What is pay-per-click (PPC)? What are the benefits of PPC for printers? And how do you use PPC to deliver more customers to your print business? Here’s the Soyang guide.
Somewhere between half and two thirds of a typical print company’s business is online. So if you want to grow your business, a significant chunk of the growth needs to be online too. One of the most powerful ways for you to do that is via PPC.
PPC, printers, and a better ROI on your ad spend
What is PPC? Think of it as a sort of advertising auction. With PPC, printers ‘bid’ on keyphrases their customers search most often – phrases like “banner printing near me” or similar. In return, their business appears among the sponsored results for that phrase. The more you pay, the more prominent your positioning in the results. When a potential customer clicks on the link, the printer pays Google.
Rarely searched phrases might cost a few pence. Highly competitive phrases might cost a few pounds.
Benefits of PPC for printers
Instant results
The moment you start paying, your print shop starts ranking. That’s a huge difference compared with organic SEO, where results can take longer to generate.
Powerful targeting
Let’s suppose there’s a major event happening – like a big sports tournament – and you want your business to capitalise on it.
If you’re really on the ball, you could start optimising your website months in advance, so that you’re high up the search rankings by the time people start putting the print orders in.
As an alternative though, PPC for printers could have you competing online for tournament-related print within minutes. What’s more, you can adapt your strategy to customer buying habits. Suppose England and Scotland get knocked out early in the tournament but Wales and Northern Ireland power through. You can simply switch your ad spend (and your print runs) to those print products instead.
Easy to track and measure
With PPC, printers can be brilliantly nimble. With the ability to test the effectiveness of one phrase over another, it’s easy to hone the phrases which work best, so you maximise the impact of every pound.
The pay really is per click
You only pay for clicks. So when your product or business appears in a search result but doesn’t get clicked on, you pay nothing. That can make PPC a very cost effective way of bringing in new business.
How to Use Google PPC Ads to Get More Print Orders
Spend time selecting the right keyphrases
You want to be found for “printer in LOCATION”. But simply choosing that as one of your keyphrases without exploring other options could prove costly. Google Ads helpfully lets you search lots of keyphrase alternatives. It tells you how many searches those phrases get. And it tells you what the competition is like (i.e. how many other printers are also running campaigns for those phrases).
You could, for example, find that the phrase “printer in LOCATION” gets lots of searches, but is also highly competitive, which pushes the price per click up. On the other hand, taking your time to research the search options could reveal that a similar phrase (e.g. “print shops in LOCATION”) is well searched, much less competitive, and costs far less per click. That would be the search phrase to choose.
Get the ad right
Do a quick search for “banner printers” in Google now. You’ll get a handful of sponsored results before the organic listings appear. These are the businesses that are using PPC to drive orders.
The business in first place is paying the most for its link to appear first at this particular time of day. But that isn’t automatically the one you click on. Which one you choose depends on the ad itself.
That requires a combination of a punchy title, a clear, simple description including benefits (i.e. what’s in it for the customer) and a call to action. It’s worth testing different ads to see which works best but, in general, bland ‘white noise’ statements like “best quality!” tend to have limited effect. Far more effective is something a reader can really make sense of, such as “Make designing your banner fast and simple with our templates. 24hr delivery.”
Optimise landing pages
It’s one thing for your PPC campaign to drive someone to click on your ad. But what happens once they’ve clicked?
Every ad needs to point a visitor to a landing page (that is, a standalone page on your website dedicated to, in this case, the product your ad relates to). Sending them to a generic page and expecting them to search again for the right product is going to drive the customer away and waste clicks and cash.
Track it. Measure It. Change it.
With PPC, printers can track every click, so you know what gets the best results and what doesn’t. It’s important to take advantage of this tool – it can help make your PPC spend much more efficient.
Explore display ads and remarketing ads
PPC for printers doesn’t have to mean search ads of the sort we’ve already explored. It could also mean display ads (that is, banner ads that appear on websites, in blogs and elsewhere) or retargeting ads (that is, ads that aim to re-engage someone who clicked on your ad originally but didn’t buy).
Both of these can be powerful ways to drive further success from PPC.
Talk to Soyang
Is PPC driving up your need for print materials? For that, best talk to Soyang.
