4 things you need to know before starting paid search marketing

Here at Six & Flow, we talk a lot about paid search marketing. We want to go back to basics for a moment though. Lets talk about what you as a business should expect when using Pay Per Click (PPC) to generate fresh, relevant targeted leads.

An astonishing 48% of total digital spend across the globe over 2016 went into paid search according to the IAB, representing growth of nearly $6 billion over a single year. It’s fair to expect spending on paid search terms to increase even more for the 2017 period; PPC is the place to be, with seemingly everyone investing in targeted advertising to improve both the quality and quantity of their leads.

There’s the competition element to consider, too. Are your competitors stealing a march on you by implementing a paid search campaign? Are you missing out on potential business and falling behind by not having a proper PPC strategy?

Getting to know what paid search is all about

Paid search marketing is an incredibly effective beast to unleash in any lead generation campaign. There are things you need to know before putting money into PPC though, which we’ll get into shortly. Before that, it’s worth refreshing your memory on what paid search actually is before choosing to invest in a campaign.

Through a paid search campaign, you’re able to use software from search engines such as Google’s AdWords to put a bid amount on certain keywords to show higher up their search results for those terms.

The higher the bid, the higher the potential ranking, and the more likely somebody will click on your website. For each visitor, though, you pay the amount that you’ve bid for those paid search terms. With that in mind, your paid search costs could increase quite quickly, especially if your website isn’t optimised for sales.

With the right paid search strategy though, you could almost instantly see a larger volume of high-quality, targeted leads visiting your website, interacting with your brand, making purchases and more.

But there are some things you need to know first:

1: Costs will correlate with your industry

Not all industries are created equal, and some keywords are far more valuable than others in the paid search landscape. ‘Business services’ can cost nearly £45 on average for a single click, while ‘Lawyer’ isn’t far off. The higher the volume and stronger the trend for certain keywords, the more expensive they’re likely to be.

That can be navigated though by employing an inbound marketing strategy which heavily researches your personas and the search habits of the people who matter most to your business growth. Targeting more niche, longtail keywords can help to keep costs low whilst still attracting highly-relevant leads.

2: Quality content still matters

Just because you’re putting some budget into targeting more specific audiences through paid search, it doesn’t give you licence to reduce your content production and stop being creative. If anything, you need to be more creative to attract people through PPC and improve overall conversions.

You only have a short space to get your message across to people on search engines, so you need your ad copy to be sharp not only to attract traffic, but to improve your relevance score. By building stronger content on the pages your leads are directed to, you can optimise the overall process, collect better lead information and potentially close more sales.

3: It doesn’t guarantee success

Many people are under the impression that as soon as they invest in paid search marketing that half the job’s done; all that’s left is to convert that enormous number of leads they’re set to experience into sales.

As we’ve mentioned though, paid search terms can often fluctuate and audience sizes vary, meaning it’s wise to constantly monitor and change a paid search campaign organically. Constant research is also wise to see who else is bidding for similar keywords to help your ads compete with what’s offered by the competition.

4: Paid search marketing is just the beginning

Imagine - someone finds one of your paid ads, is intrigued and clicks through to your website. What next? You may have newfound power to attract targeted traffic, but it’s not much use if they look around the site quickly and leave. It can be costly too; that’s why optimisation is useful for conversions through a lead nurturing strategy that turns visitors into long-term repeat customers.

Collecting data transparently and ethically to keep in touch with prospects, entertaining them with creative content, making the online user journey as simple as possible, providing people with easier ways to pay for a purchase… A paid search campaign may be able to help you reach out to the right people, but a strong, bespoke and creative inbound marketing strategy will keep them coming back for more.

Want to know more about paid search, other forms of biddable marketing and how it can all increase highly-targeted fresh leads back to your website? Contact the Six & Flow team today to find out more.