Why You Need to Give Paid Advertising a Chance

Many small business owners get instantly scared when they hear the word “paid” in Paid Advertising. And, we get it, your budget is tight, and you don’t really want to go into something that sounds costly and risky. Then again, no one ever succeeded without taking chances.

So, when it comes to paid advertising, the risk isn’t as high as you may think, and the results may very well take your business to the next level. So, why should you give it a chance, and how can a small business PPC strategy help you?

But First… What is Paid Advertising?

Paid advertising, also known as PPC (pay per click) advertising and biddable media, is a branch of digital marketing that focuses on promoting products and services through paid ads that appear at the top of search results on search engines like Google. It’s called Pay-Per-Click advertising because you usually pay each time someone clicks on your ads.

Before you get into the technicalities of paid advertising, you’re probably more interested in understanding whether that is something that can benefit your business. And you’re right to think so. Instead of explaining how great PPC is for your small business, we’ll let the numbers do the talking…

Compared to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics that take longer to yield results, with paid advertising, you can quickly boost traffic to your website and, therefore, increase conversions.

That doesn’t mean you should only focus on PPC and ignore SEO altogether. You should incorporate both into your campaign. SEO is a long-term investment in your business that offers exponential growth in time, while paid advertising is a great short-term tactic that will help you secure leads while you’re developing your SEO strategy. It’s a bit like investing in the stock market. You need to diversify your portfolio to get the largest ROI.

If you’re just launching an online business that hasn’t started ranking organically yet, paid advertising can be a great ally to your efforts. Since SEO takes time to show results, promoting your business in the meantime is especially important. Start by identifying the terms and relevant phrases you want to rank for organically. Then, set up a campaign that targets these exact terms. This will not only give you an initial boost, but it will also show you whether these terms attract the right type of audience, and if there are other more beneficial phrases, you can revert to them.

Once you start ranking for these terms organically, you can redirect your budget toward other phrases you are yet to rank for. In other words, small business PPC strategies are dynamic and allow you to adjust things as your goals change.

There is more than one way to generate traffic for specific search terms. If the phrases you want to rank for are very competitive, and it’s near impossible to rank for them organically, PPC can help. This usually applies to highly commercial terms that can be central to your business. For example, a digital marketing company will naturally want to rank for terms like “digital marketing” and “paid advertising.” However, since the competition is intense for these terms on a global scale, showing paid ads focused on them can help the agency appear at the top results.

Plus, if you end up ranking organically for these phrases and running ads for them, you will be appearing twice in the search results. That way, you’ll be multiplying your chances of getting more clicks and generating more leads.

PPC is a fantastic way to expand your reach toward potential leads who don’t know you and won’t otherwise be able to find you online. With so many targeting options, biddable media helps you find new audiences that wouldn’t normally use the web to look for your specific business or service and pique their interest.

Do you have a strategy in place that focuses on engaging existing customers or website visitors? If you don’t, paid advertising allows you to retarget these people, days or even months after interacting with your business. This process is formally called retargeting, and it helps you remind potential leads about your business and potentially close a sale. Many bidding media platforms allow you to retarget people based on different criteria, such as people who visited your website in the last month and users who engaged with an ad but didn’t click on it, etc..

One of the major benefits of PPC advertising is that you can measure your performance online. Unlike traditional advertising channels like billboards and TV, where it’s really difficult to actually calculate your ROI, with PPC you can easily track who saw your ads, who clicked to read them, and what actions they took afterward.

Regardless of which paid advertising platform you’re on, there are many tools you can use that allow you to track what people are doing on your website once they go through your ads. That way, you know whether someone made a purchase or contacted you for a service after clicking on one of your ads. This is how you calculate the ROI of your paid advertising campaigns.

People spend a lot of their time online, and traditional media such as TV or print magazines isn’t as popular as it used to be. Plus, you can give your audience more personalized ads online than when reaching out via a national (or even local) TV ad. You end up being more useful to them and can target people that are more likely to be interested in you. That usually means better ROI for your business.

When you’re looking to increase the pool of people who engage with your small business and potentially expand your client base, turning to paid advertising can be quite beneficial for you. Since PPC is a separate channel of digital marketing, it involves a new group of people who are traditionally used to engaging with ads while surfing the web.

If by now you believe what your small business is missing is PPC, and you’re willing to dive into it, great! However, sometimes businesses get “burned” by paid advertising because they spend more money than they get in return from their ads. That typically happens because they lack the time or expertise to properly manage their online advertising campaign.

If that’s the case with you and your PPC campaigns, consider talking to a professional paid advertising expert. You can either outsource this task to them or, at the very least, get important tips and tricks about optimizing your paid ads and making the most out of your advertising budget. If you’re already working with a digital marketing agency, ask them if they can offer paid advertising help as well.