The objective of every small business is to one day compete with the big boys. To reach such heights, having a generous marketing budget is usually the fastest way into the game.
But that’s the problem.
Not everybody has a Fortune 500 marketing budget or can afford to risk so much money on advertising. But here’s the thing, you don’t need a 4, 5 or or 6 figure budget to get yourself into the game, you just need to get creative.
In this article, I will show you how to get more value from your campaigns without having to increase your budget.
- Keyword isolation
Whether you’re running an ad on Google, Bing or Yahoo, you can target as many keywords as you like. In an ideal world you would like to show up for as many competitive keywords as possible, but budget constraints won’t always make that possible.
Once you find potential keywords for your campaign, instead of bidding for them all, re-filter and isolate the ones that are most important for your business. Use any previous data you have gained from past campaigns and Google Analytics to reveal keywords searched and how that traffic interacted on your site.
Isolate keywords that bring the biggest impact (clicks, CTR, CPC) and trim off the fat by removing keywords that aren’t as rewarding.
If you’re not sure which keywords are most suitable, you might need to start testing keywords in bulk to weed out poor performers. While not an ideal strategy on a budget, information is needed to run the most effective PPC campaigns.
- Ignore useful tips
I find it ironic that I’m telling you to ignore helpful PPC advice as my blog is all about offering useful tips.
However, when on a tight budget refining your targeting settings, using tiered bidding strategies and serving ads on mobiles are not as appropriate. For example, Facebook’s Delivery Type feature allows you to serve ads as fast as possible by showing them each time they are eligible.
Why wouldn’t you want your ad served at every available opportunity when on a budget? Well, if you’re targeting prospects based on location (you should be on a budget), your daily budget may be reached by 9am and you end up isolating prospects who don’t access the Internet till the early afternoon or evening.
Using a standard delivery process as opposed to accelerated maximizes the amount of prospect types who see your ads throughout the day, ensuring you don’t isolate prospects who are late risers or access the Internet at different times of the day.
- Place ads in a lower position
Most of the time you’ll want to strive for a top 3 ad position as they receive much higher click-through rates, but they also come with a higher cost per click reducing overall clicks.
For example, if your daily budget is $10 per day and ranking in the top 3 positions costs you $1 per click, you will receive 10 clicks before your budget is reached. If you rank 5th or 7th your CPC may only be $0.70 per click getting you an extra 4.2 clicks per day.
Play around with your bidding strategies and see if placing your ad on the right side yields more clicks than ranking at the top of organic searches:
This won’t always be the case but greater testing must be done to really optimize your campaigns on a budget.
- Research how your customers use the Internet
Knowing the daily routine of your prospects becomes even more important when you need to stretch your budget. Unless you have a universal audience, running ads 24/7 won’t be optimal.
Find out what time during the day your prospects are online and searching, do they convert during work hours (9am-5pm) or after they get home from work (6pm-10)? Facebook Page Insights reveals which times of the day your fans access Facebook:
For the business above, serving ads from 6pm-9pm is ideal as that’s when the majority of fans are online. Look at your Google Analytics to find the biggest spikes in traffic to give you an idea on when to schedule ads.
Pro-tip: check your emails and sales orders, is there a specific timeframe where you get the most orders and requests?
- Location targeting
Breakdown your customer profile and location to find out where most of your traffic/sales/leads are coming from. You may think that the whole of North America or Texas is your ideal customer, but you may find that the bulk of sales come from a specific city or town.
Focusing your efforts on where the majority of business comes will increase your overall profits, profits which you can reinvest into PPC to then target other cities.
Summary
As you already know, paid search marketing can work with budgets of all sizes. It does tend to favour businesses with bigger pockets as they can monopolize the search and grab a larger reach over keywords.
Mixing paid search marketing with smaller budgets is usually more difficult as it requires more research and analysis to really get the best results. Positive results yield greater profits which will allow you to reinvest for your next campaign.
If you’ve yet to make PPC work with your budget yet, use these 5 tips to make the most of what you’ve got.
Nick Bridges
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