Marketing has always been a somewhat fluid undertaking, and never more so than in the digital era, where online trends change in the blink of an eye. As a business, you naturally want to spend responsibly in every area of operation, but this can be a difficult undertaking when it comes to your PPC strategy, which can fluctuate by the day, or even the hour. How can you properly plan for PPC budget spend? Here are a few things to consider.
Define Your Goals
Before you spend a dime or start planning your PPC campaign, you need to know what you hope to accomplish. What is the desired outcome of your efforts? Ultimately, most companies would agree that they want to make sales, but you need to consider a variety of possible conversions, from click-through, to time spent browsing landing pages, to navigating further into the site, to putting items in a cart, and finally making a purchase.
Don’t forget about repeat visits, joining a mailing list, referrals, and other long-term goals that create lasting patronage and facilitate ongoing sales and increasing brand awareness. Not all of these goals will figure prominently in your average PPC campaign, but you definitely need to spend some time outlining your primary goals before you start spending money.
Define Your Target Audience
Although it’s not uncommon for companies to cater to a variety of demographics, it’s wise to gear your PPC ads toward target audiences to increase engagement with more specific groups and encourage desired conversions. Keep in mind that you can create a variety of ads within a PPC campaign to target different audiences, even choosing different times of day to display them for optimal saturation.
Build on What You Already Know
Unless your company is brand new, this isn’t your first foray into digital marketing. The good news is, you can used past experience to inform upcoming marketing campaigns, including PPC.
When you track and analyze data, studying past successes and failures, you have the best opportunity to engineer future success. You’ll want to pair this data with current information about your customers, competitors, and how people are engaging with your brand, in order to craft a smart PPC strategy and allocate funding appropriately.
Explore Different PPC Platforms
Pay-per-click advertising isn’t limited to Google, although you certainly can’t ignore a platform that garners an average of 5.6 billion searches daily. That said, major platforms like Amazon and Facebook are also contenders for your PPC efforts. Amazon offers Amazon Sponsored Product Ads, while Facebook ads allow for incredibly accurate target marketing.
Seek Professional Help
The average business may not have the time or resources on hand to tackle digital marketing, or the complex world of PPC, in particular. Having experts on your side can help you to properly manage your budget and come up with a winning strategy to incorporate PPC and enjoy commensurate returns on investment.
Jumping into a PPC campaign willy-nilly is a recipe for almost certain disaster. When you partner with an experienced and reputable digital marketing firm, you have the best opportunity to make the most of your marketing spend.
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