The Printing Champions Blog

Putting together a Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing campaign targeting your local audience is actually very simple: you open an account with Google, Yahoo or MSN (these are the most popular search engines, compose your ads, set your advertising costs and geographic parameters…and voilà! You’re up and running.

Now that your ads are being displayed, what do you do next? You need to manage your campaign to maximize your return on investment (ROI). You’re in business to make a profit, and that begins with your advertising…and a properly-managed PPC campaign can mean the difference between substantial profit and significant loss.

So what’s the secret to highly-successful PPC advertising? The formula: good keyword selection + relevant ads + constant bid optimization.

Identifying the perfect keywords for your target market may appear to be a challenge when you don’t know what you’re doing. Your portfolio of keywords needs to be relevant enough to drive traffic to your site, while eliminating those leads not likely to become paying customers. The name of the game is attracting local leads that are specifically looking for what you have to offer.

There are various tools at your disposal to assist you in identifying the perfect keywords for your local audience. Many are expensive and difficult to use. So as a busy local shop owner whose based in, say, Ottawa, you may opt to seek out an Ottawa PPC management agency to research those keywords for you. However, if you want to avoid paid tools or services altogether, there are excellent free keyword tools you can use. If you’re advertising in Google Adwords, I highly recommend there Keyword Selection Tool: it helps you not only identify relevant keywords, but numerous synonyms that can literally help you dominate your local niche.

Some small business owners don’t realize that PPC marketing is basically a huge auction: the highest and most relevant bidder (we’ll talk about relevance below) is the one who’ll win the auction…every time. In PPC marketing, the highest bidder’s ad will occupy the prime space on the search results page…which will result in more traffic than lower bidders’ ads.

But bidding high for your ads is only part of the story. Your ads need to be relevant. Google and other search engines will reward your ads with higher positions – and even lower bids – if they are highly relevant to what their searchers are looking for. Therefore it is crucial that you group your keywords in themes based on your target market. Again, you can decide to leverage the experience of a local PPC management firm to help you define those audience profiles and write highly-relevant ads…and potentially reduce your advertising costs in the process.

As soon as your local advertising campaign is running, it is critical that you keep a close eye on how your ads are performing: how much are they costing you as compared to your resulting sales? There are powerful bid management methods that can greatly improve your ROI (you can either do a web search or contact a qualified PPC management firm for more information), but at a minimum, you should remove those keywords that are proving to be unprofitable.

Successful local PPC campaigns are possible with the correct keywords, highly-relevant ads and continuous bid management. It may sound difficult at first, but the financial rewards are well worth the effort.

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