As digital marketers, we have a variety of channels we can use to reach our target audience. There are the tried and true organic channels, called “earned media” — like search engine optimization, social media, and content marketing – as well as your “owned media” channels, like your email list. But the third piece of the pie is “paid media,” and it’s just as effective, if not more effective, than the other two. Failing to include pay per click marketing in your campaign plan is an oversight that can cost you big in the long run.
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Pay Per Click Marketing Creates Instant Traffic
Unlike SEO and social media, which take time – often a year or more – to fully develop, pay per click ads can begin bringing traffic to your website tomorrow. It’s perfect for promoting holiday or other short-term promotional content. If you’ve launched a new business, developed a new domain, or have otherwise started your Web presence over with no traffic, finding out how to do pay per click marketing can help your company start making sales the very next day.
Pay Per Click is Highly Targeted
When doing organic search engine optimization, chances are that most of your visitors will “bounce” — leave your site without ever clicking on anything else. This “bounce rate” is typically considered the percentage of your visitors who are not the right target market. They either weren’t compelled to complete their objective on your site, whether that’s purchasing a product or becoming a lead, or the offer or content was wrong. This can happen more often than not when you’ve cast a wide net with SEO. Unfortunately, a sizable percentage of your visitors won’t be valuable to you. On the contrary, pay per click marketing is highly targeted. You can find visitors specifically matching your customer demographic targets, psychographic interests, or behavioral data. This allows us to pay for the clicks that have the highest value to us, based on our strategy.
Pay Per Click Fits Lots of Campaign Objectives
Normally when we think of pay per click business plans, we think of the largest pay per click opportunity: Google AdWords Paid Search. While AdWords may account for a sizable percentage of your total campaign spend, pay per click marketing may also include paid social media, remarketing, display campaigns, or managed placements. In Paid Search targeting, Bing Advertising, as well as Google, we may find different results. Pay per click marketing services, such as Ballantine, can use the full gamut of paid media to find a just-right fit for your campaign objectives.
It can be tempting to ignore pay per click marketing. After all, there are costs involved, and we want to hope that can accomplish our goals using other, cheaper media. But we do this at our own peril. There are certain advantages to instituting a pay per click plan that make it an essential and effective part of a comprehensive marketing strategy for your business.
I'm the Director of Digital Services and Partner at Ballantine, a family-owned and operated direct mail & digital marketing company based in New Jersey. and started in 1966 by my great uncle!
