What makes a great PPC campaign? What makes the difference between a waste of cash, and a campaign that you can use to continuously keep growing and scaling your organization?
While there are a lot of factors, you could certainly make the argument that one of the most important of these is the keywords. Your keywords are of course the search terms that you’re going to target. With both Google AdWords and Bing Ads, you’re going to be advertising in such a way that your ads end up showing on search engine results pages for specific searches. You can then choose precisely which searches bring up your adverts, and this is going to impact who sees the ads. So, what difference does this makes to your success?
Now, here are the questions: how do you go about picking the right keywords? What is the difference between a good keyword and a bad one?
Let’s take a closer look…
The Basics
The basic idea behind your keyword choice is that you’re going to try and ensure that the phrase you pick is one that the right people are going to be looking for. Who are the right people? Of course, they’re the ones who are most likely to buy your product.
This is also how Facebook Ads work – it lets you choose the type of person you want to target by looking at the details they fill out such as their age, sex, location and even hobbies and interests. The difference with a search term is that it is also time sensitive. In other words, a search term will have a bigger impact on your eventual profits because you are showing ads to someone at the precise time that someone is actually looking for your site.
For example, if you’re trying to sell hats, then your search term would be ‘buy hats online’. That means you’re not only targeting people who want hats but you’re also targeting people who want hats now.
So, when picking keywords, think about who and when.
Negative Keywords
One way you can make this a little more precise and specific is to try and avoid certain search terms from showing your ads. This is what is known as a ‘negative keyword’ and a good example of this might be the word ‘free’. You don’t want people to click on your ad if they’re searching for free things, because they won’t be likely to want to buy anything off you – and that means they’re costing you money without earning you anything back.
Keyword Research
More important still is to do your research.
That means looking to find out just how often certain keywords actually get searched for, rather than assuming. For instance, some phrases that might at first sound popular can actually end up being surprisingly unpopular. This means of course that no one ever searches for them, and thus they won’t bring any visitors.
Likewise, you also need to research the amount of competition for each keyword and aim for the terms that aren’t saturated! So, let me quickly explain how to fit Bing into your internet marketing campaign.
How to Fit Bing Into Your Internet Marketing Campaign
A great internet marketing campaign should be a campaign that is fought on many fronts. That means you need to have your fingers in lots of pies, and you need to find lots of ways to reach the widest audience possible.
If you rely on just one method to build your brand and gain customers – be it PPC or SEO – then you’re going to end up too reliant on that single source of traffic, and you’re going to greatly limit the amount of visitors you can appeal to.
That is why it’s important to make sure that Bing fits into your campaign. But it’s also why Bing should only be one part of a much larger and multi-faceted assault. Read on to learn more about the different aspects of internet marketing, and how they should all coalesce into one single strategy.
Content Marketing
One thing that every business can benefit from these days is a blog. Having a blog allows you to create content on your site, and this will then give people a reason to come to your site.
Key to understand here is that no one likes being sold to. If all your site is essentially one big advert, then you’re not giving people any reason to keep visiting. You’re not building loyal fans, trust or a relationship. If the visitors don’t want to buy then and there, then they will simply leave.
By creating great content, you give people a reason to want to find you, and this will gain you regular traffic.
Email Marketing
If you can’t capture sales, then capturing emails is the next best thing. This converts cold leads into warm leads and it gives you a huge list of people you can potentially sell to.
Social Media
Social media has a similar end goal to email marketing. This gives you a way to reach the people who have proclaimed themselves your fans, and it allows them to share your content to help more people find you. It also lets you build a closer relationship with your potential customers.
SEO
Next comes SEO. One part of this is creating lots of great content, which you should already be doing. The other part of this is having lots of inbound links to your site and lots of people sharing what you do. You can encourage this by writing great content and being active on social media. This will help you to reach the top of Google and Bing for different ‘search terms’.
PPC
Now comes PPC. This is a tool you can use to pay to reach the top of the search engines right away for your chosen keywords. That means you need to be making money back from these searches, so normally it will be used as means to send targeted visitors right to your sales page or ecommerce store. You can also use this as a way to ‘test’ the organic keywords to try and rank for with SEO though.
Using Google and Bing makes sure you gain 100% of this audience and it also helps you to avoid direct competition in some cases. Bing is more affordable and has fewer advertisers competing for the same few spots!