“You have to spend money to make money”.
This simple truth is one of the most common sayings in the English language. But no proverb will tell you exactly how much you have to spend in order to generate profit. That is what discourages many from continuing to pursue the freedom that comes with a self-run business.
Luckily, there are some ways through which the initial investment – at least when it comes to the marketing budget – can be strategically attributed for a profitable effect. If you’re a small business owner, you may want to take a look at these following tips to spend your money wisely.
There is a certain strategy in choosing the right keywords to get effective results. The less of a budget you have, the more that strategy can turn into an art-form. As any artist, you have to go through highs and lows to be successful, so as a PPC budget “artist”, the three most important highs and lows are:
High intent keywords refer to a strong intention on the searcher’s behalf of conducting a transaction. This could either mean buying a product, inquiring about a service, and generally any action that has a strong possibility of eventually leading to a purchase. There are three types of basic search queries:
For high intent keywords, transactional searches are the only relevant ones. This sort of search turns keywords with commercial intent into “triggers” from prospective customers.
High-volume keywords are keywords – or search terms – that have a large search volume. These are among the queries people search for the most on Google, Yahoo and Bing. “Computer repair”, for example, is a keyword phrase that is searched for 823,000 times each month, according to Google Ads. You should consider using low-volume keywords if your product is specialized for a narrow market, one that accurately and precisely describes your service or product. That way, you filter only the people who really know your product and are specifically looking for you. If your product is more general, consider using a higher-volume keyword phrase.
Low competition keywords are long tail keywords with much lower competition than generic, competitive keywords. You will rank higher on Google, Bing, and other SERPs, if you keep your competition low.
The most successful campaigns are also the tightest and most focused. To achieve this, you do not need to include every keyword you anticipate your audience will search for. Instead, create different keyword groups, all relevant to each other, so that the whole ad campaign will cater to the specific needs of your audience. This will allow for you as the marketer to have the most control over the campaign.
For example, if you own a custom guitar shop, but you also offer guitar repair services, it’s not something that people might deduce from merely placing a “custom guitar shop” ad. The keywords and ad copy within the guitar shop campaign should be separate from keywords and ad copy within the guitar repair services campaign.
It will be in your best interest to always be testing different versions of ads. And you can do so by using split testing (or A/B testing). This ad optimization tactic is unexpendable, and allows you to analyze how different strategies, keyword groups, audience targeting, and ad copies impact your campaigns.
Testing is not free, but it is a necessary expense. This experimentation stage can guarantee the much sought-after long-term success for your campaign, especially when every penny counts: you do not want to risk seeing sub-par results at the end of a campaign, which might end up costing you more than you would’ve spent on split testing.
At the start of any campaign, you probably set out a price per click that you won’t want to exceed (even by a penny).
Luckily, Google Ads offers the option of various bidding strategies and one of the most relevant to you will probably be Maximize Clicks. Max clicks bid strategy allows you to set a bid limit that Google Ads won’t exceed. Setting these firm limits is a good discipline to setting out the budget for the campaign beforehand.
The max clicks bid limit can be changed for each campaign. Allocating a bit more for high-value keyword groups and reducing your spend on others is a good idea.
Remarketing basically means reconnecting with the customers that showed initial interest in your product. You can reach these users by attaching the remarketing audience to this specific campaign. The remarketing audience is made up of users who have already landed on your website in the past X days. You can define X.
Remarketing is an extremely cost-effective tool that comes with lots of benefits. Some include:
You are marketing to people who have already shown some interest in your product or service so you can show them different messaging than you would cold traffic. Plus, you can get a better bang for the buck for each of your advertising dollars because it costs less to reach these users than it does cold traffic.
Your first low-budget campaign can either be discouraging, or it can be the start of an important marketing channel. Your willingness to test and learn will be the determining factor for your success with PPC.
And as always, if you need help with your PPC marketing, feel free to contact us.
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