Generating Sales through Pay-Per-Click Marketing

Search engine marketing is turning into a major source of lead generation for many companies, and outpacing traditional forms of advertising. Search Engine Marketing is often described as a combination of Search Engine Optimization –ranking on normal search engine listings— and Pay-Per-Click advertising, which is posting ads which appear before, or alongside, normal search engine results.

Marketers have a few common challenges. For B2B marketing, most marketers identify their top challenges as generating high quality leads, and generating a high volume of leads. For B2C marketing, the challenges are similar: finding quality customers and upselling and/or cross selling to their customer base.

Of course, each business is unique and depends on its own system of reporting and analytics to monitor and track its sales process, which is another common challenge for marketers.

The Benefits of Pay-Per-Click

As with any aspect of marketing, it is a combination of factors that makes it successful or not successful for your particular business. PPC advertising is not a universal fix or optimal transition for everyone, but it does have some benefits over other traditional methods.

These include:

• Reporting

Real-time reports let you micromanage your leads, as well as receive in-depth data on your lead stream. This helps you make better informed decisions and track results throughout the lead cycle. This lets you test and experiment, and also gives you justification for future budget investments.

• Targeting

Part of the beauty of the Internet is the ability to serve specific ads to people with specific interests. Of course you can do similar targeting in print (such as buying car ads in a car magazine) but online targeting can go further – targeting to specific regions, interests, groups, etc. – which means that you can be very effective in your ads with only a small budget.

• Self Selection & Self Filtering

In addition to specific targeting, Search Engine PPC ads are also triggered by search terms. This means that as a person searches for a particular product or service, your ad could appear. By targeting specific keywords (keywords that show intent) you can target ads towards people who are already looking to make a purchase.

• Real Time Marketing

In most cases PPC ads can be very quickly and easily updated. This can help you respond to events and trends, as well as take advantage of changing search behavior during holiday periods. The ability to activate, deactivate or modify campaigns with the click of a button can be a huge advantage for many companies.

• Free Impressions

Running search engine PPC text ads (those ads you see on Google™) only costs you money if/when people click on it. Since you only pay when people click, this means that you can get a lot of impressions (meaning people will see your ad and may be influenced by it even if they don’t immediately click). Also, ads can be relatively cheap – as low as 10 cents per click—which means that with good targeting, you can get started very easy.

There is a lot of skill and talent writing and effectively targeting ads, and being able to optimize campaigns to produce maximum efficiency. As campaigns progress, data helps to further optimize and enhance campaigns, as well as define trends that can be used to your advantage.

We also invite you to contact us for more information or help starting a PPC campaign, or for help managing a current PPC campaign.