The most obvious way to use PPC is to try and make sales. When you place PPC adverts on Google or Bing, you are paying per click. This means you can calculate precisely how much each visitor to your site is costing you and that means in turn that you can work out whether or not you’re likely to make a profit.
In other words, look at your number of visitors in a given timeframe, look at the amount of money you make in that timeframe and then calculate an income per visitor. That’s how much you can afford to spend on PPC.
The Power of Brand
Except is it? Because not every visitor to your site is going to of course buy from you the very first time they visit your site. Much better for you, would be to build your brand and to build trust up to the point where you can sell a ‘big ticket item’, such as an expensive course or a retreat. If you can do this, you can make much more per customer over time.
Likewise, it might be that by exposing people to your brand, you are later better able to sell to them the next time they visit your site.
The only problem is that it’s much harder to quantify the value of a brand and to know how much to spend on this kind of advertising. So what do you do?
Free Exposure
One thing to keep in mind is that you can use a PPC advert in order to get free exposure if no one clicks on it. Remember: this is pay per click. So no clicks, equals no payment. But just because no one clicked on your ad, that doesn’t mean no one saw it and no one noticed it subliminally.
That means that if you design a PPC advert with a heading and a description that people are less likely to click on, you can build a lot more visibility for your brand!
The other thing you can do is to use PPC by carefully choosing your search term. Normally, the keywords chosen are picked to try and directly sell the product. The example often used is ‘buy hats online’. Buy hats online is a keyword people will search if they’re trying to buy hats there and then.
But instead, consider making your keyword something that is not sales oriented. For instance: ‘improving VO2 max’. Perhaps you sell cycle helmets; this is the perfect way to reach and talk with the very same audience. People who want to increase their VO2 max may well cycle and that means they might need cycle helmets.
This is all about knowing your ‘why’. That means knowing why it is your business exists and what it hopes to accomplish. If you understand this, then you can find other people who will believe in your brand and want the same thing. Once you can do that, then you can find people who will likely become loyal followers and fans.
