There’s a lot of ways you can market your business online in 2016. You can create a free YouTube Channel and release weekly videos, write blog articles and hope to get ranked on Google, post organic updates on social media, join forums or pay for ad space.
There isn’t a single ‘go-to’ method as each is relative based on the business and variables such as time, budget and industry. However, if I were to advise a small business who is looking to generate leads and drive sales, I would almost always tell them to use PPC.
Why?
1. You’ll generate the fastest ROI
Producing a video can cost a fair bit of money and take a while to produce. Writing blog posts and ranking via SEO will take months, and building an organic social media following from scratch originally can take hundreds of hours.
With a bit of learning and studying, paid search can yield instant results. You can create an advert on Google or Facebook and within an hour be able to reach more than a billion people. PPC is the fastest inbound marketing method to bring prospects to your website.
2. It’s suitable for every budget
Small business owners think they need a large budget to get started with PPC advertising, when in reality it’s as cheap as chips. Google lets you setup daily budgets for as little as $1 per day.
When trying out PPC for the first time, I always recommend to start small and test the waters before allocating large sums of money to any one campaign. All ad networks provide you the option to manually adjust your bidding options to ensure you never pay above what you want per acquisition or action.
3. You’re in control of who you reach
Whether you’re pushing SEO to rank originally in Google or posting organic updates on social media, you’re not in control over who sees your content. For example, there’s no way to create a blog post which will be shown to 35+ year old parents with children using SEO, it’s up to Google not you.
Search engines will rank your content and won’t allow you to preference who views it. With PPC you can target prospects based on age, location, gender, interests, behaviours and on past interactions with your website.
4. PPC is available on every online medium
PPC ads isn’t just Facebook, Twitter, Google and Bing. Every single platform that has an audience is or at some point will allow businesses to serve ads. Only this year Snapchat decided to launch ads on their platform with Instagram opening up to advertisers in 2015.
PPC advertising is very diverse and you can leverage everything from social media, search engines to forums and content networks to get your ads in front of the right people.
PPC is an amazing resource but it’s not easy
PPC marketing does come with unlimited benefits for businesses of all sizes, but don’t expect results to happen overnight with zero experience. Without some level of training and knowledge, it will be pretty much impossible to create winning campaigns that generate leads and sales.
This isn’t to say SEO or organic audience building is easier, because they are just all as difficult. Becoming good at anything takes time, once you get the hang of creating ads, crafting copies and targeting prospects everything will slowly fall into place.
If you’ve not started PPC marketing, Google, Bing and Facebook advertising starts from as little as $1 per day, why not give any of them a test-drive?
Nick Bridges
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