When it comes to effective marketing strategies, some specialists rely heavily on pay-per-click ad campaigns for achieving fast, reliable results. But some marketers strongly believe in other marketing strategies and want nothing to do with PPC campaigns. The latter group is one of the reasons why only 45% of small businesses are investing in PPC campaigns.
But what if we told you that both groups are valid? For any marketer trying to stay on top of the SERP, creating a hybrid marketing campaign with PPC ads and other marketing methods might be your best shot at driving reliable results. In fact, merging PPC campaigns with other marketing approaches will help you drive a more actionable campaign and ultimately generate more leads and conversions. In this guide, we will explore this and other essential information you need to remember to make your business thrive. But first, let’s start with the basics, shall we?
Quick Overview Of Creating A PPC Campaign
There’s a whole CPC vs PPC debate on whether the first or the latter form of marketing should be focused on. But before we answer that, let’s define these concepts. PPC stands for paying a fee each time your ad is clicked, while CPC (cost-per-click) is the amount of money you spend on each clicked ad. Basically, PPC is a marketing channel while CPC is the performance metric used for it.
Yet contrary to popular opinion, running a PPC campaign is more than just paying to have your website pop up on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP). Rather, it’s an in-depth (often back-breaking) process that will require you to create a series of ads based on a set of highly related keywords.
However, it’s not just about the ads you’re creating; it’s also about where you’re creating those ads. For most marketers, Microsoft Bing, Google Ads, and Facebook ads are popular choices, but you could use other efficient platforms to drive reliable results.
For instance, you could try out AdRoll, a popular retargeting platform that advertises to people who have already visited your website in the past. Although Google Ads also offers this feature, AdRoll can display ads on Google and social media, giving you broaderreach.
Can You Improve Your KPIs By Merging PPC Campaigns With Other Marketing Strategies?
PPC leads bring approximately 50% more conversions than clicks coming from organic results. Now imagine what happens when you merge PPC ad campaigns with other efficient marketing strategies such as SEO and content marketing.
For instance, if you already have a content marketing campaign in place, you can boost your content using PPC. You could start by running a Facebook Ads campaign targeted at people who have liked your page. This will ensure that anyone who’s interested in your niche will undoubtedly come across your content. Next, run another Facebook campaign that requires you to manually input targeting information. This will help to ensure that you target the particular audience you’re trying to reach.
At the end of the day, your content marketing campaign will have a wider reach thanks to the integration of PPC ads. And your PPC ad won’t be yet another clickbait with no engaging content to hold your audience’s attention. Overall you’ll observe higher click-through and conversion rates. In the end you do stand a better chance of meeting your KPIs by integrating PPC ads with other marketing campaigns.
How To Merge Content Marketing With PPC
It’s time to take a closer look at how you can merge this marketing strategy with content marketing.
Focus On Creating Great Content
It goes without saying that if you’re trying to merge PPC with content marketing, you should start by creating great content. Now, great content can mean different things for different people. For the average pay-per-click consultant, it could mean creating a clickbait headline to grab their audience’s attention. However, for the experienced hybrid marketer, great content means in-depth, well-researched content that can grip the reader from the first sentence to the last period.
A great way to measure your content’s success is to analyze the unique page visits and the average time users spend on your page. If your content is engaging and comprehensive, readers will spend more time reading it instead of exiting the page after only a few seconds.
If you’re struggling with finding inspiration for content creation, you can always search for any great content within your niche and then create an even better version of it. For instance, you could include more details like images, tips, and examples to make your content more in-depth. We recommend using Buzzmo to find high-performing content on search engines.
For Example, we searched for the key phrase “how to make money online” on Buzzmo, and we found various content on making money online.
With these results, we now have a wide range of content ideas to choose from. We could decide to make a more detailed post on making money with Google maps and include images. This way, our content would be better and more informative than the high-performing one.
Promote Your Content Using PPC
Now that you’ve created great content that’s performing well, it’s time to get it out to a larger audience using PPC ads. A great way to do this is by using the “Boost Post” feature on your Facebook page to promote the best-performing piece of content you have. You can then set up the targeting parameters to include people who like your page, and their friends.
This helps you ensure that your content gets across to anyone who might be interested in your niche. If your content performs well on Facebook, you can take a step further to promote it on LinkedIn using LinkedIn Sponsored Updates. Your content should target your LinkedIn followers/audience (if you already have one) and also reach to people who are interested in your niche but aren’t on Facebook. You can ensure that your content is relevant to every member of your target audience, regardless of the social media platform they use.
It’s important to note that PPC advertising doesn’t have to be limited to simply promoting content. It can also be used to come up with better ad headlines.
Try creating about five attention-worthy Twitter headlines, run these headlines as “Promoted Tweets”, and watch their performance for the next five days. After this exercise you’ll be able to ascertain the best-performing headline and use it for your piece of content.
Voila! You’ve successfully increased the chances of your content performing well organically.
Merging SEO With PPC
Merging PPC with SEO strategies is a powerful move ensuring that you rank higher on search engines, even for keywords with the most difficulty. Here are some essential tips for combining PPC ads with SEO strategies:
Make A Flawless Keyword List
Here’s the thing: creating optimized content that works involves more than just stuffing random keywords into an article or landing page. To achieve the best results, you’ll need to develop a flawless keyword list that will help you rank higher on SERPs. This is where keyword research comes in.
Keyword research helps you see things from your target audience’s point of view and create relevant content. But how do you find the right keywords? We recommend using Semrush Keyword Magic Tool, Swydo has launched a new integration with Semrush, to get keyword ideas and insights. In this example we used this tool to search for the keyword “content repurposing.”
What we got was an exhaustive list of keyword ideas, as well as their density and difficulty levels. It’s typically advisable to choose keywords with lower difficulty levels. Trying to rank on the first page for a keyword with a high keyword difficulty could take years (or longer) to achieve since you’ll be competing with the “big dogs”.
Don’t Overlook Website Design And Layout
If you’re looking to get maximum results by merging SEO and PPC, make sure you don’t overlook your website’s design and layout. PPC ads might draw users to your website, but you’ll hardly get any conversions if your website isn’t aesthetically pleasing.
We like to think of SEO and PPC strategies as an invitation card while the website itself is the party you’re about to visit. You can attend a party because someone handed out a cool invitation card to you. But would you stay if the venue looks wrecked and there’s no DJ? Most likely not.
PPC ads and SEO strategies can lure users to your website, but its appeal might be the tipping scale for conversion and sales. So without an attractive website design, you might be pouring SEO and PPC strategies down the drain. It’s advisable to create specific, appealing landing pages for each PPC ad since it’s most likely the first encounter your users have with your brand. This way you can make a great first impression and increase the amount of time users spend on your page.
Measuring Your Campaigns
When it comes to aligning PPC campaigns with other marketing strategies, a lot of marketers often find it difficult to navigate through several reports at once and determine which results are organic and compare different metrics. To maximize efficiency when it comes to tracking your campaign performance, you can use a tool like Swydo to help you piece all your analytics together into one comprehensive report.
Swydo makes it easy to combine data from multiple marketing channels in one report, monitor your KPIs and goals over time, keep track of your high-performing campaigns and optimize the low performing ones. You’ll have access to reporting data to make more informed decisions about your marketing strategy and budget.
Final Thoughts
Merging PPC campaigns with other marketing strategies is a form of hybrid marketing that can help you draw maximum conversions and traffic to your site. We’ve outlined some of the essential tips for pulling off this hybrid approach that can help you boost your results. First, you should create great content and push it using PPC. Then, you can develop a flawless keyword list to boost search engine optimization. Finally, remember not to overlook your website’s aesthetic appeal. Good luck!
BIO:
Amanda Dudley is an essay writer with a background in education. She has a Ph.D. in History from Stanford University and has dedicated over ten years of her career to educating students and bridging the learning gap. Currently, she works at EssayUSA, a reputable essay writing service.