Small Budget Tips: How to Effectively Use PPC for Small Businesses

Whatever industry you’re in, every business wants to stay on top of the game and continue to keep growing. While a business that isn’t growing doesn’t necessarily equate to dying, letting it stagnate for long periods of time will increase the likelihood of closure. To maintain and improve your business, finding new clients is the ultimate key to success.

Pay per click (or PPC) advertising is an effective method to supercharge your business and grow your client base. It works by showing ads on certain websites that costs businesses a small fee each time an ad is clicked. By directing visitors and customers directly to your site, this internet marketing technique amplifies the possibility of closing a sale and generating income.

However, if not used correctly, PPC can create shockingly large advertising bills. To prevent skyrocketing charges, here are some tips on how to implement PCC ads for small businesses even if you have a limited budget.

Wouldn’t it be nice to run a campaign that targets all your business marketing goals? Building awareness, generating leads, promoting your brand, increasing web visibility, and targeting specific market – all in one single campaign? It’s possible - especially if you have millions of dollars to spend on internet promotion! But as a small business owner, you only have a limited amount of budget to work with.

Since a small budget limits the amount of advertising campaigns you can have, you need to prioritize your goals and stick to them. Determine what’s important, and from there build your marketing goals based on the needs of your business. If your goal is to increase brand awareness, focus on that and develop a campaign that will materialize your objectives.

• Set up a realistic daily budget and don’t go overboard with it.
• If you exceed your daily budget, do not dip into your budget for the next month.
• You can combine goals into one campaign, e.g. leads and sales marketing.

A great digital marketing campaign needs to be well planned in order for it to be effective. If you run a local business, you should only target your area to effectively reach the right audience. This geotargeting settings uses the location of a potential client to deliver search results based on their current position. Decide if you want to target customers by state, city, zip code, country, or local neighborhood.

You’ll also need to carefully schedule your ads so you can save on costs by running campaigns on certain days at predetermined times. A clever trick to remember is to run your ads during business hours. This way, if a customer sees the ad and tries to contact you, you are available to answer their call or email at that time.

Another trick is to use the right keyword match types. A broad match shows your ad when people search using all kinds of keyword variations, while precise keywords are required for an exact match.

• When you are creating the ads, be sure to add negative keywords to exclude to be more targeted.
• Review the search terms that triggered your campaign regularly to either add or exclude them from your campaign.
• A PPC campaign running in a smaller geographical area tends to get less traffic.
• Broad match reaches the widest audience but costs more per click than exact match.

Another tip to maximize your PPC for your small business is to use long tail keywords rather than generic ones. The problem with generic keywords is that your ad might not come up near the top of search engine results because the competition for that keyword is just too high (other businesses are trying to target it too). With long tail keywords, however, you are establishing a clearer, more specific line of communication between your business and the active buyer.

Rather than a word or two, a long tail keyword is a combination of words and phrases that visitors use when searching for products or services. Although they frequently result in less traffic, long tail keywords attract potential customers who are close to the point-of-purchase, meaning these are the clients ready to buy at any time. For example, “jewelry” is such a broad keyword term to use, but using “diamond garnet 14 carat solid gold earrings” will most likely reach the desired audience.

• Use programs such as Google Keyword Planner to search long tail keywords or related searches on Google.
• Google autocomplete is a great platform to find relevant long tail searches.
• The cost per click on long tail keywords is much lower than for generic terms.

Ad extensions are additional pieces of information that are relevant to your business. These are combinations of different snippets that can be added to the body of your ad copy. An ad extension may include, but is not limited to, your local business address, site links, phone number, business ratings, callouts, app extensions, and much more.

Using ad extensions can help your campaign be more relevant by showing users the most useful appropriate content. Likewise, it helps improve quality score and ad ranking. Another benefit of using ad extensions is that it makes your internet marketing efforts stand out from the rest since you have an extra piece of information visible within your advertisement. It promotes customer engagement without the need to spend more.

• Manual extensions are customizable but automated ones are easier to use.
• Google provides free automatic ad extensions which you can opt-out of any time.
• Explore consumer ratings, seller ratings, previous visits, and structured snippet extensions.

The last thing you want to do to maximize PPC for your small business is to learn what’s working and what’s not. To reach the full potential of your campaign, you need to measure its effectiveness to see what will eventually bring new leads cost-effectively. Discover your best performing advertisements for each keyword group and replace all the money-losers with new ones.

There are many ways to measure the success of your PPC. First is the conversion rate where you can analyze how often your ad resulted in an actual sale. To do this, simply divide the total number of conversions to the number of ad clicks during that time period. Another way to measure your PPC is by doing A/B testing. Test two or more keywords and use the gathered data to assess which keyword performs better.

• To determine how much to spend per ad, compare test results with your budget
• Don’t forget to test visuals, landing page offers, and ad copy to boost conversions.
• Always monitor and maintain your PPC campaigns, and refine them to yield better outcomes.