Many people believe that pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is only profitable for big brands that can invest more money and have high PPC budgets. They believe the success of a PPC campaign is directly related to the size of the advertising budget. The more money you have to place bids, the more competitive keywords you can target, and the more potential customers you can bring to your site. But here’s a good news for small business owners; there are ways you can attract new customers through PPC advertising without breaking the bank.
When large companies are targeting literally millions of keywords, you can still leverage PPC advertising tactfully in order to carve a slice of conversions away from the big brands.
Below mentioned are 6 ways small businesses can compete with large companies on pay-per-click advertising:
- Target Long-Tail Keywords: Long-tail keywords are often termed as sales magnet as they have high conversion probability. A search query like “outsource SEO in the Philippines” will get you more specific target customers than a generally query like “outsource SEO”. While most big brands would target the latter keyword, you can bring a significant amount of visitors to your site by targeting long-tail keywords that are cheaper to bid on and are more likely to produce a sale.
- Target High-Volume Keywords within Limits: In case you want to target high-volume keywords like “outsource SEO”, you can do it by putting limits on when and where your ad will be displayed. Though it is not expected from small businesses to target most competitive keywords related to their industry on a 24×7 basis, they can still grab a significant share of the audience by displaying ads on a particular day and time for a shorter duration. Do some online research and find the most appropriate time when your audience is active on the Internet, and try this strategy.
- Make Your Offer Too Good To Refuse: If you’re planning to compete against big brands, you will need to make an offer that your target customers just can’t resist. A strong offer, such as “flat 30% off for the first 15 customers” or “buy one get one free for a limited period time,” can make search engine users pause for a second and take notice of what you are offering. This is one of the best strategies to compete with more recognized brands in the PPC advertising space.
- Create Dedicated Landing Pages: Many small businesses often undermine an otherwise successful PPC campaign by directing clicks to their website’s homepage or some product/service page. This is a serious mistake! You have made a great offer to your prospective clients; now it’s time you direct them to the page from where they can avail that offer. Yes, I’m talking about creating relevant and persuasive landing pages that can act as an expansion of your PPC ad and make it easy for your audience to place an order or make an enquiry. Provide your visitors with a clear path of what you want them to do and this will definitely improve the conversion rate. A dedicated landing page also helps in improving your Google Quality Score and thus, eventually, reduces the overall campaign costs.
- Do Not Run Competitor Campaigns: Some small business owners think they can break other companies’ clients by targeting keywords that include the brand name of competitors. Well, this is a self-defeating practice. First of all, targeting keywords that have other companies’ names will lower your Quality Score and make your PPC campaign even more expensive. Secondly, users are specifically looking for your competitors’ sites and may have no interest in knowing what you have in offer for them. This reduces click-through-rate (CTR) to an extremely low, making the whole PPC campaign more expensive and ineffective.
- Test Your PPC Campaigns: Some people believe that pay-per-click advertising is a one-time process where you create an ad, publish it and forget. But what they ignore is the fact that PPC is an ongoing process of methodically testing one element of the campaign against another, and keep improving the ad performance. You need to test one offer against another, one ad text against another, one landing page against another, and more in order to identify which combination of elements yields maximum results. By testing your ad campaign wisely, you can surpass your competitors’ performance and will gradually gain a bigger share of PPC traffic.
Remember, big brands have a whole different approach towards PPC advertising. And you can use PPC to attract leads around the edges. By taking into account the above mentioned points, you can target prospective customers often ignored by big brands and get your share of business.
In case you have any further queries about the above or you want to share your PPC experience, please feel free to leave us a message in the comment section below.
Author Nikhil Aggarwal: I’m currently working as Content Manager with Adreno Technologies. I have a great passion for digital marketing and I help small and medium-sized businesses improve their online presence and grow their revenue by formulating effective digital marketing strategies for them. Apart from Digital Marketing, I have keen interest in Entrepreneurship, Brand Management, Tech Consultancy, etc.