Make Your PPC Campaigns Deliver Better: Online Advertising for SMEs

For many Small and Medium enterprises, Internet has proven to be the best tool possible. Small companies operate with the basic challenge of having either very low OR almost no budget at all to market their business. They cannot leverage traditional media and hence online advertising and promotion provides them with a great alternative which is low cost to reach out to its potential target audience.

PPC Campaigns
Many SMEs would have already used the PPC (also known as the Pay Per Click) form of advertising presented by Google. In its simplest forms, PPC is basically an online advertising medium/ methodology which helps businesses/ individuals to engage their target audience with focused messaging and communication and hence drive traffic to the relevant online properties, where an action could be taken. In the PPC mode, advertisers, bid on keywords which are relevant to their business to maintain relevancy to the TG. There are flat rate models as well, where the advertisers pay a certain fee to use the service, though the Bid based approach is the most commonly used.

What are the ways in which you can make your PPC campaigns deliver better?

• Target negative keywords

This is the most under utilized aspect of PPC. When you are marking keywords to target your audience, work on some crucial keywords which are opposite of what you are intending to do. Example, if you are targeting customers looking to buy washing machines, try using the word 'Used Machines'. This will help you classify the right set of users and mitigate the others on a different message which will engage them.

• Your Ad copy must be compelling (at times incentivized)

You would want someone to take an action after clicking on an Ad. Its not just about them clicking on an Ad. After doing that, once your audience land onto a certain page/ landing page, your call to action must be so strong that they actually engage. The Ad copy is the first step for anyone to take the second and hence it has to create a compelling reason for the TG to click on the Ad.

• Long tail works

So when we talk about tail here, its a little different. When online, you don't really realize where your customers might be, if your business is global in nature. Use long tail keywords to target your audience who will show a far better conversion factor, as they just might be searching for the same set of words. Example: if you are a sports goods dealer, to position sports bicycles, you might want to use "sports bicycle with 6 gears" as the long tail keyword. There is a good chance that customers might search exactly for the same words and hence chances of your ad getting clicked are far higher, hence sales.

• There is a time for everything in life

Timing is crucial. the time zones globally are different, hence if your campaign for a US based customer is working on a wrong timeline and you expect people to click when its time to sleep, well, then the whole online advertising bit might just not work for you!

• Landing pages have to have a strong call to action

Just getting traffic on a page is not the ultimate aim of a PPC campaign. Once your TG reaches the landing page, you must ensure that they take a desired action. Your call to action must be strong enough to create a pull.

Team IndiaMART Knowledge Services is committed to enable SMEs with tools, tips and techniques to help them reach up the value chain and hence achieve the next level of growth. For more information on how you can create new opportunities for your business, drop in a comment to this post and we will get in touch with you!