PPC: Sitting Pretty At the Top of the Lead Gen Food Chain

One of the most frustrating things you can experience as a business owner is an ineffective lead generation campaign. Even if you offer the best product or service available, your bottom line will suffer without the right leads. That’s where pay-per-click, or PPC, can step in and turn your business around.

Hey, What is Pay-Per-Click?

PPC involves building what’s called a “campaign” on a platform like Google AdWords. You build that campaign around keywords related to your business. You then pay to have your website show up at the top of the search results when someone searches one of your targeted keywords on Google.

For example: you own a coffee shop in Colorado Springs. You want to drive more customers to your shop, so you create a Google AdWords campaign and one of the keywords you target is “coffee shop colorado springs”. When your campaign is done well, whenever someone searches “coffee shop colorado springs”, your business will appear at the top of the results list. It’s then your job to make your business appealing enough to get that customer in your door. Look at that! Money in your pocket.

P.S. the Wolf Pack is super good at managing PPC accounts… like better than you could imagine.

PPC Can be Intimidating

Starting off on the wrong foot with PPC will always result in lost money. You’re essentially betting business capital on an experiment. That sounds terrifying, like you’re going to lose all your money no matter what. But let’s explain it this way: it’s like a poker game.

If you’ve never played poker before, you’re way more likely to lose than win on your first try. But then there are professional poker players. They’ve studied strategy, learned the best moves, and figured out how to use their cards to their advantage. They know their stuff, so they’re way more confident and qualified to drop into a poker match at any time and, probably, win it pretty easily.

PPC, when it’s done well, is the number one way to generate leads online. But it takes a lot of research and a bit of trial and error. You’ll need to spend a good amount of time tweaking and re-working your campaigns to get them really running well. That’s why, most of the time, businesses end up hiring someone who really knows their stuff to run their campaigns for them.

Is PPC a DIY Project?

Of course, we’re not saying you can’t do it yourself. You absolutely can.

PPC is one of the largest sources of qualified leads for most advertisers. You’ll need to maximize the features and functions of the PPC platform, know your target market, and know your competitors. You’ll need to set up goals right from the start, begin gathering data, test and test again, optimize landing pages, and stay organized.

Get as much information as you can about the process customers go through when buying your product. Where do they normally fall off the map and become a lost lead? Investing in an email follow up system will build a stronger relationship with leads as well, which will help close more sales. But that’s a topic for another time.

PPC Could Change Your Life

Okay that’s a little dramatic, but not entirely incorrect. Remember, the name of the PPC game is capturing potential customers attention wherever they are in the buying process, and keeping it until they buy. Do they even know your company exists? If not, PPC should put you on their radar. If so, it should reinforce that your product is perfect for them.

What is pay-per-click? In short, it’s an invaluable lead generation tool, so get going! Let us know if you’d like us to help.

If you’re already rocking the PPC game and are ready to take it up a notch, check out our list of the best google ad extensions!