If only there were a marketing tool out there that allowed direct and immediate access to your ideal customer base–24 hours-a-day, 7 days-a-week. What if that same tool could get your business in front of potential customers actively searching for your products or services?

Tacky intro aside, I think you see where I’m going with this…

Believe it or not, this form of marketing exists— it’s called, pay-per-click advertising.

What is Pay-Per-Click Advertising?

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is a unique style of digital marketing that displays text and graphic ads across search engines to internet users, based on specific searches. Unlike traditional forms of advertising where advertisers pay upfront for ad space, PPC advertisers only pay when an ad is clicked— hence the name, pay-per-click.

PPC campaigns are created and managed through platforms such as Google AdWords or Bing Ads. Managing campaigns within these platforms allows for a great deal of control over how you wish to display ads, how ads are triggered by searches, and most important, how your budget is spent. The focused targeting capabilities within PPC give you confidence that the people clicking your ads are, in fact, searching for what you offer. The trick is showing up for those searchers at the right time, in the right place.

Now, I’m going to show you exactly what you’re looking for: four unbeatable ways PPC can take your business to the next level.

1. Build Your Audience:

The idea of knowing your target market or audience seems basic, but when you’re trying to grow an established business or build a new business, your attention needs to be focused on the individuals who want, search for, and buy what you’re selling— not who you think want what you’re selling.

PPC gives you hard data and visual proof of how people are searching for your ads as well as how these people are interacting with your ads. Use this data to create realistic strategies and make data driven decisions about how to best market your business, rather than trust a hunch.

There are numerous ways to effectively develop your audience using PPC, but one of the fastest ways to draw traffic to your business is by running a display campaign. A display campaign is a visual ad format that publishes graphic ads across a variety of websites within the search engine’s display network that are related to your business or industry.

Within display falls remarketing, a vital tool to building a dedicated following. If somebody comes to your website and they add a product to the cart, but fail to complete that purchase, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not interested in purchasing that product. It just means they weren’t able to complete that function at the moment. This is where you can use remarketing to stay relevant to that shopper by having your ads follow them around the web as they continue to search. The remarketing ads will draw previous visitors back to your site and increase the efficiency of your sales funnel.

Taking this custom approach with ppc is not only great for building your audience, but for understanding who they are, how they behave, and to get the most out of your campaigns by tailoring your approach to meet their needs.

2. Identify Most Profitable Products Or Services:

PPC is known for being a quick solution for businesses focused on fast growth, but it’s also a major contributor to long-term success. It sheds light on how people are interacting with your website, and which of your products and services are performing at a higher rate of return.

The way you can access this data and identify top-performers is with conversion tracking. Conversions are meaningful interactions between your website and your potential customers. It might be a purchase or a request for quote, but it also might be a phone call, a submitted contact form, a newsletter subscription, or a product catalog download.

Conversion tracking allows you to quickly adapt your strategy to meet your company’s goals. For example, once you use conversion tracking to identify the respective performance of your products, you can adjust which of those products to focus your business on.

Having a clear understanding of where your effort is best spent within your campaigns will guide the direction of your overall PPC strategy. Knowing your strengths opens the door to many opportunities that continue pushing your business to further success.

3. Level The Playing Field:

If you share an industry with big companies and even bigger budgets, PPC can level the playing field.

Smaller companies tend to think they can only compete with the big dogs by targeting broad, industry keywords— but that’s not the case. Odds are, even your biggest competitors aren’t going to dominate every area of the market. Rather than cast an overly broad net, it pays more to target specific keywords that highlight your strengths.

You can reference your conversion data to piece together a strategic approach to rising above your biggest competitors. Your conversion data will tell you exactly what your audience wants, so you can focus budget on keywords that illustrate unique products, services, or qualities that you know people are looking for and that set your business apart from the big guys.

You may notice a pattern with PPC, that it’s inner workings are all connected to your desired outcome. Conversion metrics are an important component that have a heavy influence on the performance of your campaigns, but they are just a handful of trackable elements generated from PPC that can impact the entire future of your business.

4. Access To Valuable Data:

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the amount of data points within PPC, but if you take a step back and look at a few basic factors that propel a business forward, you can easily point out the areas of data to focus on within your own campaigns.

If you plan to scale your business, it’s crucial to understand those who are buying your product or service. PPC gives you direct access to this kind of data so you’re equipped with the necessary levers to control the outcome of your success.

The key to sustaining a successful business is understanding the people who give it life, and PPC is what gives us the data to make that possible. It generates feedback as to how people are searching for you, what they’re searching for, from which device, at what time, on which day— you get the idea.

The future of your business depends on your ability to be dynamic in evolving with your audience. PPC will give you the necessary foundation to capitalize on this understanding, while reaching peak success.

No matter what stage of development your business is in, PPC will push it even further.