HOWTO'S
How to Grow a Startup With Paid Search on a Low Budget
If you want your startup business to succeed, you can’t wait for your SEO marketing strategies to bring in your desired traffic. Time is of the essence. Fortunately, you have a tool like the PPC to give your startup a kick start. With the right PPC advertising campaign, you can increase the organic traffic of your website.
Your startup business needs solid proof of concept. If you need additional funding, you should be able to show your financiers that your business is really feasible. This is where you could use the help of PPC advertising. It will help in the initial market testing of your product and will produce the initial organic traffic that will drive your startup business onwards.
Paid Search Challenges and Advantages for Startups
There are a number of challenges that many startup business owners face. You need to understand these challenges. Here are some of them.
a) Scaling Marketing Campaigns
If you intend to sell a large set of SKUs, you must be prepared to conduct an ad campaign that is tedious and intensive. You also need to design an effective SEO strategy that will put these SKUs in front of your target market.
Fortunately, you don’t have to do it manually. There are tools such as the ACB (Auto Campaign Builder) of SearchForce that will enable you to automate the creation of your campaign.
This useful tool will set up your campaigns, creative & PLAs, keywords, and ad-groups by automatically and directly using a single feed. You can then optimize bids coming in at the level of each SKU.
b) Reporting
You need to do a lot of work in making and tweaking reports that convey important digital marketing statistics and information that will help you manage your startup business. Thankfully, there are also some tools that can help you customize, schedule, share and filter your reports automatically.
c) Optimization and Bid Management
Startup businesses have to face the challenge of optimization and bid management. You may need to use different platforms to manage different activities. For instance, you need one platform to optimize traffic on your website. For optimizing your leads, you need another platform.
All other aspects of your business such as combining reports, monitoring performance, and so forth, need management and optimization. Again, there are some tools that you can use in bid management and optimization. They will provide you some flexibility in setting up and automating vertical business rules.
d) Management of Inventory
It is very difficult to manually manage the inventory of a business, especially in relation to PPC advertising. You need to be aware of your available inventory in real-time. When there are out of stock items in your inventory, you need to pause their ads until they are available again. You can use tools that can automate this process to make the work easier and faster.
e) Attribution
You need to optimize bids in your startup business. But to do that, you also need to put value to all the activities that happen during the conversion process. There is a correlation between up funnel conversion and the down funnel conversion.
You should consider this in your decisions as part of your business’ online growth analysis. Again, to make the job easier and faster, you can use tools to track users in the conversion funnel. You can also use these tools to gauge how paid search and other aspects of your marketing campaigns perform.
As for the advantages of paid search for startups, consider the following:
- It is highly targeted
- It is fast
- It is simpler than SEO
- It is economical because you only pay for the clicks
- It is very predictable
- It has a good tracking ability
Plan Your Budget and Goals
When planning your budget and goals for PPC, avoid fixing definite numbers. The fact is: your goals can change so with your budget. You should consider exigencies in arriving at your figures especially if you are working on a low budget. That said here are some suggestions on planning PPC advertising budget.
a) Set up goals that your budget will allow.
Setting goals for PPC spending can go in different directions. Some of the typical goals that you can set are:
- Brand awareness
- Lead generation in terms of numbers and time period without considering the cost
- ROI-centered customer acquisition in terms of numbers and time period but related to the cost per customer
b) Determine how much traffic will help you reach your goal
After you have set your goals, determine the amount of traffic that you will need to achieve these goals within your prescribed time frame. Again, there is an effective tool that you can use to do this – Google Analytics. It contains historical data that can show you figures and stats that you will need for this purpose.
c) Conduct research on the cost of PPC advertisements
Your next step is to conduct research on the cost of PPC advertisements. There are different PPC advertising networks. They may have different prices. Select the best ones that offer the lowest fees.
Have Defined Conversion Goals
Conversion goals are the measurements of certain actions done by a user in your website. Setting defined conversion goals for your PPC advertisements may include the following:
- Button click or the link click
- Submitted form
- Viewing a certain page
- Completing a purchase
Select Your PPC Platforms for Promotion
There are several companies that offer PPC advertisements. Choose one that offers the best services at the lowest fees. Here are some of them:
- Bidvertiser
- AdRoll
- Bing Ads
- Google Ads
- Facebook Ads
Although PPC advertising seems to be easy to implement, you still need to set up your campaign properly if you want your startup to succeed. Follow the tips enumerated above to ensure that you are starting on the right track.
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