There is a real fear that a recession may be upon us or approaching soon. For small businesses, few things are more terrifying. Recessions often cause many small businesses to clamp down on advertising, reduce their business investments, and find less expensive ways to operate.
Here's the thing: When done right, a business can use a recession to leapfrog the competition. To be clear, you must work harder and smarter than ever. You have to engage in a series of advertising tactics and readjustments with your inbound marketing material, sales plan, and pay-per-click advertising that you'd never even begun to approach.
Fortunately, there are strategies you can implement to make your ad investments recession-proof.
Target the Right Audience
Recession-proofing your business through PPC ads starts by understanding your target audience.
- Do you know who your ideal audience is?
- Do you know where they spend their time, what marketing strategies work for them, and how you can reach these prospective clients?
- Have you updated your pay-per-click ad management accordingly?
To connect with the correct audience, here are a few tactics to keep in mind:
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Research your audience to get a better understanding of your ideal client and learn the best way to connect with them.
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From this, create a client avatar or profile of your ideal client. This research will help guide other relevant advertising decisions.
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Spend time with tools like HubSpot or Google Analytics to research keywords in your digital advertisement copy.
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Update your website and pay-per-click advertising to engage in website retargeting. This will allow you to retarget people who have already visited your website.
Once you've mapped out who your audience is and why they are looking for a solution, you can start designing your campaign.
Consider a New Audience
The steps listed above have extensive overlap. For example, while researching who your ideal client is, you may stumble across vital information: you have an entirely new audience that you can target.
Your research may provide insight into prospective customers that can be useful for business purposes — and they weren't who you thought they were!
However, this begs a few questions, including:
- How can you reach this audience?
- Who are they, and where do they spend their time?
- What social networks can you use to connect with them effectively?
- How do you need to adjust your PPC advertising strategy accordingly?
These insights will require extensive research to develop an ideal profile and may require significant marketing adjustments. You may need to target new demographics, update your keywords with search engine optimization, or create new landing pages for your PPC ads. Fortunately, good PPC ad best practices (like testing) can help you identify the right mix of optimization, keywords, and more to target new and existing audiences.
Test and Optimize Your Strategies
Pay-per-click advertising has never been about a static approach to how you manage your ads. Instead, marketers that succeed with pay-per-click ads constantly test, optimize, and adjust their paid search campaigns in real time. This means using A/B testing to ensure you create the most effective ads.
With A/B testing, you run two copies of the same advertising campaign but adjust one factor in each ad. These factors may include the graphic, search engine keywords, and the intended target audience, among others.
For example, Once you conduct keyword research, your campaigns may perform better in search queries than the original. From there, you can track the results based on page views and clicks and update accordingly.
Furthermore, don't hesitate to experiment with different PPC advertising formats or strategies. Only through experimentation can you discover what works for your audience and what doesn't. Building successful PPC campaigns often demand consistent tracking and recording of the results during this experimentation period.
Focus on Conversion Rate Optimization
Conversion rate optimization (or CRO) is increasing the number of users who do what you want them to do on your website or with an advertisement. This can include buying your product, downloading a guide, clicking on PPC advertisements, or more. The higher your CRO, the more impactful your marketing efforts.
Conversion rate optimization is even more critical in a down market, as your sales pipeline may have slowed. A high CRO means your limited advertising dollars are going further than they would be.
Increasing your CRO means optimizing your paid search ads, experimenting with new formats, and monitoring your pay-per-click advertising for what works best.
Personalize Paid Ads
Remember, the best online advertising is personal and speaks to an urgent need in your customers. By researching your customer and having a robust understanding of who they are and where they spend their time, you can develop a solid understanding of who they are and what they need. This research can allow you to create highly personalized PPC ad campaigns to boost your search engine marketing success.
Furthermore, your advertisements should speak to pain points and lead prospects to your landing page (and business) for solutions. Consider a few questions when developing your ads, including:
- Why are your customers using your product?
- What need can you solve?
- How can you improve their life or business?
These questions will likely shine a spotlight on the questions they ask search engines like Google and Bing to find their way to your solution or product.
Partner With Geekly Media for Pay-Per-Click Ad Management
Partnering with an inbound marketing agency can help you skip these steps on your own, instead relying on proven experts who understand the basic principles behind advertising, testing, conversion rate optimization, and pay-per-click ad management.
Geekly Media has the experience and expertise to help plan and construct your paid advertising campaigns through sound digital strategy and content management. If you're looking for a solution to help recession-proof your business, let us help you with your paid ads campaigns!
Learn more about effective strategies in our free resource, "Paid Ads: Definitive Guide for Any Business."
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