It is a well known fact that Pay Per Click marketing is an essential element in digital marketing strategy for small and medium sized businesses. It could mean survival for them - the best chance to compete from the get-go with big or similar sized companies. Nonetheless, it also helps them spend their small starting budget in the most optimal way.

Meanwhile, big companies usually fall into a trap when they are confident to say that their brand is strong enough to stand out from the crowd and they don’t need PPC advertising. They definitely do not see the hidden potential of PPC advertising or have a lack of know how in this field.

So really, why on Earth would you pay Google for clicks when your site has significant organic traffic and your brand is strong and well known?

1. If you don't act, your competition might outrun you

How does it look when your competitors’ ads appear in front of yours in Google searches? If you rely solely on your organic presence and expect miracles from non-paid search results, the competition’s ads will be displayed above you in no time.
The cost of your own branded keywords is lower for you than for other market players. But the lack of advertising will give customers the chance to discover the competitors’ websites. Just to give an example: you are looking for something very specific, you even include the name of the brand in the search field and you’ll find that the positioning favors those with paid advertisement. And the internet is full of search engine results like this:

As you can see if you don’t pay at least for your brand-related keywords, your competition will have the upper hand.

2. Give Your online presence a Big Brand Feel

Let’s say you already are a big brand. Let’s say you are well known in your industry. But are you sure that being an established brand means that you can reach all of your customers? Is that really enough?

Google Display Network reaches 90% of global internet users via more than 2 million websites. Using its large array of targeting tools you can choose to target from a very specific slice of audience to your entire client base.
Imagine, you are in the jewellery business, you can choose to target stay-at-home moms who live in the suburbs outside of your radius and are returning customers but usually buy basic items for their children or for themselves. At the same time, using different creatives, you can target men who fall in the age group of 25-35 who might be looking for engagement rings and are potential customers for your very exclusive jewellery line.

Thus you can make sure that everybody in your target audience will think about you as you’re the one they see everywhere.

3. Use PPC advertising for testing purposes

It’s a well known fact that you can optimize your marketing budget with the right creatives. But fewer people are aware that PPC advertising allows you to test the market and expand at your own pace in a quick and effective way.
With the right strategy you can easily test various ad texts, landing pages, keywords, banners or even videos. A/B split testing can help you determine the best combinations that you can use as part of your global marketing strategy or you can choose the best creatives for a specific target audience. In any case you will get the chance to make decisions based on data and implement them on a larger scale.

4. Monitor your competition and get the most relevant insights

If you know where to look, you can get valuable data about your competitors. Auction Insights lets you see your competitors for a specific keyword and also whether your competition is more aggressive in bidding strategy or allocating a larger budget.

For example, when your outranking share and your impression share are both worse than your competitors', it means that you need to alter either your advertising budget or restructure your campaigns. Also, by segmenting your auction insights reports you can observe more granularly whether your competition has device or time-of-day based decisions.
Furthermore, by analyzing Placements you can get useful insights about new placements with great exposure potential.

More so, you don't have to be concerned about not learning in a timely manner about the appearance of the new players because you can observe in real-time the new trends and the new-comers.

5. Display of your product on the SERP: possible only with PPC campaigns

Search Engine Result Page is basically for text results but if you launch Google Shopping Campaigns, your products could occasionally appear in front of text ads which means better exposure of your product in a visually more attractive package. Needless to say, that images are always more captivating and are easy to be stumbled upon with less effort than wording.

6. You can take advantage of remarketing campaigns in the most efficient way

There is no secret to it: the initial remarketing campaigns can prove to be difficult to launch for small businesses. You, however, as a big company can leverage the true potential of remarketing campaigns.

On one hand you have the skills or can afford paying for an advanced implementation, while on the other hand you already have a significant number of visitors on your site, this means you have valuable data, so you can segment your audiences in really specific ways. If you combine your Remarketing lists with Customer Match (online and offline data) you can re-engage with your customers in a very customized way, with the added bonus of reaching new and similar audiences with a big potential. Use the data that is meaningful and turn it to business advantage. This is only a fingertip away from hyper-personalization.

The take-away

If you are wondering, whether PPC is useless to you, then my answer is certain: you are not using it in a right way! Without PPC campaigns you are letting pass you by a lot of opportunities that might fasten your growth hacking process. And in this era that we live in, opportunities are a rare breed. Once you see it, you have to grab it.
On a more positive note, you might be right in the phase of realising and acknowledging the need for strategic planning. And this a good start where we want you to know that you have a lot of room to grow and rock the PPC scene.

Of course, a digital marketing strategy should not only consist of PPC campaigns, but it is a powerful tool from the digital palette that, if used properly, can create great value for your brand and company.

Written by: Zsuzsa Menyhárt, Digital Marketing Specialist @Cognitive Creators