Every digital marketer desires to conquer the art and science of content marketing and Pay per Click (PPC) advertising to maximise their digital marketing ROI.
A quick Google search returns a page full page of a combination paid ads as well as organic results:
PPC And Content Is A Match Made In Heaven
Clever marketers can combine organic SEO and PPC to boost their marketing efforts. While PPC drives the right traffic to the right place, content marketing ensures that the traffic is retained and converted. It is one thing to entice people to click your ad, it is another thing to make them stick around, fall in love with your brand and even become brand evangelists. I have no doubt in my mind that you have heard the phrase “Content is King”; no wonder content marketing has ever been on the lips of every internet marketer.
Content marketing is not only cost-effective; it results in increasing, ever-green traffic. In other words, it has a spiralling effect on traffic.
Having said that, sometimes getting and leading the target audience to your content is not always as straightforward as marketers would like it to be.
If you are struggling with your content marketing, it means it is time to utilise paid search to boost the effectiveness of your content marketing campaigns. Paid search can mean the difference between working your ass off without seeing meaningful results and being an effective marketer. There are no guarantees in digital marketing or even marketing in general, but being calculative, creative and open-minded can increase your chances of success.
If there is one thing you need to remember straightaway it is this: PPC doesn’t and shouldn’t happen in a vacuum. You should consider your content before you launch a new PPC campaign.
A Good PPC Campaign Should Do More Than Just Bring In Sales
Yes, it’s true that the goal of any PPC campaign is to improve your campaign, get people to click on your ad and make a purchase. As such, the average marketer sees it as the easiest and quickest way to win in the marketing sphere. Therefore, all they do is research the right keywords, set their budget and sit back to watch their ad bring in customers.
But what if, like most of us, you are in for the long haul? Wouldn’t it be wise to think of using PPC to boost your content so that you can build your brand and audience?
PPC, done in the context of content marketing, ensures that instead of just clicking on your ad to buy whatever they want and forgetting about you, your customers can land on great content, interact with you and build relationship with your brand. So a truly holistic approach to digital marketing involves a combination of both PPC and content marketing.
How Exactly Does PPC Boost Content?
A PPC campaign gives the marketer an important insight in terms of providing useful data to help them create a more effective content marketing strategy. Some of the questions you should be able to answer after running a PPC campaign include:
- What are my most popular products?
- Which geographical region is most interested in what I have to offer?
- Which gender is most interested in products?
- Which age bracket should I mostly be targeting?
- What are the most relevant keywords or phrases that represent my offer most effectively?
- What is my competition like? Is it high or Low?
The fact that PPC provides marketers with enormous amount of data, with everything measurable and tractable, makes it a critical component of any digital marketing strategy. Based on the above, let’s look at important metrics derived from PPC that can boost your content strategy.
PPC Helps You To Know Your Audience
Suppose you have been running a PPC campaign for a health supplement product for months, you should look for the following signals:
- Geography: are there particular locations where demand is notoriously high?
- Behaviour of buyers: who are my buyers? What are their interests?
Most, if not all, PPC platforms will allow you to select specific countries and/or regional areas that you would like your ad to be served. In fact, Facebook and LinkedIn go a notch higher and allow you to offer gender and age group specific targeting. For instance, if you think your product is best for college graduates, your audience is most likely to fall in the 24-45 age brackets. If your audience likes a particular book or movies, you can target just that.
By knowing exactly who your audience is, you can ensure that you create content that is relevant to your audience. What PPC does is to take the guess work out of your content marketing.
PPC Helps Improve Click-through-rates
Writing catchy and compelling PPC ad copy helps entice users to click on your content. Ad copy or headlines are important marketing tools. They enable you to project a marketing message and attract people to click on your content. If you look at your PPC account, you can find out what is converting well. So from an SEO perspective, this might give you a clue on what Meta tags might work well in gaining a higher click-through-rate from organic search results.
Sometimes I’m surprised that ads and headlines in my adtexts that I carelessly throw at the end of the ad without much thought end up outperforming those I thought would work. In the end, I have to go with what actually works instead of what I think will work. Without running a PPC campaign, it would be difficult to tell which ad groups and headlines are most effective. In other words, PPC data takes guesswork out of your site’s content approach and allows you to focus your efforts where it’s best placed.
Suppose you run two ads: “cheap packaging Sydney” and “packaging materials Sydney”. If the latter outperforms the former, it tells you that you have to design your content in such a way performance and solution is emphasised rather than pricing. Here PPC can be helpful in terms of knowing how to design your messages so that customers get what they want.
PPC Enhances Your Visibility And Trust
Relying purely on content marketing will demand a lot of time and effort before you can appear on the front page, if ever you will. Getting to first page of search engine results is not a piece of cake. Some have never gotten there despite huge efforts going into SEO. Not because they are doing something wrong, but because the competition is fierce. And believe me, dislodging the big boys from the first page is harder than becoming the president of your country.
PPC all but guarantees that you will appear on the first page of the search engine results. Even if no one clicks on your ad, people will still see and remember your brand. So PPC can enhance your brand visibility and awareness without spending anything. As more people see your brand in future, they will be more likely click on your content to see what you have to offer. Ultimately, this will positively affect your overall traffic and hopefully bring clients to your brand.
Not A Fan Of PPC? Free Traffic Sources Are Dying Out 🙁
There was a time when marketers could rely purely on free traffic, but that is no longer the case. Nearly 4 million blog posts are published every day, making the internet a crowded place. Therefore, the best way to get fast and highly targeted traffic is via a PPC campaign. But strictly speaking, PPC ought not to substitute your content or SEO efforts. Instead, it should enhance it.