Finding your voice and amplifying your brand’s message is a complicated, endless process that demands both commitment and careful consideration. From finding out what channel best embraces your marketing efforts, to pinpointing your exact target audience, pay-per-click success comes down to acknowledging the primary strategic elements involved. Follow these five principles to garner attention and discover an effective approach to online advertising.

Find the right digital advertising channel

First and foremost, you need to determine where you would like to advertise your business and why. Many people begin simply by trying to appear in front of as many eyes as possible. This is outdated thinking. Whilst potentially reaching thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of people can sound enticing, this is not nearly as important as who you are reaching. Understanding your customers, or the customers you wish to attract, is the key to finding the right advertising channel for your business. Think carefully about the demographic you consider most likely to find your product or service relevant to them. Next, think about where this demographic is most likely to ‘hang-out’ and be most likely to engage with what you are going to communicate with them in that moment. Example: Let’s say you are a mortgage broker and are offering the quickest and most cost-effective solution to finding the perfect mortgage for young couples. Is opting for Facebook going to make the most sense to try and engage with this demographic? Maybe it would be – young couples browsing Facebook, messaging each other, discussing the potential of buying a house together. On the other hand, browsing Facebook, socialising, not really in the mood to be thinking deeply about big life decisions – are they behaviours you’re really looking to target? These are exactly the kinds of considerations you should be focusing on when deciding to embark on a new PPC adventure. Determine your goals Once you decide upon the perfect avenue to reach your hordes of willing customers, next you need to establish exactly what you consider to be a ‘win’ after you begin advertising. This may sound like a moot point, as simply ‘securing more business’ is of course the ‘win’, right?what your Wrong! Sourcing your potential business and communicating effectively, long before you’re even able to try and close new business, is the first step to the process. Online marketing allows us many luxuries, such as the ability to experiment with variations in audience (who we reach) and how we communicate to that audience, allowing us to change course in a matter of seconds. Securing new business comes after establishing your goals for success from your ad campaign > your business. How you measure the fact that you have driven a qualified lead is essential to understanding the process of attracting new potential business, then refining the quality of your potential business over time to ensure a higher chance of securing more business from those leads. Do you consider it a ‘win’ if…

You are receiving a lot (how many, why?) of clicks, therefore driving a lot of traffic to your website?
Somebody sends you an email enquiry?
Somebody phones your business line?
Somebody downloads a certain price guide of your products?

There’s a potentially endless list of actions that may indicate you are taking a step forward. Gaining a new lead, a new sale, a new client or whatever tangible beginning of a business relationship you count as a successful tally, can all contribute to your measurement of growth throughout your venture. Ensure maximum chances of success by first defining what your success is. Define your messaging Your ad messaging acts as an umbilical cord from potential customers to your brand. The more you provoke a) emotion, b) intrigue and/or c) a sense of resolution, the more likely it is that people will engage with your ad and begin the potential relationship with your business, with an open mind. Aside from provoking a strong reaction, you also should be aiming to communicate in a way which is relevant to the demographic of which you’re trying to appeal to. What are you trying to say? What separates your brand? Don’t settle for discounts and racing to the bottom of the barrel (cheapest) to cop-out on the need to both: be unique and to communicate your uniqueness through your ad messaging. Align your landing experience Often an overlooked aspect of any online advertising campaign is the webpage on which your traffic lands (hence, landing page), after clicking your ad. Why spend an eternity crafting an enticing, engrossing and engaging ad, painstakingly reworking and testing endless messaging, if the landing-page your traffic ends-up on is not entirely relevant to what you’re advertising? Imagine that you walked in to a supermarket, asked to be directed to the bread aisle, got led down a certain path and yet ended up staring at cheese. We all like cheese (well, most of us. Shame on those of you who do not), but we would be less likely to purchase cheese if looking for bread. The word cheese has been used far too many times now (that’s 4), but you get the point. Your landing page is your aisle. Show your potential customers what they are looking for and what you have advertised to them. The more coherent the messaging and content is from source (platform/channel) > ad > landing page, the more likely you are to produce positive results. Track your success Easily the most neglected, yet absolutely paramount aspect of any marketing campaign is tracking. The key difference which separates almost all forms of online marketing campaigns vs. traditional (offline: TV, magazines, billboards etc.) marketing is the ability to accurately and precisely track the source of positive results, helping to determine your source of success. Without knowing exactly from where your leads are coming, it becomes increasingly difficult to eliminate wasted investment and stack the odds heavily in favour of what is working. With the likes of Google AdWords (used in conjunction with Analytics), we now have the ability to track almost every conceivable action which you may define as a conversion (new lead). Tracking your volume of leads and where those leads are coming from, is the information we use to make logical decisions as to our next moves in the PPC game of chess. Without this information, you’re throwing darts in a dark room and hoping you hit a bulls-eye. Thinking of running a PPC campaign? We can help! Give us a call on 1300 663 995.

Brett Fenton