Technology has fundamentally changed our lives. Every single day, new innovations are being made. These are helping to push the boundaries of what we already know. Moreover, these changes are revolutionising markets in a profound way. In some cases, the entire fabric of businesses is being affected. This opens up potential for new marketing, such as pay-per-click marketing to be used in new ways, for new markets. In this blog, we’ll look at often-ignored but absolutely critical PPC considerations for technology companies.
Ambitious projects and new developments are the cornerstones for enterprising businesses. However, this comes at a cost. Standing out in these markets is increasingly difficult. More and more innovators are piling in. There is increased confusion about best practices and best audiences. Sleeping tech giants are now waking up from their post-COVID slumber, and are determined to once again assert their position at the top of the market. This means that it’s more imperative than ever that fledgling technology businesses have a strategy in place to drive results and support them financially.
The Perceived PPC Problem
Pay-per-click market is often overlooked by technology companies because it’s traditionally viewed as expensive and time-consuming. However, new Google technology is revolutionising this process. Machine learning allows for auction-time bidding, helping to stabilise costs. Smart campaign creation automates keyword creation, ad-copy and generation to give you a totally hands-off experience.
Whilst this approach is never going to match a managed PPC strategy, it’s a great option for businesses that want to dabble with pay-per-click marketing. Overall, PPC is absolutely invaluable for technology companies. It can put you in front of the most relevant audience, that are at the right buying time, in the right places. When used in tandem with an organic SEO strategy, you can put yourselves top of the search engine results exponentially. You can also grow your natural position to get yourself as high up the SERPs are possible.
Moreover, businesses don’t need to worry about PPC costs being obscure or confusing. There’s no hidden charges or unexpected costs. You always have full control over your budgets. This is true whether you run a Smart campaign or a manual campaign. This means that you only pay when your campaign is successfully obtaining your chosen result. Consequently, this makes PPC an extremely cost-effective form of advertising if your technology business is just dipping its toe into the water.
3 PPC Considerations for Technology Companies
When it comes to planning and executing PPC campaigns, there are a lot of variables to consider for technology companies. Some of these are very obvious. Ad-copy needs to be relevant and pithy. Landing pages need to be geared to drive action and get conversions. You need to drill down on the best keywords for your brand and make them central to your content. Above all, your technology company needs to be presented in an honest and attractive manner. You do this through a judicious selection of the best advertising format.
Technology companies usually remember these four variables when executing their campaigns. However, this still means they forget other important aspects, and consequently, campaign performance is usually stunted. Although PPC is not a precise science, there are several considerations that usually get overlooked. The best technology company PPC campaigns will instead push these variables to the very centre of their campaign. This helps ensure efficient, optimal performance is achieved. The 3 PPC considerations for technology companies that are so often overlooked are below:
Picking a Good Budget
One of the biggest barriers to an effective PPC campaign is inadequate budgets. Technology companies like to push grand ideas and ambitious targets. However, when push comes to shove, they can be quite conservative. One of the few drawbacks of PPC marketing is it’s not easy to create a strong business case initially. Resultantly, technology companies can be reluctant to devote the right budgets to their PPC marketing.
However, taking this mentality is not necessarily effective in the short and long term. You can use Performance Planner to help you get a strong idea about expected performance. It can also help you identify the most cost-effective keywords for your business. This means you can balance controlled spending with the best performance. If in doubt, you can set up a simple short pilot campaign to work out what is best for you. If your technology company has multiple assets or ideas you want to test, there is a solution too. Using an A/B test can help you identify the best performing content for you to use in the future.
The Correct Audience
Another mistake technology companies make in PPC is talking to the wrong level. Technology companies might want to talk to C-Suite executives. However, their copy might only be understood properly by technical staff. Resultantly, it can cause confusion and disruption. These problems if left unchecked only result in poor performance, and wasted, or unspent budgets.
Taking time to decide the best audience is extremely effective for technology companies. Options like geographic targeting, or demographic targeting can help you hone in on the core audience that resonate most with your technology. Once you’ve established this, it’s time to break down this core into smaller segments, and then match those segments with your keywords, phrases and topics to produce bespoke adverts.
Evaluate Effectively
Getting 1 PPC campaign running well gives you a good use case to present to the rest of your technology company. However, it most certainly shouldn’t be the end of your time investment. PPC strategies need long-term investment in terms of resources and finances. The best technology companies are the ones who recognise this fact. They continually develop their PPC strategy to help push their company on further. Reviewing what has worked and hasn’t worked is essential to strong benchmarking. Making these changes allows you to evaluate what is the next steps you need to take to ensure your PPC campaign continues to be successful.
Final Thoughts
When weighing up these final PPC considerations for technology companies, there could be a strong gut feeling to prioritise one over the other. It’s true every single one has their own merits. Good budgeting gives the campaign freedom to experiment. Appropriate audiences are more likely to engage. Strong evaluation sets up what is ‘good’ and steers the future direction of your campaigns.
However, the best strategies will take these 3 PPC considerations for technology companies and weight them equally to enhance and improve all aspects of the campaign.
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