Until recently, business advertising had always been by and large a hit-or-miss proposition. You paid for a print ad, billboard, radio or TV time, or some other medium that announced your presence to John Q. Public. The problem with that form of advertising was threefold:
- It wasn’t directed at your target audience. You had to hope your ad reached people who needed what you’re selling, when they needed it. Or, maybe they’d recall having seen your ad when they needed your product or service in the future.
- You paid a flat fee for your advertisement regardless of how much business it brought you.
- There was no way of tracking an ad’s effectiveness; consequently, you didn’t know how to adjust your marketing strategy for maximum ROI.
Online marketing offered significant advantages over those forms of advertising, like greater reach, longer exposure and measurable results; but there weren’t the tools necessary to accurately measure what did and didn’t work. That is, until Google AdWords.
Advantages of Google AdWords
Google AdWords is a pay-per-click (PPC) service that allows you to create your own business ads, and gives you the tools you need to measure their results. With AdWords, your advertising is more targeted, reaching people who are actively searching for businesses like yours. This gives you significant advantages for developing your marketing strategy.
- AdWords is designed for intent marketing. That is, your target audience sees you when they need you, where they need you. Unlike a scattershot ad campaign, AdWords reaches local customers who are actively looking for you.
- AdWords gives you control of your ad spend. Rather than paying a flat rate for ads that may or may not deliver a worthwhile ROI, AdWords lets you specify a budget per ad, and adjust it according to the ad’s effectiveness.
- AdWords lets you leverage the power of YouTube. As a Google-owned video sharing website, YouTube offers you an additional marketing venue, with over 1 billion viewers per month.
- AdWords gives immediate results. It takes considerable time and effort to tweak your SEO to reach that prized first page of search results. AdWords puts your ads to work immediately, and provides metrics you can use to measure results right away.
- AdWords gives you a competitive advantage. Because it works faster than SEO, your business ads can appear at the top of search results before the competition. People looking for what you’re selling will find you first!
- AdWords is customizable. Using Google AdWords, you can run multiple ad campaigns simultaneously; narrow your audience by location, device, language, etc. Use specific keywords to reach your target market.
- AdWords employs retargeting. Retargeting uses cookies to keep your ad in front of people who’ve visited your website.
As a local small business owner with a limited advertising budget, you need to be targeting the right people with your ad campaign. Google AdWords give you more control, better ROI, measurability and customizability.
At Cedar Park Local, we are dedicated to helping small businesses here in the Cedar Park Tx area. Our expertise in SEO, web development and reputation management offer you and hands-free solution for driving business growth. Let us help you so you can focus on your core business.
