To PPC or Not To PPC really is and should be a question on a company's mind. On average, there are 40,000 search queries per second equating to 3.5 billion search queries a day and 1.2 trillion a year. With that being said, you would think the answer would be a simple yes, why would we not include PPC in our marketing efforts - but like anything in life, nothing is ever simple.
There are many questions one should ask whether PPC is the way to go for their company, but one of the first questions is, "do we have the budget to not only compete against competitors but can we do it effectively?
As you probably guessed, within the PPC sphere exists an extremely competitive ring. If you are a SMB, you are going to be competing against companies that have a much larger monthly budget than yours, some are even as high as $100,000 and above. For instance, can your $1,000 - $5,000 a month budget go against these top guns and actually provide results for your brand? It can, but your approach to how you run your PPC strategy must be different.
Working with a small budget to generate paid search leads cannot be your only lead - generation tactic. You must have a full marketing and lead - generation machine firing on all cylinders. Meaning, other lead - gen efforts must be in place and running at the same time as PPC such as a landing page strategy on your website for campaigns, social media, perhaps content syndication, and a highly targeted linkedin strategy. We also cannot forget about email strategy. If you are feeling overwhelmed by all of these strategies, not to worry! These are all topics we will be going into more detail on in future blog posts so stay tuned.
You should also have to have an extremely focused and targeted keyword strategy, a topic we will dive into in a later blog post.
So should you use PPC? The answer is yes, but if you are working with a smaller budget, you must make sure you have other lead - gen and marketing efforts in place that work alongside your PPC strategy to support your overall business goals.