need help developing a strategy for this online marketing tactic, find a PPC (Pay Per Click) Specialist with a keen understanding of how to use PPC as a lead generation tool and can counsel you on the best ways to keep nurturing those leads until they emerge as buyers
- Have you brainstormed a landing page? Website visitors DO NOT want to be directed to your home page after they click an ad. If your ad creative talks about a specific product, make sure that click-thru goes to an attractive and well designed landing page that explains the next steps in the buying process clearly. Potential buyers will “bounce off” of your website if you make it difficult for them to purchase from you.
- How are you going to measure the results? Revenue is not the only way to measure the effectiveness of your PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign. Consider correlating your online reputation score, bounce rate, visitor time on site and number of website pages viewed into the measurements. The desire of any business owner or entrepreneur is to get the right visitor to the site who likes your products or services and can potentially be a word of mouth referral to others like them. Remember: Just because they don’t buy today, doesn’t mean they won’t buy tomorrow, next week or next month.
Before you allocate those hard earned marketing dollars to a PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign and hurt your online reputation, re-evaluate your effort by considering strategy, landing pages and measurement tools. Your CFO (Chief Financial Officer) and marketing budget will be glad you did.
