PPC Advertising Tips for UK Small Businesses

Online marketing is all about bolstering clicks and maintaining a high click-through rate (CTR). As a small business owner, you may be cash-strapped when compared to big companies with large and widely saturated advertisement campaigns. The good news is that the online world works a little differently, allowing small digital businesses to go toe-to-toe with larger competitors for search page visibility. One of the key weapons in the digital marketing armoury is pay per click (PPC) with Google Ads, an online service which gives you the opportunity to augment your brand or businesses visibility.

PPC has become an industry standard through which businesses can find new clients and customers for their services online. As with many other digital marketing strategies, it can be difficult for the uninitiated to work with. After all, it takes time to build the proper foundations for PPC use. Whilst it may appear costly to utilise advanced PPC, small businesses have all the tools they need to be smarter in their PPC use to compete with larger companies. Here are some strategies to help set you off to the right start.

1. Choose your keywords wisely
Online PPC allow businesses to create their own adverts online. Clients pay a small fee for every time an advert pops up and a customer clicks it. Appearing in Google via Ads, PPC allows new visitors to discover your link through pronounced visibility. You cannot benefit from this process without both optimal and succinct keywords. This is where keyword research comes in with platforms like Google’s Keyword Planner

A poor choice of keywords will see your PPC budget fail, where an understanding of the best terms in your field will prove more profitable in the long run. Instead of thinking with your gut, you need to choose tested phrases. Essentially, you need to research and finalise your keywords based on their search volume, relevance and price.

Keywords need to be as specific and concise as possible. Avoid generals and think about local specifics. The more general and popular terms will be the costliest. By choosing keywords that are geographically specific, you’ll both attract a user that actually needs your service/business whilst saving money.

2. Start small to build up
If you’re working with yourself or a small team, you should start your digital campaigning small. If you produce and manage several adverts, it can become overwhelming and confusing quick. To get a better handle over your budgeting, it’s always best to start with just one campaign with Google Ads to learn how to use the platform. This will allow you to track and improve your campaign as necessary.

3. Organise your campaigns effectively
The careful organisation of campaigns is key to helping your Google Ads PPC get off on the right foot. Before starting a particular advertisement campaign, ask what the purpose of the PPC link-building is and what you want to achieve. Each outcome/purpose requires its own criteria. As a new business, new customers are attracted by what is called a search network campaign which brings awareness of your site to an audience. For general awareness building, you want to impose a display network campaign to increase visibility. To simply bring people through to your site, you’ll want a remarketing campaign, and so on.

4. Monitor your campaigns
As with good organisation, good monitoring will allow you to make the most of your money. It’s no use feeding credit into a campaign that isn’t working. By keeping an eye on the analytics, you can improve your advert performance. With Google Ads, this is simple, with Analytics allowing you to measure your return on investment (ROI).

5. Use strong language and encouraging call-to-action phrases
Strong and compelling headlines will help receive a better and more focused audience. In particular, if you want your audience to do something (e.g. get more information, sign up or buy now), don’t be shy in stating it. Call-to-action (CTA) is the best way to achieve these goals, telling your audience precisely what you want them to do. You want to convert those clicks into follow-throughs.

Some great tips for creating attractive ad copy include those based around exclusivity like “only 3 left in stock”. You can motivate your audience with engaging, empathetic marketing terms like “are you sick of…?”. All the while, you have to be focused on your selling point as well. You could even offer trials or discounts with these early campaigns.

6. Budget accordingly
This is a good tip across all marketing campaigns, but particularly with PPC where costs can snowball if you’re not careful. If you’re not making any headway with your PPC campaign — which is common in small businesses — you may need to reconsider increasing your budget. Although it’s good to start small, you need to foster enough clicks to make your PPC campaign worthwhile.

7. Consider professional help
The final tip for newcomers to PPC is that professionals will make the process easier. Bringing a wealth of marketing knowledge with them, professional help is ideal if you do not have the time or resources to organise PPC on your own. Internet marketing agencies also have their own set of skills and experience in things such as machine learning programmes, allowing them to make more effective advert campaigns that are in tune with changes in audience behaviours.