Advantages of PPC Marketing

We all want incredible results from our digital marketing campaigns, right? With an unlimited budget, nearly any advertising strategy can be successful. But if you are like most small business owners, you want to make sure every dollar you spend on advertising is a dollar well spent. And when it comes to making an advertising impact on a budget, you can’t overlook the power of PPC marketing.

In fact, PPC marketing has benefits far beyond its affordability. Sure, that’s a big one. But the truth is, its benefits extend into almost every aspect of your marketing campaign.

Before we dig into those benefits, let’s do a quick recap of how PPC marketing works.

How Does PPC Marketing Work?

Pay-per-click or PPC advertising is a marketing strategy based on getting your ads seen on search engines, websites, and social media. But rather than paying to have your ads displayed, you’re only paying when they’re clicked on. Once you get that click, the ad will take them to your website.

What does PPC look like in action? Head over to Google. Make a search for something like shoes, jackets, or jeans. At the top of your results, you’ll see a bold black heading that says “Ads.” (Organic, SEO results show up below) These are paid ads that advertisers have running for the search terms you’ve entered. For example, if you searched “shoes,” the advertiser has bid on that keyword.

But here’s the thing: if you don’t click on their ad, they aren’t paying anything to have it there! But let’s say you do click that ad. In that case, they pay for that click out of their set ad budget.

5 Powerful Benefits of PPC Marketing

Now you know how it works, but how does it benefit you and your business?

Affordability

Only paying per click rather than per impression brings us back to that key benefit: affordability. Maybe you are working with a really tight advertising budget one month and a bigger one the next. Or maybe you’re just starting out and you don’t have much to spend on advertising right now.

But no matter how big or small your business, PPC marketing is an affordable option! You can set your budget as high or low as you’d like. And even better, you can adjust it or even pause it when need be.

This is also a good time to remind you that while PPC marketing can be successful even with a tight budget, there are limits to what an extremely low budget can get for any advertising campaign.

Sometimes it takes investing in PPC marketing to get the ROI you need to grow your business. Of course, if you’re going to make this type of investment, make sure you have digital marketing experts helping you out every step of the way.

Increasing brand awareness

Remember when you Googled “shoes” and five paid ads appeared? While you may have only clicked on the ad for one brand, you still saw other ads. Even if you didn’t click it now, this is ultimately something that will increase your awareness of that brand.

And brand awareness, as an established brand will tell you, builds the all-important brand equity.

Think of this as a long-term strategy. Maybe the same person who saw but didn’t click your ad online will spot your store the next time they’re at the mall. “Oh, that looks familiar! I should check it out,” they think.

Next thing you know that same internet user who became aware of your brand from an ad they didn’t even click on is now a paying customer.

Speed

While this article is focused on PPC marketing, we are also big fans of SEO at Blue Water Marketing. PPC and SEO can both provide incredible results, but they work in different ways and have different pros and cons.

For one thing, SEO takes time. You can implement on or off-page SEO changes to your site today, but the rewards of these changes might take months to reap—it’s a long-term strategy.

With PPC, you can not only set up your campaign and strategy in a few days, but you can also start getting clicks just as fast.

Does that mean you should choose PPC over SEO? Or vice versa? Ask just about any digital marketing professional and they will tell you not to pick between the two. Instead, an integrated approach can’t be beaten.

Testing

Thanks to how quickly you can see the results of your PPC marketing campaigns, it’s also quicker and easier to find out what’s working and what isn’t.

A/B testing with PPC advertising is pretty straightforward: run two ads with one different element (maybe a different headline) with the same audience and budget. See which one performs better. Then, you can keep testing and tweaking your ad elements to continually improve your results.

Keep up with the competition

Organic search results are powerful when they’re done right and enough time is allowed for them to succeed. But the competition for ranking high in search results is nothing short of tough. For smaller or newer businesses, it can be incredibly challenging to keep up with the competition if you’re only using SEO.

But because of how PPC works, your paid ad can jump to the front of the queue and be shown right alongside ads for more established brands.

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