What to Do Before Starting a PPC Campaign
Paid advertising, also known as Pay Per Click, is for some, a form of advertising they couldn’t survive without. In a competitive market it may be a businesses only opportunity for visibility on-line. This is especially true for a small business whose bigger competitors out bank them in marketing dollars, affording them the top spots in organic search. You might just go broke trying to keep up using SEO as your only strategy.
But the reality is, paid advertising can also be a disaster. A disaster is defined as spending loads of cash sending traffic to your website and getting nothing in return.
Learn What a Surprising Number of Advertisers Do Wrong That Costs them Money
Before you pay money to send traffic to your website, be sure it is effective at what you want it to do. In other words, is your offer compelling enough and worth the effort you’re asking of your visitors? Is it worth the price your selling it for. Whatever it is you are asking visitors to do, ask yourself if you would do it? Preparing your site to be “conversion ready” is where you will spend the most time and probably the most frustration. If you have money to spare I would strongly recommend hiring a professional to implement the best lead capture and conversion strategy for your website. Sending traffic to a site that isn’t ready to convert traffic is the same action as flushing money down the toilet. How do you know when your site is ready? By testing it. But we’ll save that for another post. Right now our focus is Lead Capture.
Understanding the Behaviors of Internet Traffic
This is not easy. I repeat, this is not easy. Since the “how to” varies depending on your business and your strategy, you will have to do some research. The bottom line is, you will not be successful in paid advertising until your presentation is polished and your offer so good, it’s nearly irresistable. I feel it’s safe to say that selling anything over $20.00 on the internet is twice as hard to do online, then it is offline. I am not saying there isn’t opportunity; it’s just more difficult then people realize, to capture.
Refine your Offer
Remember, you may be asking your visitors to invest in something they don’t get to feel or touch before buying. Or you may be attempting to capture their contact info, which is, believe it or not, asking a lot. It’s downright exhausting for internet surfers to read articles, let alone type words into fields. Create your presentation for an audience that has attention spans barely long enough to measure. With a simple click of the mouse they could be a million other places more exciting. With ease of transition like that you’d better come up with something good…and quick?
Target your Message
You have probably heard this a thousand times but have you really thought about what it means? Targeted messages usually mean that although you may have a very large market, the reasons why people buy your product or service differs on a large scale. So selling to a “general audience” isn’t compelling enough for any one of them to take action. You have to “hit home” and appeal to each and every need separately. Why? Because then that message resonates with them. Expect to have several different market segments and thus separate lead capture pages for each of those segments. These could either be on separate domains or on your main domain as “subdomains.” You don’t have to target all segments at once just make sure to target them individually.
Here’s a Quick Review
Creating Lead Capture
1. Define your market – Break up into smaller segments. Who are they, what are their needs?
2. Create offer for each segment- A page that describes your offer – make it attention grabbing preferably short with a good hook. Most often you have to give something away in return for what you want them to do. An ebook, or how to on something of interest related to your offer.
3. Prepare lead capture pages for each market segment – Do this for each market segment – do not try to target the entire audience with one offer that you think appeals to everyone, it won’t work.
4. Test pages by running similar ads changing one of them slightly to see which performs best.
Have anything to add? Would love to hear from you with ideas for creating great lead capture.
