Affordable PPC Marketing: Expectation vs Reality 

Customers often ask, is there any affordable PPC marketing tactic? Well, the answer is always: it depends – there are so many important factors we want to highlight today.
In this post, we’ll explore the key areas of your PPC campaigns to make your PPC campaigns more “affordable.”

Where to begin…

Before the digital transformation and affordable PPC marketing, companies relied on traditional media and sales to attract new customers. We watched and listened to one-way communication advertisements whether we were interested in the offered product or service or not. Traditional researchers tirelessly worked to find more information about viewers’ various demographic and psychographic characteristics. Yet, these campaigns were considered “Shotgun marketing” (to reach as many viewers as possible).

Today, we are living in a different world and Google ads campaigns are as punctual as a laser gun. You can attract potential customers already searching for your products or services, and you only need to pay for the clicks. As marketers, we can confidently say that PPC is an affordable marketing method, as small businesses can potentially utilise it to compete with global giants.

Why advertise on Google?

Google is the most dominant search engine with an 84.2 % market share in the United Kingdom and has over 40,000 search queries per second. Google launched its advertising platform in 2000 and gathered an immense amount of data and utilised to evolve the platform.

You might ask now: Why is it essential in my point of view? Well, it’s because Google allows you to target specific audiences based on demographics and psychographics. Using demographics, you can target based on statistical data collected from your desired customers (age, gender, location etc.) – Psychographics, on the other hand, refers to their affinity, topic interests, and attitudes.

Here, we should stop to explain how this information relates to affordable PPC marketing. To successfully deliver any digital marketing campaign, you should understand your target audience – The secret is to advertise to the people you would like to attract because that’s what makes PPC affordable compared to traditional media (TV, radio, etc.)

What kind of marketing is PPC?

The proliferation of digital technologies taught us, marketers, new ways to reach our target audiences albeit it didn’t replace our favourite terms – Inbound and Outbound marketing. To make it simple – Outbound marketing is when we push our message in front of our audience, and inbound marketing is engaging them via valuable and engaging content.

PPC was considered outbound marketing, but it’s not necessarily true anymore. It’s considered inbound – If you have written super helpful content or created an engaging video and promoting with PPC.

To sum up, PPC is an outbound marketing technique when it’s used to promote a company message, and it’s inbound when used to engage your audience.

What is a reasonable PPC budget?

Whether you are a small independent business or a large organisation, you must have a comprehensive marketing budget – and an allocated amount you can spend on PPC. The main questions you should ask are, how much is the lifetime value of your ideal customer – and how much are you willing to spend to get one?

If you are in an industry which is subscription based, for example, a protein powder provider, you can potentially count on 12 sales/annum/person. If you are selling one bag of protein for £25, that’s equal to £300 in revenue/annum.

The next step is to forecast the estimated performance by running tests. At this stage, you need to determine how much it costs for one click (CPC) and how many clicks you need to drive one sale. If one-click costs you £1, and you need 50 clicks to get one deal, you will need to spend £50 to get £300 worth of deals.

At this stage, it is time to determine how much more revenue would you like to deliver from your PPC campaign. If your plan is to deliver £50.000 extra revenue: £50k / £300(1 customer lifetime value) = 166.66 (New customers) * 50 (50 clicks to get one sale) = £8.333 (budget).

The above calculation is just an example; the CPC is always different in every sector.

How do you get the lowest cost per click (CPC)

Every time a user uses Google to search, Google runs an online auction and determines which advertisers will appear at the top of the search results. In this contest, there could be just you or many other competitors bidding on the same keyword.

CPC (Cost per click) is determined by the maximum amount each individual is willing to pay for one click and the relevancy of the ad creative. CPC is the abbreviation of cost per click, which is the amount you are paying for one click.

To get the lowest possible amount of CPC, you can follow a few tricks and techniques:

– Try to find long-tail keywords with low or medium competition.

– Make sure your headlines and descriptions are relevant.

– Follow Google’s advice to increase the quality score.

– A/B test to find the best performance creatives.

– If your services or products are location-based, set the suitable locations and negative harmful locations.

– Use negative keywords.

– Weekly, check the search terms and how users found your ads.

Marketing persona

Marketing persona for marketers is probably the most loved or hated terminology to explain specific characteristics about a group of people we’d like to reach. Marketing personas or target audience is a segmentation method to differentiate various demographic and IAO variables (interests, activities, and opinions).

To produce affordable PPC marketing, we need to know who do we trying to sell to. Buyer personas help you better recognise prospective clients. Understanding prospective customers will allow you to tailor your creative headlines, description, and tone to different groups.

It’s always good best practice to think about secondary personas – people who might influence the decision-maker.

How to gather data for a PPC campaign

Gathering the correct data from the right source is crucial to putting together everything we mentioned above. The two ways are quantitative and qualitative analysis, and you can find this information from internal and external sources. Qualitative research refers to the statistical data, and quantitative is psychographic characteristics.

Internal data:

If you have a website and already using any analytics software, it allows you to get a tremendous amount of statistical data and IAO (interest, activities, and opinions). Suppose you do not have access to any analytics platform; In that case, you are better off speaking with your sales team or customer representatives – no one in your organisation has more information than the customer reps and sales team.

External data:

One of the best ways to gain more information about your potential customers is to share an online form and ask them to fill it out. To gather in-depth information about your target audience, personal interviews are probably the best way to start. Google Trends and keyword planners are great tools to execute keyword research.

Affordable PPC marketing: DIY or outsource PPC

Do it yourself PPC appears to be the most attractive way of advertising for most small businesses with tighter marketing budgets. Below we highlight some advantages and disadvantages of managing our PPC campaign.

The pros:

It might save you money. The first and most obvious benefit is you don’t have to pay a fee for the agency.

If you are a small business with a limited budget, it’s the only way to “get your feet under the table”. It makes sense to learn how to manage PPC or teach someone how to do it- however, it might take some time to grasp PPC.

For free, Google offers excellent training to everyone who wants to start their journey in the advertising world. You should also beware that a poorly-planned PPC strategy can eat through your budget without delivering the conversions you are waiting for.

We have seen many examples when our customers have had a high ad spend for months on their PPC campaign and realised outsourcing brings more value to their organisation. When you outsource, you still have the option to control your budget.

You have complete control. One of the most significant advantages of PPC advertising is having full control over our budget and targeting. You can test different variations to find the best-performing ads.

When you outsource to a PPC ad management agency, the command is yours, but someone else will execute the actions for you in this scenario. One of the most significant benefits of letting someone manage your PPC is they can provide in-depth insights about the industry and your competitors.

The cons:

Lack of knowledge about PPC: Learning PPC takes time, and you can only practice by spending money and sometimes (when you are just starting) without having any benefit. Google and Bing ads have an allocated team to develop their products, making PPC more and more sophisticated. There are always new ways to reach the right audiences.

Time constraints: Once you have learned the basics of PPC, it is time to create your campaign. You need to allocate a certain amount of time to research your audience, write the creatives, set up your campaign, and analyse the performance.

DIY PPC can be done with a limited budget: However, outsourcing your PPC can save you a lot of money and time in the long term. With outsourcing to an affordable PPC management company, dedicated PPC experts working on your campaign and placing 100% effort on delivering the best performance ads possible.

To understand the alternate benefits of outsourcing PPC management for small businesses, check out that blog and see how PPC Management could be the solution that works for your business.

Fire your campaign

Affordable PPC marketing is an achievable goal but, as you can see, is complex. To deliver the best-performing campaign, you need an allocated budget, and you need to understand your target audience to make sure they click on the ads. Gathering data from suitable sources not only helps the targeting perspective but also helps you write catchy headlines and descriptions.

If you would like to make your PPC more affordable and need help ROAR offers PPC management services.

Contact us today to learn more.