When you’re a small business owner you know the importance of getting the word out for your business. It’s important to rely on cost-effective, profitable, and creative digital marketing avenues to do just that. One of the most important and popular methods is using PPC ad campaigns – here’s what they are and how they work to grow your business.

It’s Search Engine Advertising

PPC (pay per click) advertising is exactly what its name implies – advertisers pay every time a user clicks their ad. One of the most popular places to place PPC ads is on search engine results pages, where users will encounter your ad as they enter search terms that include your chosen keywords.

For example, if someone was to search “Volkswagen Repair,” and you owned a German automotive repair shop, you’d tweak your PPC ads to appear on the search page for that search.

How Your Ads Appear

Google Ads, formerly known as AdWords, is perhaps the most common PPC platform. It works by setting up an Ad Auction where competitors bid on spots for ads based on click prices and monthly budgets of PPC campaigns. The Ad Auction is totally automated and happens in less than a second to give everyone’s ad campaigns a fair shot at being displayed.

The Ad Auction works by having advertisers place bids on specific keywords so their ads will show up when searchers are looking for what they want. For example, if you were a German automotive repair shop in New York, you might bid on keywords like “Volkswagen Repair in New York.”

After all the advertisers bid on the ad space, Google AdWords displays them all according to their bid places. You can see how this is useful for small businesses to target specific and local audiences with keywords that pertain to their businesses.

Some of the other popular PPC platforms include Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and search engines like Bing and Yahoo. The key is to determine where the bulk of your target audience spends time online and then tailor your PPC campaigns to be where they are when they need what you have to offer.

PPC Is Affordable For Small Businesses

If you’re reading all of this and getting overwhelmed by all the technicalities that go into running a PPC campaign, don’t worry. The best part about PPC is that it’s an incredibly cost-effective way to advertise without going over the budget you’ve outlined for yourself.

All you have to pay for is if someone clicks on your ad, and you can adjust how much you’re willing to spend on that by changing your CPC (cost per click) and your daily ad spend. If you monitor your CPC and keep in mind what your goals and budgets are, you won’t ever find yourself going over your limit.

Moreover, even if nobody clicks on your ad, you’re still getting really great exposure from the ad being there. The more people see your business pop up on their search engine results page, the more they’ll come to recognize and trust your company. This kind of cost-effective trust building is so essential for small businesses since it can often be difficult competing in the same digital marketing spheres as big businesses with big ad campaign budgets. PPC advertising is a smart and low-risk way to make your dollars last when you’re advertising.

PPC And SEO Go Hand In Hand

PPC campaigns are great online advertising tools, but they shouldn’t be the only ones in your business’s arsenal. A great way to boost your business’s reach in the digital world and spread the word about products and services you offer is by using SEO (search engine optimization) marketing techniques.

SEO is a way to organically make your business’s website appear closer to the top of a search results page, and it works best in tandem with PPC. SEO is an incredibly valuable strategy to adopt because 92% of searchers click the links that appear on the first page of their search results. SEO, while it’s basically free advertising, takes a long time to work and integrate into your site’s structure. So using PPC on top of SEO will boost your site’s reach on the search engine page for specific keywords.

SEO for Small Business

Small business owners, don’t let the digital marketing arena filled with competitors big and small deter you away from starting your own ad campaigns. While it’s not the brick and mortar bus stop or billboard advertising that we’re often used to, digital advertising campaigns are a smart way to get a high ROI on the money and time you put into developing them.

If you’re still questioning whether PPC advertising is the right direction to take your business’s marketing campaign, reach out to the friendly folks at Outreach Marketing.

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