Competing against big brands as a small business can be difficult; these business giants are notorious for having dedicated in-house marketing teams with a large budget to play with. Due to this, many small to medium businesses wrongly assume that their PPC campaigns have no chance of succeeding due to the uneven playing field and decide to not dabble in PPC.
PPC advertising isn’t like other advertising channels such as billboard exposure across the city or a double page spread newspaper feature; you don’t need deep pockets in order to appear. PPC marketing is an ideal channel for small advertisers to compete, if they know how to!
If you’re a small business looking to compete against some big name competitors in paid search, keep reading for our top tips on how you can win at PPC…
Review Your Competition
More often than not, businesses like to focus on their own business and ignore what their competitors are doing. Whilst you should always strive to be unique and focus on what you do best, you should also keep up to date on with what promotions your competitors are hosting and other advantages that they may have over you.
Review your competitors PPC ads and compare their ad text to yours. How does it compare? Simple changes like the tone of the text, ad extensions or a promotion can dramatically impact how users interact with your ads.
If you’re running a 50% promotion on all summer clothes, put that in your ad! Users can’t see what is on your website until they click on your ad, so your ad needs to tell them why they should click and buy your products. If your competitors are running promotions in their ads when you aren’t, this is a major disadvantage to your business.
Mix Up Your Messaging
You’ve optimised your campaigns to an inch of its life and you’ve bagged the number one position, great! Unfortunately this doesn’t guarantee you clicks from genuinely interested customers, this all depends on the messaging in your ad.
Get the most out of your character limit and push your unique selling points that are going to appeal to your target audience. You need quick, snappy text that is going to grab the attention of the users in milliseconds if you are going to compete with these big name brands. Generic text such as “X years’ experience” and “high quality” aren’t going to cut it in such a competitive industry like yours, as well as keyword stuffing your primary keyword into every element of the ad.
It’s not just your ad text that needs to be flawless; it’s your entire ad, including sitelinks and call out extensions as well as your landing page. Use sitelinks to push users into deeper site pages that are of value to them and use call out extensions to share that your products have 10 years guarantee or that you offer free quotes, these will work a lot more effectively than generic ‘about us’ and ‘founded in 1998’.
Work With a Google Partner Agency
Knowing and understanding your largest competitors is easier said than done, competing against them is harder. In order to stay ahead you need to:
- Know what they are doing
- Know what competitive advantages you have
- Showcase your competitive edge in your ad text
- Monitor, test and repeat!
As a small business taking the plunge into PPC advertising against huge brands, it can be difficult to do all this yourself if you have little to no knowledge of Google AdWords. Changes occur all the time that without PPC knowledge may end up causing a lot of budget wastage and confusion.
Big brands have large in-house marketing teams to ensure their campaigns are running smoothly, why shouldn’t you have some additional help too?
Choosing the right PPC agency to take on your project is a crucial step in ensuring that you are working with a reputable business and getting the most value for your money, a good sign that you are hiring a reputable agency is if they are a Google Partner!
“The Google Partner badge shows that specific Partners have passed Google AdWords product certification exams and are up to date with the latest product knowledge. In other words, they earned it.” – Google
In Front Digital have earned their Google Partner status by completing Google’s training courses and passing AdWords specific tests to earn their individual qualifications, meaning any member of our team can jump on your campaign at a minutes notice to ensure you’re not wasting budget.
Want us to have a look at your PPC campaign and see where you’re going wrong? Or maybe you want to set up a campaign but have no idea where to start? Head over to our PPC management page to find out more about what we do, or contact us here to see how we can help you compete!