Are you trying to gain more exposure for your company and think a smart marketing campaign using PPC is the way to go? You aren’t wrong about your assumption. When you can earn $2 for every $1 spent on PPC ads, it makes PPC an excellent investment.
The question is, do you have the proper framework to create profitable ads without wasting a ton of money?
You can’t afford to launch a PPC ad campaign without a strategy. Keep reading to learn how to create a PPC campaign strategy that will deliver results for your company.
Determine Your Goals
It isn’t enough to want a PPC campaign to drive more visitors to your website. Without a clear goal about what you want those visitors to do after they arrive on your website, you’re going to have a challenging time creating ad creatives for your marketing campaigns.
Below are a few goal types you can strive for when marketing:
- Product purchases
- Email opt-ins
- Brand awareness
- Inform consumers
- Generate Leads
Each of these goals will take a different ad type to aid conversions. Think about what’s most important for your business at the present moment and start your marketing campaign with that goal in mind.
Create Audience Personas
Now that you know what the goal of your campaign is, you need to figure out who you’re going to advertise to. You aren’t going to find success by trying to appeal to the most people possible. Not everyone will want to buy your products.
That’s where an audience persona helps. An audience persona is a fictional depiction of the type of person that might be interested in your products. It helps give you direction for which social media channels to use when posting updates, where to find out what types of content your potential audience likes to read, and which search terms they might use to find you.
You can use all of this information to help you create your ads. Your goal should be to create targeted ads that appeal to the personas you create. Doing this will help you create more targeted messaging that better appeals to what your ideal customer wants.
Examine Your Competition
Understanding your competition will help you determine how best to beat them. While you want to make sure that what you’re doing reads differently, do your best to keep your ads consistent with your competitors.
This isn’t a process you can do in a day and call it quits, either. Online businesses test new ad creatives all the time. You don’t want to launch an ad based on something you see and not see results because it was only a test.
Watch the creatives from your competition for at least a week. The chances are good that you’ll see several creatives during that time. The ones that stick around are likely the ones that are working best.
Determine Your Keywords
Now that you know more about what types of ads work and who your audience is, you’ll need to figure out what your audience looks for on the internet. To do this, you’ll need to come up with a list of target keywords.
You can use many tools to help you figure out which keywords will work best for your campaign. You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner, WordTracker, and Google Trends.
Once you have a list of keywords, choose the ones that matter to you and your business and align with the goal for your advertising campaign. For instance, you don’t want an informational keyword to go to a product page. You want that term to lead to informative content that informs your visitor.
Create Multiple Ad Campaigns
When you’re ready to start your campaign, don’t create one massive ad group. For starters, this is going to make it challenging to manage and track your different ads. It also makes it more difficult to track the results.
Start by creating a goal-based structure of ad groups. You’ll want one ad group for each of the different goals you want to achieve with your ads. From there, you can create multiple ad creatives in each group.
Doing this will let you test multiple creatives at once. You don’t want to spend all your money on one campaign and have it end up not working. Creating numerous campaigns will let you test ads quickly and figure out which ones work.
Set Up Website Tracking
Once you have your ad groups set up, you’ll need a way to track the results of your campaigns. For your advertising strategy to find success, you’ll need to install tracking software on your website. This will allow you to track which ads are driving traffic to each webpage.
Most websites use the Google Analytics platform. Using Google’s software helps Google track information about how visitors are interacting with your website after they arrive.
This makes it possible for you to analyze traffic data and find out what people are responding well to. On top of that, you can assign dollar values to goal pages in your tracking program. Doing this allows you to figure out how profitable your ad campaigns are, making it easy to cut poor-performing ads.
Creating a Successful PPC Campaign Strategy Isn’t Always Easy
While you might be able to get away with doing little planning when landing a digital marketing strategy for PPC, that’s going to be the expectation rather than the rule. If you don’t do your homework and create a great PPC campaign strategy, you’ll end up wasting all your ad dollars. Keep the above advice in mind so you can start getting results from your PPC ads.
If you want to learn more about marketing your business online, head back to the blog to see our latest posts on the subject.
