As you begin to grow out a full-service marketing team within your organization, developing a holistic digital marketing approach will be crucial. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is a powerful but often siloed tactic that many marketing agencies ignore. As a result, they are leaving money on the table. By taking the time to learn how PPC can be integrated into an existing digital marketing strategy to make it more cohesive, any organization can bolster the returns on its marketing efforts.
What Is a Holistic Digital Marketing Strategy?
First and foremost, it’s important to define what exactly a tailored and holistic digital marketing strategy is. Holistic marketing strategies are those that have all marketing channels working together towards a common goal of congruence. This allows for unified messaging, branding, and performance tracking, which can bolster returns. Holistic components to a digital marketing strategy can include SEO, content marketing, social media, email marketing, web design, PPC, and much more. While today’s focus will be on PPC, all marketing agencies need to focus on growing the individual channels as well.
The Unique Strengths of PPC Advertising
As mentioned, Pay-Per-Click marketing is an effective strategy that, when combined with other marketing channels, can revolutionize your overall digital strategy. PPC can drive immediate visibility and traffic through highly targeted audiences by using keywords, demographics, location, and more.
On top of this, PPC advertising results in measurable ROIs and rapid testing capabilities, meaning your digital marketing strategy can be adjusted on the fly. This works nicely to complement longer-term strategies like SEO, which have a lengthier time horizon.
Where PPC Fits Within the Marketing Funnel
During the course of marketing for a product or service, there are various areas where a certain type of marketing strategy can shine. PPC, in particular, plays the biggest role in the awkwardness stage through display ads, YouTube ads, and brand campaigns, among others. However, it also plays a role in both the consideration and conversion stages.
In the consideration stage, PPC campaigns specifically assist with search ads, remarketing efforts, and Google Shopping. In conversion, landing page alignment, and call-to-action testing see the strongest impact.
All marketing firms need to focus on mapping their PPC campaign to the proper funnel stage in order to prevent ad fatigue. This will also ensure relevance on all ads is maximized.
Aligning PPC with SEO and Content Marketing
As alluded to, aligning PPC to your broader SEO and content marketing strategy is of the utmost importance. First, use keyword research for both your paid and organic strategies. If necessary, repurpose your existing high-performance PPC ad copy into blog headlines or meta descriptions to drive traffic.
You should also make an effort to test content ideas via PPC to inform organic content creation, which still drives profits. Any insights between your different marketing channels should also be shared in order to improve both. If you have separate teams managing each distinct channel, ensure there are meetings between the groups to align on strategy.
Leveraging PPC Data to Improve Overall Marketing Performance
An effective way to measure how well your PPC campaigns are working is to use an A/B test result to refine messaging or your social campaigns. This type of test simply compares two versions of a web page in order to analyze which method is most effective.
This can help you determine and identify high-performing customer segments. Using this information, you can then sharpen up your future targeting across all platforms. Additionally, keyword insight from PPC can be used to shape your organization’s content and overall landing page strategy. You should also use this information to better allocate your budget based on ROI comparisons so that you aren’t sinking money into unprofitable segments.
Cross-Channel Retargeting and Personalization
One effective way to adjust your PPC campaigns to make them more effective is to retarget them. From site visitors to abandoned cart users, you should use email marketing and PPC together to remarket. Depending on the breakdown of your PPC ad groups, also consider personalizing landing pages to match.
Measurement and KPIs: Tracking Integrated Success
In regard to PPC, measuring your KPIs will be the most crucial indicator of success. The KPIs you should focus on in particular include cost per acquisition, customer lifetime value, and conversion rates. These will provide the most insight into the movement of your potential customers online.
Additionally, consider integrating cross-channel attribution models such as first-click, last-click, and multi-touch in order to create a unified reporting dashboard. Google Analytics 4 and Looker Studio are particularly useful tools in this regard.
Common PPC Pitfalls to Avoid
When running a PPC strategy, there are a few common PPC pitfalls that can lead to issues. First, running a PPC campaign in a silo without communication amongst different marketing teams will severely limit the capabilities of that campaign. To avoid this, ensure all marketing efforts are centralized under one group to form a holistic strategy.
Another commonly seen issue with PPC is overlapping your efforts such that costs are driven up. Bidding on keywords that are already ranking organically is a common example of this issue. Finally, ignoring the full customer journey just to focus on short-term clicks is the other common issue. While PPC is important, it will take the combined effort of other marketing campaigns to get there, so ensure you don’t neglect other channels.
Build an effective marketing strategy
To integrate PPC into a broader marketing strategy, you need to focus on avoiding siloed approaches and emphasizing synergy within your marketing teams. Take the time to audit your current PPC campaigns, regardless of how many you currently have running, in order to identify integration opportunities. This will allow you to focus on the specific areas of the campaign that need attention in order to maximize the effects. If you are ever uncertain about the efficacy of your PPC campaigns, reach out to a marketing firm for a consultation to determine what can change for the better.
