10 Steps to increase your ROI with PPC
William Gladstone said “a leader must be a good butcher…”and this is something that applies to a lot of things; one of which is your pay per click marketing and online media. You may feel compelled to dip into every new marketing idea that is presented to you by your staff or marketing agency. The problem arises whenyou have made these decisions and find that you have a massive amount of meat on your cutting board and no one is getting fed.
Too many times I have come onto a project only to find it bleeding money and not producing enough clicks, leads, sales, etc. By concentrating piece by piece on which online marketing methods work FIRST before trying to take on another channel you become a good apprentice butcher.
For example,a small business with 50 employees does not need to spend money on banner advertising, pay per click marketing, social media marketing, email marketing,mobile media and forms of traditional media in order to reach out to its prospective audience. Targeting the markets you seek the most do not require huge amounts of funds to make introductions, prospect, entice, or sell.
If it isyour first time into the arena of website marketing, take your time and take it one step at a time. Make sure you achieve success day by day and month by month. Once your independent consultant, internal marketer, or advertising agency has hit a few out of the park, make considerations for expanding online marketing.
You may be thinking that this paying attention to budgets on the front end of this should be pretty easy however, keywords and costs per click can run out off control pretty quick. So, don’t spend more ad dollars until you seeresults. Well, I’m here to tell you, companies large and small do it all of the time. Coming onto a project where it takes a butcher to trim the fat may comet too late if money has been spilling out on the floor for months.
My recommendation for building out an online pay per click media plan is simple and for the small to medium businesses.
- Define your goals
- Define your keywords
- Define your DMA / target market
- Write compelling PPC ad copy
- Ensure you have all of the correct calls to action
- Use proper Ad Words and Google Analytics tracking
- Check quality scores and landing pages
- Focus on high converting low cost keywords
- Use the Google keyword tool for your research
- Focus on both short and long tail keywords
- [bonus] – Cut keywords that are under performing or costing too much
All the best and happy chopping.