Attract leads that matter to you most with paid search

Why paid search will be so important for your growth in 2018

You may have a pretty solid idea of your market, your customers and the personas you want to reach out to that are most likely to become long-term brand advocates and tell their friends and family that you exist.

The problem is that, even though you’re able to effectively picture these people in your head, you have little idea on how to approach or attract them online. If you’re investing in an inbound marketing campaign, too, to rank naturally and attract organic traffic, you’re playing a long game (and a highly effective one, we believe).

While that organic campaign takes hold though, you could be targeting and attracting traffic to parts of your site right now by putting some of your marketing budget into paid search to rank highly for specific keywords to complement any and every part of your inbound strategy.

With the right approach, you can almost instantly begin attracting people ready to make a purchase to your product pages, your services, nurture leads at the start of the buyer’s journey by directing them to specific content, direct them to places where they can transparently leave their data in compliance with GDPR, and much more besides.

Balancing your paid search strategy with an organic approach

With the right paid search strategy and a targeted approach, there’s no reason why you can’t begin to attract targeted leads to your site right now. There are businesses and marketers out there, too, who after researching the benefits of paid search ask why they shouldn’t just throw all of their budget into it.

Relying too much on biddable media practices including paid search can be an expensive business. It makes more sense to rank naturally and organically for the keywords you’re targeting in the long run to decrease your overall campaign costs.

At the same time, too much paid search can lead to overall campaign suffocation. A cluttered campaign is never a good sight, nor is it an effective driver of leads if there are too many layers. The very nature of search engines is subject to change; you have to constantly monitor each paid search campaign and adjust it regularly for the best results.

Invest too much into various paid search campaigns targeting different keywords and it’s not just your money you could be wasting. You can be wasting other valuable resources such as time and manpower. A long-term inbound campaign complemented by paid search is the way to get the best results.

Improving the quality of your inbound leads with paid search

Having a long-term inbound vision isn’t just important to helping reduce campaign costs and potentially achieving higher rankings. The overall goal of any marketing campaign – inbound, outbound or otherwise – is to improve the overall quality and volume of the leads you’re targeting.

It’s important to understand though that there’s no perfect way to do that. Inbound marketing is constantly changing. When it comes to search, for instance, Google is one of the most important places to market yourself. The search engine consistently changes its algorithms though, for quality purposes to try and reduce spammy results and to reflect people’s constantly-changing search habits.

That’s why it’s so important to have a multichannel approach to inbound marketing, with paid search one of the more important places to put your marketing budget, especially when you begin a new project to initially attract targeted leads.

There’s no point in attracting thousands of leads – or ‘hollow traffic’ – that don’t convert, though. It’s a waste of time and money. Working hard with key data and marrying your paid search campaign with other parts of your inbound strategy can be a great way to improve your overall lead quality long-term.

Time your paid search campaign properly for better results

Should you always put a set amount of money into a paid search campaign at all times of its existence? No; as previously mentioned, like any part of an organic inbound marketing campaign, paid search is subject to change and needs a constant eye on its performance to measure its success and adjust keywords and bid values.

It’s also a reason why persona targeting and getting to know the profile leads as much as possible is so important. Once you know when and where they spend their time online, the products they’re likely to be interested in, the hours they’re likely most active and other laser-focused factors then you can adjust your campaign accordingly for better results.

Take the ‘payday modifier’ for instance, the practice of increasing your paid search bid for a certain time toward the end of the month when people are more likely to have disposable income. We’re talking payday, and appearing higher in search results for certain terms when the people in you’re targeting are looking to spend could provide a serious sales boost for the sake of a couple of pound more.

A few days into the new month though and it’s worth decreasing the bid to again align with people’s financial situations. The payday rule isn’t the only modifier in paid search, and there are many other tactics to use to improve your paid search performance.

Learn more about your market with a paid search strategy

Paid search isn’t only a way to attract targeted traffic back to your website to boost the potential of your product sales. As part of a wider inbound marketing strategy, a paid search campaign can be a great way to learn more about the browsing habits of your users.

Growth-Driven Design (GDD), for instance, is a way to build a website that’s more affordable than traditional avenues. A launchpad site is created and optimised as you collect data and other information about how people are using it when they visit it.

But how do you get that traffic back to your site to get valuable insights to improve your GDD strategy? A paid search strategy can be a great way to drive traffic back to your GDD build almost instantly to get essential feedback on which parts are working well and which areas need to be overhauled.

Similarly, a paid search campaign can be used to increase email sign ups for more direct inbound marketing campaigns, to experiment and discover more effective keywords, to drive traffic back to social media profiles and much more besides depending on your overall inbound strategy.

Learn as much about paid search marketing before you start

Like all things you budget for as part of your business, you’re unlikely to part with your money unless you do your research and learn as much about the medium as you can before investing. Paid search is no different, and despite the amazing benefits a campaign can provide as part of a wider inbound strategy, there are other things to consider, too.

Costs correlate with your industry, for example. Not all keywords are created equal, and you’ll be paying the amount you’ve bid every time someone clicks on your ad. With phrases such as ‘business services’ and ‘lawyer’ costing north of £40 per click, it’s crucial to make sure that you have your strategy as perfect as possible and budget properly before giving it the green light.

Nurturing is a large part of the paid search process, and you still need to be producing high-quality content on a consistent basis to entertain and attract leads when they hit your landing pages through a paid search campaign. Even then, there are no guarantees whatsoever that a paid search campaign will bring you success.

Paid search though can be the beginning of a successful inbound strategy if you use multiple channels and invest your bids carefully, making sure to keep up with the evolving search habits and interests of the leads that matter to you most.

So, what are the best ways to use paid search?

It’s little wonder that so many companies and marketing professionals invest in paid search. Paid advertising can provide an average ROI of 200% if done properly. It’s also an excellent way to attract interest on multiple platforms, with 53% of paid clicks coming from a mobile device.

With marketers set to increase their ad spend by 73% in 2018 alone, paid search is one of the more mainstream avenues to attract people when it comes to inbound marketing. So, how exactly are businesses using paid search?

• Lead generation: Work hard to identify the customers and personas most important to you and you can begin to attract a higher volume of better quality leads with paid search.
• Lead nurturing: You can also target people at varying stages of the buyer’s journey to direct them to specific pages and content, nurturing leads to turn them into long-term customers.
• Data collection: GDPR has changed data collection. It’s more important than ever to collect data transparently; paid search can help you do that by directing customers to the right forms on-site.
• Campaign testing: Want to know which parts of your site are performing well and which bits could be better? Directing traffic to certain pages can help you ascertain their effectiveness with paid search.
• Increasing sales: Simply, if you want to increase sales for certain products, you could stand a better chance by appearing higher for branded keywords thanks to a targeted paid search campaign.

So, what does a paid search marketing specialist do?

Because it’s budget-based, you can begin to implement a paid search campaign almost immediately to begin driving targeted traffic back to your site.

That’s not the wisest idea in the grand scheme of things though; an experienced inbound marketing agency will work with you to create a wider inbound marketing strategy that effectively turns those leads into loyal customers. An agency will help you construct such a strategy, with the aim to also lower paid search costs as your long-term organic inbound strategy takes hold.