How To Target Your PPC Efforts
The golden rule in marketing and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is to “know your market.” However simple as that sounds, it’s not as easy as 1-2-3. In fact, PPC can be darn complicated, especially if you have the following views:
“My market is the world!”
“Anyone and everyone is my customer!” or
“What I have is universal.”
Sorry, but every business needs to have a specific target if they want their PPC (or any other type of marketing effort) to work. The bottom line is that what you want is to get your money back on your investment, whether it be in developing your product, maintaining operations, or spending on PPC marketing. A business entrepreneur willing to throw away valuable resources and not receive a return aside from that “feel good” feeling will soon find the need to close shop.
In order to make PPC efforts worth it, here are some suggestions on how to target your PPC efforts:
Review Your Brand Then…Change Your PPC Keywords
You need to ask yourself if your target market is still your target market. Being in business, we often find it surprising that the original target market is no longer our key customer.
Many companies have rebranded and shifted their target market to become a top success story like Hershey’s, which decided to make candy lower in fat for adults, or Harley Davidson, which opted to throw out the “boys only club” and cater to women.
Once you have reviewed your product, you can make the necessary changes in your PPC keywords. Make sure they are relevant, categorized, and tight. If your keywords are not closely related, users will hesitate or be confused about your message.
Keywords Are Not Be-All, End-All; Consider Persona-Based Targeting
The branding is very critical this 2016 because while keywords are important, one trend in PPC is persona-based targeting. Persona-based marketing has been around for many years. It used to be called psycho-graphic or demographic marketing; with the technology we now have, users can be more accurately profiled. That being so, you can reach your market and predict their response to your ads with a higher degree of effectiveness. This gives you an enormous edge and helps you stay in the game.
Improve Your Landing Pages
It is highly possible that you have the perfect PPC campaign but the results are dismal. Could it be that your landing pages are difficult for users to navigate or find the product/information they want? Try to get some feedback on your landing pages from objective users and see where you can improve the experience.
Provide Great Content, Solid SEO
Your PPC efforts will do better if it comes with great content and exceptional SEO. In fact, because PPC provides instant results, you can use it to help you improve your content, provided you have good analytics. Analytics will help you find that sweet balance between using the right keywords and providing the information users want.