Home of the iconic Space Needle and the Pacific Science Center, Washington State’s largest city offers several tourist attractions and entertainment options. However, that’s not all Seattle has to offer; it’s also a thriving tech startup city!
With tech giants, like Amazon and Microsoft, headquartered in its Metropolitan area, Seattle has transformed into a technological haven, putting the city on par with Silicon Valley—the original tech epicenter.
Over the last few years, tech jobs in Seattle have grown at double the rate of any other city in the country, driving entrepreneurs and small businesses to flock to the Pacific Northwest and take advantage of its top-tier talent.
The Emerald City’s burgeoning tech presence, thriving industries, and high purchasing power are well on their way to breaking records. Startups launched in Seattle belong to a myriad of industries including, but not limited to, real estate, biotech, and retail. Startup funding in Seattle has reached a record of $3.5 billion in 2019!
This means that the competition is growing by the day in Seattle, and as a new startup company or a small business, you need to get things moving along—fast—and build traction before the limited funds run out. And for that, you need a dynamic digital marketing strategy that combines the power of search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to get the best return on investment.
By leveraging professional SEO services in Seattle, you can maximize the outreach of your marketing campaign and attract targeted traffic to your business.
Setting Up A Goal-Centric PPC Campaign
The PPC paid search model is great for startups that have razor-sharp needs and require measurable and tangible results on a lower budget. PPC allows business owners to get their website front and center on Google—resulting in high numbers of web traffic and conversions!
If you’ve ever noticed advertisements appear at the top positions in search results with the term “Sponsored” or “Ad.”, then you’re already familiar with PPC advertising.
Paid ads allow brand owners to bid on the chance to display ads (for particular keywords), giving them the opportunity to attract their target audience from the get-go. In return, the owner pays the publisher (Google) every time their ad is clicked.
One of the biggest reasons PPC is popular among startups is that it’s extremely targeted and helps them achieve a vast number of marketing and business goals. These goals can range from thought leadership and high-level brand exposure to e-commerce sales and hot lead submissions. Nearly all types of conversion goals can be tracked with PPC.
Let’s talk more about exactly how you can set up these brand presence goals for your PPC campaign.
Evaluate Your Business Needs
Creating realistic goals and establishing benchmarks for your PPC campaign refines your strategy and helps you ensure your ad spend isn’t wasted.
Figure out what you’re trying to achieve from your paid ads; why do you think your business requires a pay-per-click strategy?
Here are some common brand presence goals that businesses typically work toward:
Direct Sales Goal
If you’re targeting buyers and want your business to be on the receiving end of a sales conversion, your ads need to be concise and highly actionable! They should target your audience at the same time when they’re ready to make a purchase.
To achieve this goal, create transactional landing pages to drive more sales and incorporate visually-striking ads that entice the audience.
You can measure direct sales goals by keeping track of the product/services sold through your paid ads.
Lead Generation
If your business has a longer sales cycle or is strictly B2B, focus your PPC campaign on lead generation.
Here’s how you can work towards this goal:
- Optimize your PPC campaign with automated bidding and targeting to get more customer contacts.
- Prepare separate landing pages for every ad group; this will allow you to easily track your lead conversions.
- Add forms on your landing pages to encourage a prospective customer to enter their data. This way, you can reach out to them in real-time or in the future with your offerings.
- Keyword research is an important part of your bidding strategy. So, make sure you update your campaign strategy based on your PPC audit findings. This means allocating more of your budget on converting keywords.
Boost Site Traffic
If your goal is to drive traffic to high-quality content on your site, then focus on the number of clicks and impressions that your PPC ad receives. Set target numbers and daily/weekly goals for ad impressions.
Moreover, you can gauge brand awareness and keep track of user engagement by re-evaluating the click-through-rate (CTR) of your ads.
To boost site traffic, you need to focus on branding, content appeal, and powerful, compelling ads. Conduct thorough keyword research and work on improving your content marketing strategy.
Increase Brand Presence and Awareness
Although brand presence is a secondary concern for PPC advertisers, because they’re paying for clicks rather than impressions, it’s a goal worth considering for small businesses and startups.
To work toward this goal, you need to target a larger audience and create positive engagement. This can include leveraging social media platforms or launching discounts and promotions to drive more impressions.
Invest in relevant and media-rich creative display campaigns. If you’re a startup with a limited budget, you can boost exposure by utilizing placement targeting.
Gauge your campaign’s progress via metrics like reach, impressions, frequency, social engagement, and direct traffic.
Establish Short And Long-Term Goals
Once you’ve analyzed the business needs that you want to focus on in your PPC campaign, the next step is to establish these goals for a particular timeframe. You can track your goals weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually, based on the scope of your campaign.
Creating short-term goals will help you create a benchmark for wider-scope business objectives. Long-term goals, on the other hand, will help you determine the overall performance of your PPC campaign, and whether or not it was profitable.
Analyze Goal Performance
The best part about PPC campaigns is that there’s no mystery to its performance; the stats are readily available based on the scope of your campaign.
Use Google Analytics in combination with the Google Ads tool to see high-level performance details with these metrics:
- Clicks
- Impressions
- Conversions and Conversions Rate
- Quality Score
- CTR
Additionally, analyze the objectives you didn’t hit. Find out why they didn’t work and how you can resolve them.
With a solid tracking sheet, perform a contrast between what worked and what didn’t. This way, you’ll have something to look back on when you start a new campaign.
Concluding Thoughts
A PPC campaign is one of the best ways to increase your brand presence, put your business on the radar and benefit from Seattle’s exponential growth in the digital world.
By reflecting on your business needs and requirements, you can determine your key performance indicators (KPIs) and set the right goals for your PPC campaign. These will help shape the trajectory of your strategy, and thereby, deliver high-achieving results.
Setting up actionable goals for your PPC campaign demands up-front thinking and long-term plans. You can always reach out to professional SEO services serving Seattle to establish an analytics-driven and targeted PPC campaign.
