7 Things That Up Your PPC Game | Pay Per Click 💤

How do you differentiate yourself from your competitors, and how do you deliver your life-changing products to the people that need it?

The answer is simple.

Your marketing message! Starting with branding, messaging and storytelling, consistency across all content channels, and yes, PPC! You need to bring awareness about your product via a combination of both organic and paid traffic.

There’s no debate as to one versus the other. You need both, organic and paid. In this article, we’re focusing on how to engage your audience with paid traffic, specifically PPC.

First off, what is PPC? PPC, short for pay per click , is a way to describe user acquisition, how your paid ads bring users to your website, by paying for each click on ads that you’re running on a search engine or a social media platform. The better your PPC campaign, the higher your CTR ( click-through rate ), the more qualified leads you can drive to your site.

Content and SEO are stellar players when it comes to organic traffic. Branding works with all internal and external communications, including PPC. Try to stay consistent with your brand’s mission and guidelines when you create PPC campaigns.

PPC capitalizes on the work that the rest of your digital marketing team has put in. In order for the PPC team to reach their goals on their KPIs, and that includes CTRs, your entire marketing needs to be aligned.

Below you’ll find a list of the things that could improve your PPC outcomes.

7 things that will up your PPC game

1. Buyer Personas

You know exactly who your current and prospective customers are. But before starting to run ads, it would behoove you to segment your customers into specific groups.

I’d suggest figuring out the answer to the questions below before you start getting excited about CTRs on your most awesome ads. Discover your buyers first. Do your customer and market segmentation first. Then, build the ads that speak to them, and to them alone.

  • Who are you creating ads for? — consumer segmentation: think location, demographics, motivations, values
  • What is their role? — are you selling B2B or B2C, or both? Buying for themselves or for their organization?
  • What motivates them? — what’s their pain point? What is your product trying to solve?
  • How does this pain point affect their life now? — your product is built to solve that.
  • How much budget do they have to spend? — this matters, but only before you develop your product IRL. After you’ve developed and are launching the product, your pricing strategy is fairly set. You have to make the decision on the pricing before you start to think about marketing, and that’s another topic altogether.

Understand your audience, and build your segments and your PPC with clear outcomes in mind.

2. Data is Queen, Keywords are King

This data will make your messaging clearer. Dig deep into your Google Analytics and look at your demographics. Then go over to the Google Keyword Tool and generate the comprehensive (preliminary) list of keywords.

Do your research on your own users and your competition. It helps to know the gaps in products and services that your competition is leaving open, the complaints that users have about your, and your competition’s, products, and of course, the keywords that your competition is using to attract their audience. All of those are key terms/keywords that you can include in your PPC campaign.

Use MOZ.com or SEMrush.com to find your keywords and the keywords of your competitors.

3. Segment your Users by their Intent

Differentiate between the users’ intent when building content as well as when deciding on the distribution channel for that content.

You get users with different intentions, from different traffic sources.

  1. Display: These users might research a product to get a general idea.
  2. Search: These users are actively looking for a solution to their problem. They are actively looking at purchasing this specific product and are looking for solutions now. It’s up to you to offer them the solution in the form of your product/service. These users are your target market.
  3. Social: The third one, the socially conscious traffic, is all about people showing their support for your service or products, if your product/service has a social impact, and if it improves people’s lives.

As you can see, there is a massive difference in traffic sources! So the messaging needs to be different, too.

Each group will need its own set of keywords, ads, and landing pages. Segment for the win.

4. Qualify your Leads

As you’re paying for every click (ahem, “pay per click”), it is important that every user that you engage with is actually someone that you can convert into a buyer. So, qualify your leads!

Here, you’ll add audiences to your PPC target audience bucket. Don’t be broad. Be specific. Again, think about your audience segmentation and campaign goals.

5. Use Audience Exclusion lists

The better you are at setting up your audiences and your exclusion lists, the more specific your target market gets and the more qualified your leads are. Some marketers ignore this part about audience building, in thinking that if you reduce your audience, your ad does not get enough exposure. The benefit of using a scalpel and removing segments of the market that have no interest in purchasing your product, totally outweigh a reduction in exposure. You want your ad going to the users that can actually benefit from your product, not to someone that has no interest in ever purchasing your life-changing offering.

If you don’t select your target audience correctly, it doesn’t matter that your offering is life-saving! It’s never going to get in front of the people that need it.

6. Landing Page optimization

PPC optimization, leading to conversion is only half the battle! Delivering on the promise of the ad once the user reaches your landing page is the other half.

The last step in any PPC ad campaign for a new product is a landing page that delivers knowledge AND product! You brought the user to your page. They’re interested in knowing more, or are already convinced and want to purchase now. Be clear and deliberate here.

And one of the things that bother me, and I’m not the only one, is once you’ve made the decision to learn more/buy/etc., and you click on the link, 1. You don’t know where on the page to click to get to your product, and 2. Once you do get to the Buy Now button, that takes you to another page, and then another page after that, and then eventually, if you’re lucky, you get to the checkout page, and you can, after clicking one more time, enter your cc information and order the darn thing… Ahhhh, I’m exhausted just thinking about that.

A quick word of advice: Make your landing pages SIMPLE, and CLEAR. Mailchimp doesn’t let you introduce more than 1 CTA ( call to action ) button (‘Buy Now’, or, ‘Subscribe Here’, or ‘Donate Now’) per newsletter or landing page, and I like that! Clean. Simple. For the user! Don’t ever forget about the user experience. That is a costly mistake.

7. Remarketing / Retargeting

Remarking is the best (and cheapest) way to remind interested and qualified users that have already visited your website about your solution/product after they have left your site.

This is where you can convert your display traffic source (see point no. 3 above) into customers.

It used to take 17 instances of exposure to a brand’s messaging for a consumer to become aware of that brand and make a purchasing decision. So, make those 17 exposure opportunities work for you, with PPC and remarketing!

Remarketing is probably your best-spent dollars! Your leads are already highly qualified. You’re just reminding them about your solution and offering them the opportunity to improve their lives. And only then does your product actually help.

Conclusion: PPC is a fun game if played well. I wish you patience and passion, and to always keep the user in mind. We’re here for them.

HAPPY LEARNING! :+1:

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