How Small Business Owners Can Leverage PPC Advertising In 2024

As a small business owner trying to survive in the current global marketplace, finding effective digital marketing strategies that can be leveraged with a minimal budget is certainly very attractive. In this article, we’re going to talk about how small business owners can leverage PPC advertising to their benefit in 2023. Let’s go!

1. Bid on your competitor brand-names

It might sound counter-productive, but this is actually a very popular PPC strategy in 2023. The process is simple:

• Target users who are actively searching for your competitors on Google >
• Your PPC ads will display (hopefully) in the top 3 position among your competitors >
• This can help you effectively ‘intercept’ some of that traffic and turn them >
• The conversion rates are typically very attractive.

You can also counter this by targeting your brand name with some ads as well.

2. Look at your competitor’s keywords (and do it better)

Competitor research is crucial in all digital marketing efforts. What are your competitors currently working on? How do their ads read? What are their landing pages performing like?

Identify what works and what does not and then target the same (or similar) keywords and attempt to intercept more of the traffic by simply being the superior option.

Something as simple as having a website that loads 1-second faster than your competitors can make a huge impact.

The above two points are rather aggressive tactics, but they’ve proven to be effective in 2023.

3. Focus on your value proposition

Your adverts shouldn’t be treated as an excuse to flash your brand and talk about how awesome you are. Instead, you should focus the attention of your ads on the amazing value that you will bring to your customers.

Value ads get straight down to brass-tacks which is what the modern consumer is after. They don’t want to waste time getting to know you, they want to identify (as quickly as possible) whether you can help them or not.

The more appealing your value proposition, the higher the CTR – and the higher the CTR, the greater your quality score.

4. Don’t forget to target long-tail keywords

Long-tail keywords enable you to target very specific prospects. So, rather than targeting a broad term like PPC agency, you could go much deeper and create an ad for: “PPC agency in Singapore” or something to that effect.

Long-tail keywords tend to have less competition and much higher conversion. Of course, don’t make them your sole-focus, but do make sure you have a healthy mixture of short and long-tail keywords for your PPC and your broader SEO strategy.

5. Don’t bid for #1

As a small business owner with a limited marketing budget, trying to compete with the competitors who have a much larger budget to play with is an unnecessary and expensive risk. As such, rather than trying to target the very top position, aim a little lower but work on crafting highly-targeted copy that is bound to resonate with your audience.

Yes, the higher positions get more clicks, but they’re also far more expensive per click. Again, find your balance. Smaller businesses with lower budgets can succeed in PPC if they learn to play the game.

Conclusion: consider hiring the professionals

There are many strategies you can put into practice with your PPC, however, if you don’t have the time or the budget to be split-testing and analysing data and making constant changes to your strategy, then it may be worth hiring the professionals:

• Save precious time.
• Enjoy industry expertise.
• Achieve faster results.
• Greater chance at a sustainable ROI.

In any case, we hope this article has been handy and that you crush your competition with your future ads!