When it comes to an effective online marketing strategy, many businesses tend to focus on a pay per click strategy to work quickly or focus on a longer strategy of creating content. When using both content marketing and PPC together it can drive great results for a business. After creating relevant and valuable content for your audience it is important for that content to reach potential customers.
Content Marketing and its benefits
Content marketing is the creation of content to attract and retain customers. This can be in the form of blogs, social media posts, podcasts and more. The idea of content marketing is to create and share content of good quality and value for a business’ target market. Content marketing is a great way to engage with your customers and create lasting relationships with them. “Brand trust clearly drives growth, with 61 percent of respondents prepared to advocate if they fully trust a brand, 57 percent prepared to purchase a new product or service, and 31 percent willing to share personal data or participate in activities sponsored by the brand”.
An important part of content marketing is using relevant keywords when creating landing pages and blog posts, which can help your business’ website rank organically rather than bidding on every single keyword as you may not have the budget to do this. Including relevant keywords will improve your website’s SEO (search engine optimization) meaning that you will rank higher on search engine pages.
Creating good landing pages with compelling content for your audience to enjoy will ensure that your website visitors will stay on your website for longer, reducing the bounce rate and possibly converting to a customer. According to MailChimp “forty-seven percent of buyers view 3 to 5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales representative” and “companies that use content marketing see approximately 30% higher growth rates than businesses not using it”.
PPC and its benefits
After creating your valuable content for your target audience, you can then advertise it across various channels using PPC. PPC or pay-per-click is a form of advertising used online which involves charging business’ using it with a fee. Users of PPC advertising can be charged based off clicks and conversions on their advertisements. PPC advertising is utilised across search engines such as Google and Bing and multiple social media channels like Facebook, LinkedIn and more.
For your PPC advertisements to work you must ensure that you have content for your audience to view after clicking the ads. If after clicking ads your audience is brought to a bare landing page with a lack of information, the odds are they will exit the page resulting in you still being charged without receiving any conversions.
For PPC to be effective for a business you must be bidding on the relevant keywords and linking your ads to the relevant landing pages on your website. This makes the process of converting someone to a customer as easy as possible as they will have access to all the relevant information in one click. When creating PPC ads you must use ad text related to your landing pages, use the relevant keywords, and bid on these keywords.
PPC can increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your website and drive conversions while being cost-effective.
Here are some of the benefits of using PPC:
Targeting: you can target your ideal customers by selecting demographics, interests and behaviours allowing you to reach people who would be interested in your offering.
Testing: You can create multiple PPC ads and test them against each other to see what keywords, landing pages and ad text attract your audience and achieve better results. This will help when creating more PPC ads in the future across other channels and creating content for your website as you know what words attract potential customers.
Brand Awareness: You can build brand awareness amongst your target market as PPC ads allow for specific targeting so if your business is trying to attract customers from a specific location or that have a specific interest in what you are selling you can set up audiences that meet these criteria. For example, if you do some competitor research you can set up audiences to get your ads to appear for people who have visited your competitors’ websites. This will make them aware of your business when researching an offering similar to yours.
Using Content Marketing and PPC Together
After spending time creating your content, using PPC to promote it will help ensure your content gets in front of the correct audience, making these two a great mix. “Combining content marketing and pay per click advertising allows you to capitalize on your content marketing strategy while you wait for the search engines to catch up and start delivering those search results.”
In conclusion, content marketing provides more long-term results for your business’ website, but PPC will make sure that your target audience finds it. Combining content marketing and PPC are the perfect mix for a great marketing strategy. If you want to learn more about this and how can help, please contact us below.
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