If you're producing great content you're establishing credibility and starting a relationship. But how can you leverage PPC to improve your inbound marketing?
Here are a few ways:
- Test Headlines -- That awesome content piece needs an awesome headline. Find out what your target market responds to by writing 3-4 ads, each with a different potential headline. Run them in AdWords or BingAds. See which gets the best CTR. Winner, winner, chicken dinner.
- Test Messaging -- For messaging that wont fit in a PPC ad (and that's a lot since most ad formats only allow 95 characters), test out different landing pages. Simply duplicate you top performing ad and send half your traffic to another landing page. Monitor your analytics to see which page has the lower bounce rate, higher time on site, higher conversion rate, etc.
- Test Your CTA -- You can do this right in the ad copy similarly to #1 above, or you can split traffic to 2 landing pages like #2 above, but with different CTAs. Either way, you'll be able to find which CTA draws people in.
- Discover What Keywords People Are Searching -- With the recent (not provided) news, PPC is becoming one of the only places to find out what people are actually searching. Look in your search query reports and you'll see exactly what people search so that you can write content perfect for the current search trends.
- Stay Top of Mind -- Remarketing is becoming standard practice in the PPC industry and why not? You know they've been to your site and with segmented remarketing lists, you even know which pages they visited. Using remarketing you can show them messaging that helps nurture them along.
- Build Segmented Email Lists -- Great content appeals to lots of people, but your follow up messaging may differ based on certain needs. Segment your email lists by using different landing pages for different groups. For example, all your B2B keywords go to one landing page and your B2C keywords go to another. The subsequent email lists are segmented so that you can message more accurately.
- Increase Visibility -- Posting content onto your social media profiles will get your content in front of your current fans, but if you want to expand your reach, consider some paid promotion. Just a few bucks can boost your reach significantly.
About the Author: Robert Brady
Robert Brady is the head PPC wizard at Righteous Marketing, a company that provides PPC management, and conversion rate optimization services for SMBs.
Robert got started in Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing during a class project in college and hasn’t stopped learning since. He is a Google AdWords Certified Partner, Microsoft adExcellence Member and is certified with Marketing Experiments for Online Testing and Landing Page Optimization. He has worked with a variety of different companies ranging from a small grass-fed beef grower in Idaho to a large B2B data storage provider.
He currently resides in Provo, Utah and can often be found skiing the greatest snow on earth, mountain biking through the Wasatch mountains or playing ultimate Frisbee at the park on a Saturday morning. The best way to say hello is through Twitter, where you can find him @robert_brady.
