When it comes to improving your PPC campaigns, you’ve heard all the advice:
– Focus on improving quality score and click-through rates
– Optimize your account structure
– Use negative keywords.
And while those are all perfectly functional and valid tactics, there’s one that is almost always overlooked as a way to improve your PPC campaign – quality content. Not only can quality content benefit paid media, but paid promotion is a great way to drive exposure to your content.
Keep reading to learn how you can use content marketing to improve your PPC performance, and vice-versa.
1) Use PPC ads to get traffic quickly
The problem with organic search strategies is that it’s nearly impossible to drive views to your website without an established audience. More than 4 million blog posts are published every day, so it’s nearly impossible for your blog posts to receive exposure without an underlying strategy.
Leveraging PPC ads to drive traffic to your website in the early stages of development will give your brand some exposure and early revenue. Also, traffic derived from paid clicks will represent a large share of the target audience you’re already seeking to sell your brand to.
It’s like killing two birds with one stone. Using Google Ads and Facebook Audience Insights, you can derive greater insights from your audience while, in turn, reaching them to gather brand exposure.
Slapping on a piece of detailed or informative content can help to further differentiate your brand from other advertisers. Good, quality content goes more hand-in-hand with PPC than you might think, so be sure to read up on the intersection of these two areas of digital marketing.
The idea is to focus on both campaigns simultaneously and target similar keywords. Content can be used to inform, while paid advertising should be your tool to convert.
This strategy can help your brand become top-of-mind whenever you appear in the search results for any keyword query.
2) Use PPC ads to steer people to your brand
Contrary to popular belief, studies have shown that paid ads actually help to drive clicks to organic listings, rather than cannibalize them. This is because people who view paid ads are more likely to remember your brand when conducting a future search, even if subconsciously.
Essentially, having two listings on the same page will improve your click-through rate incrementally by biasing the searcher toward your brand.
Brand affinity dramatically increases the CTR of repeat visitors as well. As research has shown, it’s cheaper to keep an existing customer than acquire a new one.
3) Deliver an awesome landing page experience
Even the savviest paid media manager sometimes runs into difficulty creating a landing page that satisfies the client and even their vision.
Content marketers are naturally great storytellers and creative in their own respect. Leverage your creative content to craft a unique landing page experience that nurtures inbound leads through your conversion funnel.
Visitors who click on ads are likely to investigate your website before making a conversion. Consider the buyer’s journey and how content can be applied across this process:
1) Awareness: A customer is alerted to a particular need or problem (blog posts, curated content, infographics, videos, articles);
2) Consideration: A customer realizes a particular need and conducts research on it (white papers, testimonials, reviews, landing pages, ebooks);
3) Decision: A customer decides to make a purchase or conversion (tutorials, trials, product demos).
Consider providing testimonials, user reviews, and links to relevant articles aside landing page content for visitors to read before making a purchasing decision as not all visitors who click on an ad will make a purchase during that session or even that day.
Providing relevant and quality content on your site will become a valuable touchpoint on your attribution path to generate conversions.
4) Find content insights from PPC keyword data
If there’s one feature your SEO and PPC campaign already share, it’s keywords.
Leverage your PPC keyword data to discover which keywords drive the highest traffic and revenue. You can also analyze ad copy that’s performing well and apply it to your organic content campaign.
Consider using commercial intent keywords in your content to promote your services/products to customers. Branded keywords are incredibly successful and have a much higher CTR than other standard keywords. Group your keyword strategy together and transfer the success of one campaign to the other. Lastly, conduct A/B testing to decipher which keywords operate the best within each campaign.
5) Gather as much SERP real estate as possible
Naturally, having two links on the same page would increase website clicks. This is especially critical over mobile displays where users tend to favor top results and paid advertisements. Aside from increasing click-through rates on both listings, having extra links increases brand exposure and authority in the eyes of the searcher.
Now, if only you could get a rich snippet, too!
In most digital marketing agencies, SEO, content marketing, and paid media are placed in silos, sharing nothing more than the water cooler. By integrating content marketing into PPC campaigns and vice-versa, you can leverage each department’s strengths to gather more conversions for your site and increase your brand’s affinity.
If you need this accomplished, contact TheIuvo today! We can help you.
