Slow and steady wins the race, and there is no doubt that organic growth, the growth that happens over time with constant effort and diligence, will benefit your online business. However, it may be that your content is appealing to a fairly narrow audience. Widening your customer base is beneficial, something you can do with pay per click (PPC) ads. But they are not without risk.
Speculate to accumulate
Trotting out yet another phrase of old, the speculate to accumulate applies to PPC. In exchange for bidding for impressions and ads when customers are browsing the web, you could reap the rewards with revenue in return.
In other words, advertise online to get more customers and more sales. New customers are hard-won and so with a strategy in place to maintain links with your new buyers, you have a burgeoning customer base.
Why turn to PPC?
In essence, if you want your business to grow faster, PPC is a move in the right direction. And there are reasons why…
#1 It’s predictable
SEO and content marketing are the fuel of organic growth. With time and patience, but your website will rank with search engines, bring customers to your site.
But even with fantastic blog posts and amazing web copy, once you’ve published and put it out there, it is out of your hands.
Minimizing potential disasters, such as being penalized by Google or being outranked for keywords, is possible, but it can all feel at arm’s length. You ‘know’ or ‘expect’ customers and search engines to find you, and with plenty of sharing and engagement on Facebook and Instagram, it should happen.
You can predict how fast this stream of traffic will grow but with ads on Google, for example, and social media channels such as Facebook and Instagram, if you get your ads right. And that means creative copy with a call to action that makes it hard to ignore.
Essentially, if you aim for 1,000 visitors with PPC, that’s what you will get.
#2 Faster results
Even with high-quality, informative blog posts, great social media content, and the golden touch of marketing, it will still take six to 12 months for inbound marketing strategies to grow organically to the level you want and need for your business.
Paid ads on Google. Facebook, Instagram and other channels can bring customers to your site within hours, not months.
#3 PPC is easily scalable
To scale up content marketing, you produce and share more content. The effects are not immediate, nor are they obvious, even after several months.
Whilst organic growth is not a bad thing – customers love a full, vibrant and informative blog or social media channel from a brand – the results can be lacking. It could be lack of sharing this content that is the issue.
Creating, publishing and sharing content – and re-sharing it or re-purposing it – takes time and effort. Your desire and intent may not be lacking, but there are still only 24 hours in a day.
You could hire someone to help or collaborate in a content marketing strategy with a specialist company, neither of which are bad moves. But content reaching the right people will still be slow progress.
With paid ads, if you are enjoying success, why not ride the crest of the wave and scale up your campaign? You can also experiment with keywords, scale campaigns back or give them a little boost (or a big one) when you need or want to.
#4 Less effort and time-consuming
There are several pinch points when it comes to the time in your business day. Spending hours on creating ad campaigns appeal to very few, especially when you want and need to continue to develop your business.
After the initial set up period, there is very little else you need to do to maintain the momentum of successful ads on Google, Facebook and Instagram. All three of these channels have easy-to-use, self-explanatory dashboards that even novices to the world of PPC find relatively easy to use and understand.
Whilst your ads are popping up in front of new customers, you can continue creating and sharing the quality content that earns you SEO brownie points, as well as what your customers want to see once they arrive at your site.
Where should you place PPC ads?
PPC is not just the domain of search engines. Other paid advertising channels could work for your business. As well as Google Ads, consider Facebook ads as well as Instagram ads, both of which are strongly linked since Facebook bought the photo-rich social media channel back in 2012.
Where you place your paid ads, along with what it says and how it entices customers, will depend on the customer audience you are targeting.
A predictable and diverse customer base is the goal of many businesses but throwing out an advert via a scattergun approach and hoping it delivers will see it fall short.
In other words, you need to understand who uses Facebook and Instagram, for example, and whether your customers are there. Knowing who you are targeting with campaigns is important on Google too.
The ad center dashboards on all three of these channels allow you to be specific in terms of demographic – i.e. who sees your advert and why – as well as when you want your advert to be most active. Linking campaigns with customer behavior also yield strong results.
What’s the risk?
We started by advocating how PPC can boost business growth, but it isn’t without risk. As is always the case, the more you invest in terms of cash and time, the more you have to lose.
That said, PPC is easy to understand and implement, although you may need to tweak campaigns from time to time. This is not a ‘pay the bill every month and forget about it’ exercise. Start small, and when you start to get the results you want, you can scale up. With calculated risk, you could be enjoying far bigger sales and revenue.