Inbound marketing is one of the most important things these days when it comes to having a business or a website online.  People are much smarter in 2015; they know what they want,they know that they should research the product or business or service and they know that buying something is less about impulse buying and more about finding the best option for their needs.  While SEO on your website IS important and always will be, inbound marketing – i.e. marketing off of your website, is also going to be an important option for every business owner out there.  If you have not considered something like PPC or pay per click for your website or business yet, perhaps its time to start thinking about it more.  PPC is a great option for inbound marketing and here are a few reasons why:

 

PPC Is Always Available

PPC is not just available on search engines like Google Ads, but it’s also available on sites like Facebook and Twitter as well.  These days, more and more people are spending their time online, whether it is looking stuff up on Google or padding through their Facebook and Twitter pages.  In the US alone, adults spend around 11 hours per day on digital media and online sites.  Because of this factor, you should consider all the different ads and products they will be seeing in those 11 hours online!  Buying PPC ads ensures that wherever your audience is spending time, you are too with your PPC ads!  PPC ads, while very fruitful in digital media, are very fickle.  If you are having a hard time figuring out what to say or who to choose as far as criteria goes, perhaps it’s time to hire a digital marketing firm to help you along the way.

 

Targeting Your Audience

One of the reasons why PPC is so robust and popular is because of the way you can create the ad.  Essentially you can be in any business, any niche, any country, and you can create criteria that will be seen by those people.  For example, you could have a business where you are a woodworker.  You hand design guitar picks made from different kinds of wood.  You then cut the wood into a guitar pick shape, you etch the wood with a custom message and then you gloss over it using a sealer.  It’s a great business and it can attract a lot of customers.  But, the last thing you probably want is to show your product to someone it wouldn’t be useful to or to someone that wouldn’t be interested in buying it.  So with a PPC ad, say on Facebook, you can choose the exact sex female or male to see the ad, more than that you can choose the country they live in, more than that you can also choose interests that are relevant to your guitar picks such as people that play instruments, guitar lovers or people that like woodworking.  It’s really fun to create an ad actually, it’s pretty easy too.  Be aware that the more criteria you choose, the lower the amount of people that will see the ad.  For example if you chose both female and male, all countries and people interested in music you might get something like 500,000 people viewing your ad.  On the other hand if you are stricter in your guidelines; only males, over the age of 30, only the USA, interested in music you might only get 50,000 people.  So it’s important to pick and choose your battles.  Everyone using guitar picks, but then again this was an easy example!

 

Geo Targeting Your Ad

As mentioned above, you can target your audience, which may or may not be important to you, but for some people it’s the only criteria they add to their PPC ad campaign.  One of the biggest reasons people choose specific countries is because of the shipping and handling costs or because their product is only available in a specific country.  For example, Region 1 DVDs are only usable on Region 1 DVDs which are usually DVDs that are used in the USA.  Therefore if you were creating a PPC ad for a DVD website that has Region 1 DVDs, you probably wouldn’t want to create ads that include people from Germany, the UK or Australia because essentially those people wouldn’t be able to buy from you anyway, since it’s kind of like burning money at that point.  Going back to shipping and handling, if you deal with larger items like Custom Wood Tables, you might not want to necessarily ship from New Jersey to Denmark – it would be too expensive for you and your customer.  So instead you might want to deal with just people in your vicinity.  You can also target by state and city on some websites such as Google.  Facebook not so much.  But you can still choose Countries on Facebook.

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