We don’t talk much about paid media on the Lauren Proctor blog, but PPC and other forms of paid advertising can be an incredibly effective means for getting visibility in a number of settings. Keep reading Eric Blair’s post on PPC for a sense of how PPC can fit into your digital marketing equation.
If your company provides a great service or offers a valuable product, it is meaningless unless customers can find out about your business. That’s the very nature of advertising. As long as there has been a captive audience, advertising has played an important role in expanding customer bases for companies. At the beginning of the 20th century, most advertising was relegated to roadside billboards or periodicals. For companies, this meant a “captive audience” only if that audience happened to be driving down the road or reading a magazine. There were some great benefits to these early forms of advertising, because it was there that the modern age image of Santa Claus was created by the Coca-Cola Company to sell their sodas in a series of full-page magazine ads. As the entertainment medium changed, so too did advertising.
When radio came along, companies jumped on the bandwagon and provided sponsorship for many popular shows. Here was the first instance of a truly captive audience. Someone who tuned in to listen to the exploits of The Shadow also had to listen to the commercials. There was no fast-forward! Radio begat television, which is where the modern age of advertising really came into being. Now, many potential customers are spending their time online in addition to in front of the television. The need to reach out to those Internet users is where the concept of pay per click advertising has come from.
Pay per click advertising is a means of communicating directly to a potential customer by providing them a link or click directly to your company website portal, which allows them to shop and hopefully make a purchase. The goal is to get that PPC directly in front of that customer while they are surfing the Internet. Just as it was in the era of Mad Men, today companies are turning to experienced consultants to provide them with pay per click management services.
Among the many benefits that PPC advertising company can provide is to give your business immediate indicators as to the effectiveness of a particular ad. Once an ad has been placed in a strategic setting, you’ll know right away whether or not it’s working by the number of direct clicks that Internet users apply. This is vastly superior to something like a television commercial where there is no guarantee of how many people will be watching your ad or how effective the commercial will be.
The specific website where a PPC appears is part of the overall marketing strategy that is developed in partnership with a pay per click management company. Here is where another benefit comes into play with PPC ads: you can have a much more direct impact on how you spend your marketing dollars. By its very nature, pay per click means just that. In other words, your PPC advertising budget can be structured in such a way so that your focused marketing dollars are spent on a specific amount of clicks. This means a small business can use their marketing budget more effectively through PPC advertising. There’s no telling what the future holds for advertising, but one thing is clear: PPC advertising is here to stay.