Before you start any marketing campaign, you need to plan how you’re going to make it work effectively for your business.
Here are our top ten tips on what to think about before you start a paid search campaign.
- What are your campaign goals? For example, to persuade visitors to sign up for a newsletter, give you their contact details, or simply to visit your website? You will want to be very specific about what you want to achieve – this will help you to stay focused.
- What’s your budget? With PPC campaigns you will pay for every person that clicks on your advert – so you need to think carefully about how much you can afford to spend, over what period.
- Who is your audience? As with any marketing campaign, you need to think about who you’re selling to and what their needs are.
- Who’s going to manage your PPC campaign? To get the best return on investment, you’ll need to put in time, effort and careful research. A PPC management service from search marketing specialists could be a worthwhile investment.
- Which keywords are you going to use? These are the key terms that people type into search engines, and the most popular ones are extremely competitive. Choosing the right keywords is vital to how successful your PPC advertisement will be.
- Are you going to use targeting? For example, behavioural targeting serves your adverts only to people who’ve searched for similar keywords in the past, while geo-targeting serves ads to people in a particular geographic area.
- What are you going to put in your landing pages, and how will this back up your PPC campaign goals? You’ll need to have persuasive sales copy (the ‘creative’), a professional, simple design and layout, and a clear call to action.
- How are you going to measure success? Decide on your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) so you can monitor how well your PPC ads are performing – for example, the number of visitors who click on your advert, how many of these follow your call to action, and how many go on to become customers.
- How are you going to test and improve your campaign over time? For example, you could experiment with different PPC advert wordings, landing pages or advert placements, and see how it affects results. Make sure to only vary one element at one time, so you can accurately work out what made the difference.
- How does your PPC campaign relate to and support your other marketing activities (both on- and off-line)? For example, if you’re using a particular, memorable word or phrase in your offline marketing, are you making sure your PPC adverts display highly for that term?
