There's very often a debate as to whether companies should focus on organic or paid search...and the answer is that to make the most of your marketing efforts, you should use both.
Paid and organic channels complement each other and in the long term can bring you a regular amount of leads and business.
So how do you get started if you've never been into the paid search world before? here are some simple tips that should put you on the right track:
- Before attempting to launch paid campaigns, make sure you have clear and measurable objectives for you site: sign ups, sales, document requests....
Remember that paid campaigns are all about return on investment, so measuring /reporting is crucial. - Optimise the conversion channel/ sales funnel on your site: the 3 clicks rule applies here - visitors should be able to get to the content they want in 3 clicks, so make sure that your site is clear and directs visitors in the right direction
- Look at what your competitors are doing and benchmark your business against theirs. If their ideas work, why not take inspiration from them (I did not say copy, ok!?)
- Do some keyword research to identify core keywords and long tail keywords for your target market
- Choose which paid programme you want to go for. I guess at this point everybody's thinking Google Adwords, and there's a reason for that. The google tool is the most comprehensive out there a will give you the widest coverage. However, it is also worth looking at Yahoo Search marketing and MSN/Bing.
- Allocate a budget to your campaigns and stick to it.
- Build your campaigns within Google making sure to have a wide range of keywords, creatives and landing pages. There is no magic formula to get it right so getting your hands dirty and testing is vital. Always give some time for your campaigns to run before making changes.
- Optimise your landing pages - build ppc specific landing pages on your site using the same keywords as your creatives and clear calls to action. Google uses a quality score for landing pages so consistency in messaging and optimisation matters.
- Track, measure and report on your campaigns. Review results on a regular basis and updates campaigns accordingly. Bidding high on keywords is not always the best strategy, so you need to aim for high click through rates (CTR) and low cost per acquisition (CPA)
- Make sure you website is organically optimised too and is ranked for your core keywords, as a presence in both paid and organic results will boost customers confidence.
As always, if you need help planning your online marketing activities, let me know!
Have a great weekend
2 comments:
If you were a small start-up, what's a viable PPC budget? (yes, I'm sure the answer to this is, how much is a piece of string...)
For example, if you only had, say, £50 to spend on PPC per month, is it worth getting into PPC?
Considering the amount of time needed to set up a campaign and the ever increasing cost per click, I'd think that £50 is probably not enough to get significant results. But I guess it all depends on how competitive your market is and if you run campaigns on your brand name, then it could be worthwhile.
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