IT business owners, let’s be honest with each other.
How much do you really know about paid advertising?
While 45 percent of small business owners use some form of online advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) is still a topic many don’t understand.
This post takes a closer look at PPC marketing and how you can leverage it to grow your IT business.
We’ll start with the basics.
What Is PPC?
Per-per click is a marketing strategy that allows you to pay to have your website appear on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) when a user types a specific phrase or keyword to the search engine.
The SERP displays your ads and directs visitors to your website. The fee you pay depends on whether users click on your ad.
Why Should IT Companies Care About PPC?
For starters, when done right, PPC can generate quality leads for your business. Put differently, if you implement your PPC strategy correctly, you stand to experience an impressive return on investment (ROI) for your efforts.
Although PPC is common in search engine results such as Google and Bing, you can also use it on social media channels.
If you’re still not sure to find PPC ads, they’re the results that pop up before and to the right of organic search results.
Switching gears…
Which Are The Best PPC Platforms For IT Companies?
There are several places where you can spend your ad budget. The choice of one platform over the other depends on the ROI.
The best platform to use is one that’s easy to use and highly trafficked. While popular PPC platforms are relatively expensive, you can consider lesser-known alternatives if you’re on a tighter budget.
Other things to consider when choosing a platform include:
Availability of your keywords
Where your target audience hang out
Your advertising budget.
That said, here are some popular PPC platforms for IT companies.
Google Ads
Think about - how many times a day do you “Google” something that you want to know more about? Several times, right? …that’s why Google Ads is the king of PPC.
On average, Google boasts a whopping 90,000 searches per second, providing a massive opportunity to target keywords that your prospects are likely to click.
However, you should know about Google Ads because the platform is highly competitive, so you’ll need a large ad spend.
Bing Ads
The advantage of using Bing Ads over Google Ads is a relatively lower Cost Per Click (CPC). While your Bing Ads won’t reach a large audience as they would with Google, Bing is still an excellent alternative if you’re on a tight budget.
Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads is an excellent platform for PPC ads primarily because of its specific targeting options.
The platform allows you to target prospects depending on demographics, interests, behaviors, and location.
In addition, Facebook supports native ads, enabling you to introduce and blend ads in your social feed. Further, you can use Facebook Ads to advertise on Instagram.
AdRoll
AdRoll allows you to advertise to people who have already visited your site. For example, if someone reads your post about MSP services, you can retarget them on other sites they visit by displaying ads that advertise your managed cloud infrastructure.
Even though you can retarget with Google Ads, AdRoll allows you to display ads on Google and social media sites. That way, you have more opportunities to generate impressions and clicks depending on your goal.
RevContent
RevContent deals with promoting content via PPC. It uses the same concept as guest posting. However, the platform displays your content on an external site, but this time in the form of an ad.
Like other PPC platforms, you still have to bid on keywords, and your ad is displayed next to content relevant to those keywords. RevContent offers low CPC alongside highly engaged traffic.
With that out the way, let’s move on to the next topic.
Benefits Of PPC Ads For IT Companies
Here’s a rundown of why you should incorporate PPC ads into your overall growth campaign.
PPC Ads Are Cost-Effective
You don’t need to have a huge budget to use PPC ads. PPC ads give you autonomy over how much you’re willing to invest.
And the beauty of it is that you only pay when a visitor clicks on the link leading to your landing page or website. Essentially, this means a higher probability of conversion and, by extension, value for money.
PPC Ads Generate Faster Results
Sure, organic ranking is great. However, it can take months or years for your IT business to pop up on the first page on SERPs for target keywords.
If you’re a start IT company trying to break even, you don’t have the time to wait for the effects or social, direct, or organic traffic to kick in – and that’s where PPC ads come in handy.
As long as you optimize your PPC ads, you can appear on top of the SERP a few hours after launching your campaign.
You’re Can Control And Test PPC Ads
PPCs ads allow you to control ad placement, target keywords, and budget. Plus, you can run A/B split tests using different ads to determine which one has the highest ROI. Also, you can do away with ads that don’t live up to expectations.
PPC ads Enable You to Target Your Ideal Customers
Leveraging PPCs ads enables you to skip cold prospects and head straight to qualified leads that are ready to buy your products and services.
You can bid on keywords that people who already know what solution they want are searching online. Also, PPC ads allow you to target audiences beyond online activities and demographics.
On top of that, you can use PPC ads to launch a retargeting campaign that focuses on prospects who didn’t buy after landing your website.
Algorithm Changes Have Insignificant Effect on PPC Ads
Google is constantly releasing updates that might affect your rankings. Add the over 200 ranking factors, and relying on free organic traffic becomes a delicate balancing act.
PPCs advertising isn’t affected by algorithm changes. In fact, with PPC ads, your primary focus should be making sure that your campaign is successful.
You Can Rank Low Rated Domains with PPC Ads
Let’s face it. Ranking a new website isn’t easy. Besides, keywords are becoming increasingly competitive by the day.
As an IT company with low domain authority, you may find it hard to infiltrate top rankings on SERP or placing your content in front of your prospects on social media.
However, with PPC ads as part of your campaign, you can quickly scale the ranking for the target keyword even with a low domain rating.
Data Generated by PPC ads can Help Improve Your SEO Strategy
Indeed, PPC ads can produce faster results. But, that doesn’t mean you should neglect your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.
Think of PPC ads as a way to complement your SEO strategies. In other words, your PPC camping shouldn’t replace SEO.
Best PPC Ads Practices For IT Companies
There are several ways IT businesses can take advantage of PPC to grow and reach prospects. Here’s an overview of five PPC best practices for technology businesses.
1. Use Elaborate Demographics In Google Ads
Even though the demographic category in Google ads is in beta, you can whitelist your account. Doing so allows IT companies to target audiences by:
Company size – Small, large, and very large employer.
Industry – Education, construction, finance, manufacturing, real estate, hospitality, and more.
When narrowing down your demographics, make sure you note the targeting available for your specific campaign. Currently, you can only access these attributes approved for video and search campaigns only. Still, the available demographics offer a world of opportunities.
For instance, you can use the Target Only option to reach users in a specific category or the Observation option to target users who don’t necessarily fit into a particular category.
We recommend that you try to add audiences to your current search campaigns as Observation to enable you to understand how these audiences engage compared to those, not in your target demographics.
2. Keep Keywords Broad When Targeting Prospects By Audience
Since Detailed Demographics is in beta, it can be challenging to figure out how many prospects fall under these categories.
However, if your campaign structure is targeting only these users, you could be hurting your reach.
When you layer prospects onto campaigns, you can further qualify your target audience. So, make sure you test out broad keywords related to these audiences.
Remember, B2B conversions come from low volume, high intent searches, and broad match keywords, allowing you to focus on individual users with your campaign.
Also, using broad keywords enables you to collect more information on how prospects are searching to discover your product or service.
3. Bing Should Be Part Of Your PPC Ads Campaign
Google ad competition is stiff. You should, therefore, include Bing in your PPC ad campaign. Bing Ads can generate impressive results for IT companies, especially due to the LinkedIn integration function.
With the new feature, Microsoft Ads can now layer on specific aspects of a LinkedIn member’s profile and target them.
These include:
Industry
Company
Job function
Bing offers this as “Bid only.” Essentially this means you can increase or decrease your bids on these demographics. However, you cannot exclusively target prospects who match these criteria.
Still, you can get around this limitation by ensuring that you set your bids extremely low and use a significant bid to raise your demographic targets.
4. Introduce Your Brand with YouTube Ads
Here’s the thing…
You can’t have a $50 CPC budget and hope to generate a couple of clicks every day.
IT businesses are leveraging the power of YouTube Ads as a cost-effective strategy to reach receptive potential customers. A $10 per day budget to test YouTube effectiveness can help create some brand awareness.
Keep in mind while YouTube may not generate immediate conversions, it is an excellent way to win brand recognition.
We recommend that you test multiple audiences at a low cost per day, typically $10 to $20, then segment your remarketing list depending on users who’ve watched certain videos.
5. Ensure Your Tech Brand’s Assets And Content Are Compelling And High-Quality
This is a big one.
One of the mistakes you should avoid as an IT business is to target multiple personas for your product or service with one message for all of them. By doing so, you won’t engage your target audience.
Look, you have multiple target audiences, so you should be speaking to them in different ways.
So, consider each of your target’s pain points and carve your message from that. Also, your offers shouldn’t be the same across the board.
If you’re an IT company targeting software engineers who would use your product daily, create a message that tells them why they should use or try it out.
While they may not be the decision-maker, there’s every probability they’ll influence their finance department to buy your product. The same goes for ads targeting C-suite level management.
The idea is to position yourself as a thought leader.
The Bottom Line
Whether you started your IT company yesterday or have been around for years, PCC could very well be the boost your business needs to stay ahead of the curve – or at least top SERP rankings.
If you want more insights on how PPC ads can help grow your business or are having a problem implementing your PPC campaign, feel free to reach out to us, and we’ll take a look. See you on the other end.