Why PPC Is Helpful For Small Businesses?

Visibility on the internet is everything today. So, if your brand is seen more by the target audience, you then stand to gain a whole host of benefits. While if your products and services are not ranked higher in search results, you then should be ready to live an anonymous existence.

So, it between visibility and ranking, where does PPC fit in? We know there are two ways of driving traffic to the website – paid and organic methods. We also know that the organic mode takes a lot of time, and effort as well, to materialize.

With PPC or Pay Per Click – a unique advertising concept – businesses can achieve their marketing goals in a time-specific manner. In this, you run ads in the online world and hope people to click on those ads. The more people click the more benefits you achieve.

All you need is a website – you can then go ahead and set up an account with either AdWords or Bing to Facebook or any other channel and create ads. Your ad campaign then will hit the internet from where it will drive traffic to your way.

Is PPC really helpful?

Whether PPC is helpful or not is a debate raging on for as long as it exists. Rather than digging into this mess, it’d better if we looked at some stats and figures and understood the utility of this advertising tool for our business.

Here are some statistics related to PPC –

✓ As per the study and research of Unbounce, visitors that come to websites through PPC are 50% more likely to buy compared to those coming from organic manner

✓ And if Google is to be believed (who would dare not!), search ads give brand awareness as massive a boost as of 80%

✓ According to an interesting finding by Wordstream, paid ads on search result pages can’t be identified by close to 46% people

✓ And lastly, more than 4 out of 10 new customers are supposed to buy based on YouTube ads, says Contently

From the stats above, it’s quite clear why brands want to leverage PPC like nothing else. They know paid ads can do wonders and in fact, brands are benefiting a great deal from them.

PPC for small businesses

We know small businesses can never match the financial clout of big corporate players splurging millions of dollars on their yearly marketing and advertising initiatives. But then, they still have a chance to access the same market with confidence and prise out their share of juices.

PPC helps small businesses a lot and in many ways, including –

✓ Paid ads as not as expensive mode of advertising as generally believed

✓ Even if PPC needs some money to get going, it gives the flexibility to allocate the sum one is comfortable with

✓ The Pay Per Click model brings flexibility meaning small businesses can continue only till their see and find profits

✓ With measurable results to get, paid ads will let cash-strapped businesses to leverage a level-playing field with ease

We can see how small businesses stand to gain a lot if then invest in PPC. After all, where else can they expect to compete against the might of big players with as little investment as they do here!

Benefits of PPC

Over the years, PPC has grown so much in popularity to become a key tool in the digital marketing strategy of brands big and small alike. This model of advertising brings a whole array of benefits businesses can’t expect elsewhere and this is the reason of its widespread popularity.

Here are some of major benefits of Pay Per Click advertising –

#1 Time-specific and quick results

PPC is a perfect tool for businesses that look to gain quick results in a time-specific manner. In this, you just need to run an ad campaign in the online world and then get results on an immediate basis. Right from setting up an account till actually getting the click or traffic – things move in a speedy manner with paid ads. So, gone are the days when you had to wait for weeks or in some cases, months to get the kind of results you wanted. You can thus leverage this unique ad model and realize your goals with ease.

#2 Measurable results

Yes, measurable results! PPC makes that possible so that you’re always in the loop of things. Thus, you can be rest assured about the costs and if anything spiral out of control, you can stop the ad midway. This is only possible when you see how many views, clicks, visits, CTRs your ad campaign generates. With a range of reports and KPIs, businesses can remain informed about every aspect of the ad and its performance. That’s why, going into losses is something small businesses can stop when they do leverage PPC.

#3 Market segmentation

PPC comes with a whole lot of flexibility options to let businesses get an edge in the competitive marketplace. It gives businesses a flexibility to select keywords to target the right audience. From data to time to location – you can select all and maximize the impact of the ad campaign. You can choose which device to target and which website to capitalize upon. With all this flexibility, businesses can gain in market segmentation and this is how right audience is targeted. Thus, small businesses should benefit from this tool to take their products and services to a right audience.

#4 Flexibility with budget

Flexibility with the budget is perhaps among the top-three advantages of PPC. Since budget is a major concern for small entities, they would like setting aside only as much as they could afford in order to make the kill with their paid ads. So, they could choose to spend only as much they deem fit. Even better, they can stop the ad campaign midway if the result is not what they expect. So, spending based on the ROI will be a good move as it brings the desired level of flexibility.

#5 Brand recognition

The more your ads are seen by people on the internet, the more brand recognition happens. This is how PPC helps as it lets you target keywords specific to the domain. Thus, you can keep the ads running so that those searching similar things can see your ads and efforts. Such efforts may not have a telling effect to the sales and revenue but they will surely bring home brand awareness benefits. And once more people recognized your business, its products and services, chances of sales going up at some point in future become higher.

#6 Local search

More people will visit your store if they find it in search results. This is something you can leverage and gain a hell lot out of local search. Thus, you can focus on mobile-carrying users and give them your ads to click on. Once that happen quite often, you can then guide them the ways to reaching you. You should not delay using local search as your competitors must be already into it. This kind of favourable digital marketing strategy will surely give a boost to the sales of your local store.

#7 Organic rankings a non-deterrent

Many people think that bad SEO rankings of their website will have a big say on their paid campaigns. Which is not the case, as both paid and unpaid are two entirely different concepts and they won’t overlap. Thus, your PPC efforts won’t ever be a reflection of your organic rankings and vice versa. Similarly, your ad campaigns won’t get impacted in any way by those constant changes of algorithm by search engines. The dynamics of pay per click advertising is separate and you needn’t worry about your SEO performance.

#8 A testing tool for marketing strategies

PPC is not only good at bringing traffic your way but can also double up as a testing tool for marketing strategies. Which means, you can create ads at will and run the campaigns one after another for a few week to analyse their performance. You can evaluate the CTR of these ads and based on that, go future course of action. So, you can easily test your strategies and then let them be employed at right time to bring you benefits.

#9 Re-targeting

Re-targeting is one of major benefits businesses can expect to get from PPC. Which means, they can target their customers based on their buying lifecycle and boost the chances of conversion. Let for say, if some customers are in advanced stage of product search and he/she is about to make a buy, brands then can use PPC to target them even if their ads could not bring the desired results earlier. Thus, ads can be run over and again to win the trust of your customers and bring them into the fold.

In a nutshell, PPC is something your small business just can’t afford to ignore. With so many advantages to take, you should hire an expert company to let your business’ marketing goals achieved in a desired manner.