Is that all you could do in PPC, if you have a low budget?
The answer is absolutely not. There is a lot you can do even if your P/L statement permits less. First of all just understand that PPC marketing is not all about hanging at the best places in search result pages. There are many other online places where you can bid for clicks and win with a targeted CPA. It just requires extra hard work to find those spaces. Following are the areas to utilize with low budget:
Re-marketing Campaigns
There is a myth that you need to earn some initial paid clicks to run re-marketing campaigns. Re-marketing campaign will target all the visitors to your website whether from paid, non-paid or direct sources. It’s just that you have to install a code snippet in all your web pages and then build logic for re-marketing. The beauty of re-marketing campaigns is that you can target users on the basis of path they followed on your website to navigate. Take help from analytics to see which navigation has performed best for your conversions.
For example; all those visitors who see your ‘about us’ and ‘contact us’ page convert at a much more higher rate than those who just visited your ‘home page’. So you can re-target all those visitors who saw both the pages but didn’t convert. Another advantage of re-marketing is that sometimes your visitors just see your ad and go to the website directly rather than clicking on the ad, which results in view-through-conversions.
This is a very cost effective medium if you already have a visitor base and you just want to convert them to buy a specific product or service. But if you don’t have enough site visitors then you should think about SEO & SMM first and then about re-marketing. Also keep in mind that re-marketing works only when you have the code snippet installed on all your pages. It doesn't track visitors prior to that.
Search Targeted Campaigns
These are the simple paid search campaigns where you pay for clicks when someone searches for a keyword you used in your campaign and clicked on your sponsored ad on a search results page. Marketers with low budget, have to “centralize” their efforts. By centralize I mean determine the most performing keywords and most performing ad copy and bet all your money on that and mute any other efforts. Even if it means, bidding on just 1 keyword and 3 ads per ad group. Try to keep only one campaign in the account, so you can allocate whole budget to that one. You can add other effective but costly keywords, after seeing good results.
This tip is valuable for those marketers as well, who are spending high, followed by a high CPA and they want to control it.
Display Network
People say that display network doesn’t align well with CPA targets, which is true to a larger extent, but you can utilize it to reach the most targeted audience as well. Follow same theory as suggested for search network above. Select those websites or pages where you think only the target audience will visit. For example if you sell camera covers then try to find websites that provide information or reviews about other camera accessories such as lenses, straps, tri pod stand etc. Even 2-3 most targeted websites that allow third party ads will work for you.
There are many 2nd tier and local ad networks that can provide placement for your ads at cheaper cost per click. You just have to research hard about it.
Social Network PPC
A platform loaded with millions of people from various interest groups is a nice opportunity for any business. Paid marketing on those social networks, provides an elevated path towards that opportunity. Good thing about social paid marketing is that you can select your target audience on the basis of interests, demography and social status.
You just have to bet on the most suitable social network for your products and services. Such as, for consumer products & services you can go for Twitter, Facebook and Youtube; and for business products & services you can go for Linkedin & other professional networks
Don’t go after trying everything at once, as you can try them one after another. Also if something strikes well at first chance don’t discontinue marketing on that medium to test others, but allocate extra budget for your next test, because anything that works for your business shouldn't be compromised for the space you haven’t visited yet.
Email Banners
This is one of the most underutilized medium, because it requires lots of interpersonal skills. You have to identify the best news & content providers serving your target audience and contact them to include your banners in their newsletters. Majority of email serving applications provide clicks report so you can argue to pay for clicks instead of paying for total newsletters served by them.
Buying Time Bound Space
Many bloggers and news websites sell spaces for fixed time and amount such as per day, per week or per month to show a banner on the side & top bar. Just make sure of few things before approaching a site owner to rent a space for your banners:
- Analyze their website by checking comments, social proof, visit counters, ranking provided by external tools or even ask them to directly share their daily or monthly visitors report.
- Profile attached to the content is a real person and have a social existence in popular networks.
- Majority of their content talks about problems and solutions faced by your target audience rather than selling some other services.
- The property is not owned by any of your competitors.
PPC marketing is a part of search engine marketing, but not restricted to that. You can innovate yourself new ideas and places to receive cheap and most targeted clicks. If you are doing something unique with low budget successfully, then please share it in the comments section for other marketers to leverage.
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This is something very useful.thanks for sharing.
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