PPC campaigns: an easy path to success?

Are PPC campaigns an easy path to success? Honestly? They can be! That is, if you are prepared to invest a consistent budget from day one to give your ads the right level of visibility to potential customers, so that they align with your sales targets.

Is that all? Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

Well, we wish it were that clear and simple when it comes to marketing services, but things are a little more complex (mind you, not necessarily more complicated), and you’ll see why I say that below.

This article is not a guide to the effective implementation of PPC campaigns. That’s what marketing and advertising companies exist for, with PPC specialists trained with professional strategies and tactics to support your promotional plans.

You won’t find PPC promotion tactics or examples of successful campaigns to convince you that Pay Per Click is worth investing in. A reputable online promotion agency will never promise you the moon in the sky, but will guarantee you nothing more than the full commitment of all available financial, logistical and intellectual resources to deliver the results you want.

In this article you will learn:

• Why organic visibility is the (ahem) gold standard in marketing
• What are the benefits of PPC campaigns
• The answer to the question: are PPC campaigns an easy path to success?
  Until then, though, let’s see:

What are PPC campaigns?

Structurally, Pay-Per-Click campaigns are the opportunity to promote your offers on different communication channels, for a clearly defined amount, mostly calculated per click. In other words, every time someone clicks on your ad, you will pay an amount of money to the owner of that channel:

• Google – in the case of Google Ads campaigns
• Meta – in case of Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, Whatsapp Ads campaigns
• LinkedIn – in case of LinkedIn Ads campaigns
• TikTok – in case of PPC campaigns run on this network, and so on.
• In the key of opportunity, however, PPC campaigns are seen by many businesses as shortcuts to reach their desired sales volume faster.

And, in principle, this is true: you pay to get an immediate result, independent of the rules imposed by the algorithms; in other words, you pay to evade the annoying rules of the algorithms in terms of getting organic visibility.

Basically, where everyone else drives to the sea, you choose the helicopter.

What exactly does that mean?

• It means you no longer need to invest months in SEO, pulling out the white hairs of anxiety caused by the uncertainty of the results your SEO strategies can bring.
• It means goodbye to months of frustration with organic social media posting strategies for 3 likes and under 5% visibility limited by the algorithm, with plans upon plans, calendars of posts, hours wasted creating and dozens of minutes wasted publishing and scheduling posts that, in the end, no one sees.
• Does this mean, however, that strategies for gaining organic visibility should be forgotten somewhere in a dusty drawer, only good to be placed in the museum of online marketing by the next generation?

Does this mean that SEO is not effective? Or are organic posts on social platforms pointless?

Absolutely not, because:

Organic visibility is the gold standard in marketing

Organic visibility is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It represents the highest level of marketing success, because it offers the most advantageous time vs. money investment.

In other words, if we segment the processes and isolate them to the level of daily activity, organic promotion can take about as much time as preparing a PPC promotion strategy, but the financial investment ends up at some point being even ZERO, and that’s a certainty.

SEO strategies offer this advantage; organic promotion strategies in Social Media also offer this advantage.

However, both in the case of SEO optimization and organic communication on social networks, to reach this absolutely ideal level you need money, broad analytical capacity and above all perseverance, because you need:

• constant investment of resources (time, money and knowledge) for a significant period of time
  intimate knowledge of the brand
• development of well-defined brand indicators
• clear brand positioning
• decisive market differentiation of the brand and the products/services offered
• mission
• vision
• values
• strategies to create and sustain a community of potential customers who identify with the business mission
• strategies to stay top-of-mind
• clear SERP (Search Engine Results Page) optimization tactics
• investment in professional keyword research tools
• Technical SEO knowledge
• locating users’ search engine intent
• and dozens of other such steps necessary to achieve a level of visibility in the market that will allow you to avoid having to pay to communicate your offers.

As you can see – headaches aside – none of these steps involve the direct sale of products or services and therefore immediate profit.

However, if you go through all these steps successfully, both SEO and organic promotion activity in Social Media guarantee that, in the end, you will find yourself in the ideal situation where:

• people will either always find you where they need you when they need your products or services
• or your brand will be the one they think of first when they need what your business offers.
  The question now, though, is: will you still be financially viable by then?

Probably not, which is why you need an alternative promotion strategy that runs in parallel and that will provide you with the cashflow you need to survive in the market and even grow.

Well, this alternative promotion strategy is Pay Per Click campaigns, which come with a lot of advantages.

Advantages of PPC campaigns

In a healthy online promotion ecosystem, with clear and carefully structured marketing objectives both in the short term and in the medium and long term, PPC campaigns are the NOS bottle capable of accelerating the performance of your business machine to an extraordinary level.

And as long as you keep the boost button pressed, paid campaigns will deliver immediate performance, and therefore revenue to your business.

This is the major advantage of PPC promotion; the quality of delivering clear, tangible, superior results commensurate with the investment, but also commensurate with the ability to sustain and/or increase the volume of your investment.

Another advantage of PPC campaigns is the opportunity to quickly display your ads to the entire range of users of your chosen promotion channel.

We are talking about approx. 16 million users in the Meta ecosystem alone (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp), just in Romania, plus a few million more in LinkedIn and TikTok, but also thousands to tens of thousands and even millions of users that you can target with Google ads, depending on the volume of searches relevant to your business niche.

A third important advantage of Pay Per Click campaigns is the ability to deliver results in a (very) short time.

Basically, you can get sales as soon as the campaigns come out of the verification phase, which can take up to 24-48 hours – although this is an exceptional case, as most paid promotion campaigns need an automatic learning period based on artificial intelligence (finding the right audience, the perfect display period, the right keywords, etc.), which can take, on average, between 2 and 4 weeks.

Another advantage of PPC campaign promotion is the ability to clearly measure the effectiveness of the investment. Basically, you will always know what return you get for every penny you invest in ads – a measurement unit that is extremely used in the sphere of paid online promotion called ROAS (Return of Ad Spend).

Finally, an equally important advantage of paid advertising campaigns is the opportunity for retargeting.

Every major platform that supports PPC campaign setup (Meta Ads Manager, Google Ads Platform, TikTok Ads Manager, LinkedIn Ads Manager, etc.) provides you with the opportunity to run retargeting campaigns for potential customers who have already interacted more or less with your ads, in addition to comprehensive campaign performance data – see the advantage mentioned above.

Whether users have already made a conversion (purchase, appointment, etc. depending on the target of your business), clicked on the ad without buying or just saw the ad displayed in front of them without interacting with it, the retargeting feature lets you re-display ads in front of them, which can either incentivize them to buy those who have not yet done so (discounts, extra benefits, freebies, etc.), or you can apply cross-sell or upsell tactics to users who have already become your customers.

You can practically see that PPC promotion takes the fear of delayed profit investing out of your heart, giving you the opportunity to think short and medium term strategies that are easier to measure and therefore easier to control.

However, you will enjoy the benefits of PPC advertising only as long as you are willing to spend considerable budgets, directly proportional to the profit you are aiming for, but the moment you stop investing, you will be back in terms of visibility to the zero moment of the promotion process.

So, what do you say:

Are PPC campaigns an easy path to success?

From our point of view, of specialists with over 9 years of individual experience in running PPC campaigns and digital marketing services, as long as you invest in paid advertising, the path to success is indeed easy.

Experience has taught us, however – as we tell every client who asks us – that success is never guaranteed, but the chances of success can be as high as 99% if you choose your partners wisely, i.e. the right specialists able to fully understand your business and devise PPC promotion strategies that deliver the expected financial results.

Also, the 170+ partners we have worked with over the last 7 years have taught us that if you want to develop a solid business that will grow healthily and perform in the market for many years to come, you need more than a well thought out PPC strategy.

You need a strategically chosen marketing mix that includes a strong paid promotion component that generates quick cash flow, but is integrated into a broad marketing ecosystem that clearly defines and communicates the benefits and advantages of your products or services, as well as the deeper qualities of your business.

This ecosystem should not, of course, lack brand identity components and the implicit strategies to increase visibility, strategies to evolve and strengthen your position on all touch points with potential customers (SEO, Social Media), but also a constant process of communication with people who choose to buy from you not just because you have a good product or service, but because they understand and identify with the mission, vision and values you convey to the market. Finally, I’m convinced that if we had the opportunity to have a dialogue, we would have a lot of super interesting things to discuss about your business and the benefits that the specialists at re7consulting marketing agency can offer you. So, if you are curious about what we can offer you, we invite you to take a look at our services and contact us.