Small business owners often dream of “organic” website traffic… visitors who trickle into their sales queue sheerly based on their interest in the company’s products or services. While organic traffic is certainly desirable, the reality is that many of your visitors are going to need a little push. Simply put, you have to make people aware of your business, your product and service offerings, and your website if you want them to pay you any attention.
One of the best ways to generate this attention is through pay-per-click marketing, or PPC. PPC has been around for years and remains paramount for online marketing success. At enCOMPASS, we are pleased to equip our clients with robust PPC strategies, including some unique features that allow us to stand out from other agencies and deliver peerless ROI.
What is PPC?
Before we get into the enCOMPASS distinctives, it may be worth a brief review of what PPC actually is.
As the term pay-per-click suggests, PPC provides a model of online marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time their ad gets clicked on. Basically, this is a method for buying engagement with your brand or your website, as opposed to earning it organically.
PPC can take many forms, but the most common is search engine marketing (SEM). This allows marketers to bid for ad space in the “sponsored links” section of the search engine results page (SERP).
It’s impossible to talk about PPC without talking about Google Ads, formerly known as AdWords. This is the most popular PPC platform by far, giving advertisers the chance to bid on space within the Google network (which may include the SERP as well as other Google properties, like Gmail).
How PPC Works
To better understand how PPC functions within SEM, consider a simple example.
PPC starts when you bid on a particular keyword. If you own a hair restoration studio, you may bid on keywords such as hair restoration, hair replacement systems, or hair loss solutions. By bidding on one of these keywords, you enable your ad content to display whenever one of your targeted users inputs this search query.
If someone actually clicks on the ad to visit your website (or engage with your business in some other way), you pay a small fee to the search engine. The amount of the fee can vary depending on how popular the search term is, how much competition you have, and other factors.
When done right, however, this fee should be truly negligible. For example, say you end up paying $4 when someone clicks your ad, but that customer ends up making a $400 purchase with your company. For most businesses, this trade-off is obviously going to be well worth it.
The Benefits of Using PPC
There are a number of reasons why PPC is an advantageous approach for advertisers and business owners.
- PPC is highly scalable. You can start your PPC campaign with a “representative” budget; the lower threshold of entry combined with the ROI makes PPC a good option for virtually all kinds of businesses. Once you have the campaign dialed in you can scale your budget as your capacity increases or add products and services as they become available.
- Results are easily measurable. It is extremely easy to see what kind of results you’re getting from your campaign because you are able to track not just the click, but what happened after the click (form filled out, phone call generated, etc.).
- PPC provides a wealth of data. One great thing about PPC is that it provides you with a trove of information about how your ads perform, who’s clicking on them, what actions are taken after engagement, etc., all of which can be used to further enhance and fine-tune your lead generation efforts.
- You have a lot of control. There’s a lot of flexibility built into PPC. You can decide how much you want to budget, which keywords you want to pursue, how narrowly you want to define your target audience, what geographic area you want your ads to show in, etc.
- PPC and SEO work well together. By pursuing both promoted ad space and organic search engine results, you can truly develop a presence that spans the customer journey.
- You have plenty of targeting options. PPC makes it easy to define the exact audience you’re looking to reach, aligning it with your buyer personas.
The enCOMPASS Distinction
Clearly, PPC campaigns offer many advantages… and there are still further advantages to be gained when you work with the team at enCOMPASS.
We pair PPC advertising campaigns with our Interactive Marketing IntelligenceTM (IMI) platform and our exclusive IMI call analysis, which allows us to take PPC to the next level by tracking every call that’s generated by your campaign. In fact, we listen to, categorize, and comment on each call so we know exactly what kind of leads are being generated from your PPC campaign. This process also ensures plenty of actionable data for your sales team to follow-up and close the deal as well as give you the ability to better manage your businesses’ sales process and improve your closing ratios.
There’s no other agency that does this, and it really sets enCOMPASS apart, allowing us to deliver incomparable ROI through our PPC campaigns.
We’d love to tell you more about the ways in which PPC can benefit your business, and about the enCOMPASS approach in particular. We welcome you to reach out to us any time you’re ready to talk further about PPC.
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