Marketing your trade to people who need you now!

Marketing to your future customers that are looking for you NOW! tell them you're here

Have you tried Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising yet? If not, read on as marketing your business with PPC can be a great way to bring in new business quickly.

What is PPC? 

The red boxes are the PPC listings or Sponsored Ads

When you search on Google for a product or service, you're shown results for that search, at the top and down the right hand side of the page are shaded boxes and in the top of the box are the words 'Sponsored Ads', the rest of the pages are what are called the organic listings or Google Places listings Read my post about how to get here for free. The 'Sponsored Ads' section is the bit we are concentrating on. 

The sponsored Ads is the PPC section where advertisers have 'bid' for their ad to show, I say bid because advertisers ads enter into an auction to be shown when someone searches for their product or service and depending where they come in the bidding depends where the ad gets shown.

If you were to bid £1 and a competitor was to bid £1.05 and others less than £1.00 your Ad would be shown in second place. Up until this point though it has not cost any advertiser a penny (Except for when you Pay Per Impressions), the time when the advertiser gets charged is when the searcher clicks on the ad, hence the term Pay Per Click.

Your marketing advert 

The ads that you create are limited to a certain amount of characters and you need to make it compelling to the searcher for them to click on it, It also helps to have the relevant keyword(s) that searchers are looking for in the ad itself. 

A relevant ad has more chance of being shown over a competitors (such as electrician in Hertford over just Electrician if the searcher has searched for the words Electrician in Hertford) and more chance of being clicked on by the searcher. When starting your campaign you should create around 10 Ads and test them to see which gets clicked on the most and then you take the best performing ad and create variations and pretty much repeat this tweaking all the time.


Keywords for marketing your trade 

when setting ads, advertisers need to set some keywords, words that are relevant to the business that someone searching for a product or service will type into the search engine, Some keyword examples for an electrician would be;

• Electrician
• Electrical contractor
• Electrical rewire
• Fuseboard change 
• Electrician prices
• Commercial electrician
• Emergency electrician

You can discover more of your own keywords with the Google Keyword tool here

Every word or phrase has a different cost per click, depending roughly how many advertisers there are and how much they are bidding for it therefore where you set your bid can make your Ad show or not be shown in the listings. The people bidding the highest will win the auction and so have their ad shown first.

Please note that your keywords should also be used throughout your website too as it helps in the ranking of your ppc ad as well as getting listed in the organic rankings.

Setting a ppc marketing budget

When setting up your ad, you are asked to set a budget, you may set a budget of £10 per day and let's say you set a bid of £1, once your ad has been shown and clicked on 10 times your ad will stop being shown for that day.

Lets say your competitor sets a budget of £10 also and and set a bid of £1, your ads will stop being shown around the same time, If however you set your budget at £15 your ads will be shown longer so you should get more business than your competitor. 

If however you set your budget at £10 but your bid at 75 pence once your competitor's budget has been used up your ad will start showing at the top later in the day once your competitors budget has been used up. The one thing with PPC is that once your set budget runs out it's like saying right I'm closing the shop - no more sales today. 

One benefit is that if you become busy you can turn it off and when you need more business turn it back on again. One tip is to set your ads so they show all the time at the start and see when you get the most clicks, then re set the times your ads show to only the times you get the most clicks.


Is your website a good or bad marketing tool

I'm going to keep this short, If your website is not good your prospective customer will bounce ie leave your website without an action, in other words you'd have wasted your money on PPC, make sure you have a good and well designed website before initiating a PPC campaign. Of course you could use just your Google Local page if you don't have a website, but in all honesty if you've not got a website then you are losing out!

Marketing on the networks

The three main networks for advertising your site are Google Adwords (the most used) Microsofts Bing and Yahoo Advertising Solutions, Google has more people using it for searching therefore it has more people advertising on it, the other two have less people using them so less advertisers which can mean you spend less or get more for your budget.

Conclusion

This has been a simplified overview of using Pay Per Click Marketing, you can view my Top tips on Marketing with Pay Per Click here. Pay Per Click marketing can be great for getting new business and it is very targeted to the people who need your service NOW!. It can take time to tweak it to get it right, the right ad, the right budget, the right bid etc. It really is a science or art and there are companies that just do this, whichever way you want to look at it. PPC done well means you can get more business than your competitors and spend less than them, this is when it's done well! 




To your PPC marketing success

Paul 



PS. If you run a trade business in Hertfordshire or don't mind travelling to Hertfordshire then you may be interested in my Google Adwords marketing 121 training. For more details on my Adwords training visit my website here

You can read part 2 about marketing your trade with Pay Per Click here

And here is Part 3 about marketing your trade with Facebook ads