Can Pay Per Click advertising (PPC) really help your business? How does it work?
PPC advertising is a simple method of using search engines like Google to deliver qualified prospects to your website. It is cost effective, simple to use and can be started with a very small budget. This article is designed as a simple introduction to PPC advertising but if you would like more help in setting up your own PPC campaign, please check out our services page.
Pay per click advertising is an online advertising model where you only pay when someone clicks on your advertisement and visits your site. It doesn’t matter how many times people see your ad or how often it is displayed – if nobody clicks on it, you pay nothing.
The most common PPC advertising example is Google Adwords. When you type something into Google it searches the web and then displays the pages it thinks are most relevant based on the terms you typed in (your keywords). For example, if you type in ‘tropical fish’ it will give you a list of pages that use the term ‘tropical fish’ in order of relevance and importance.
There are lots of thing that you can do to get your website to the top of the list for keywords and phrases that are relevant to your business – you can find a good introduction to these in our free report on Search Engines in Plain English.
However, search engine optimization takes time and you might be up against some pretty big players.
Google’s PPC advertising lets you buy your way onto the first page of the results in the form of the small text advertisements that you see along the right hand side of the screen, and under the heading ‘sponsored results’.
Opening Your Account
To start a pay per click advertising campaign you will need to set up an account. With Google, you can do that at the Adwords Sign Up Page. Once your account is opened you can create a simple text based advertisement – usually a headline plus two additional short lines, using select keywords, of course.
This is the ad that will be displayed next to your chosen search terms. You will also be able to select which countries your ad will be displayed in. In fact, if you sell to a local market only you can even select a county or city.
Choosing Your Keywords
The next step is choosing the search terms that you want your ad to appear next to. Using our tropical fish example, you might want to show up when someone searches for ‘tropical fish’ or ‘Japanese fighting fish’ or any number of terms.
Before you start typing them in, do your homework and find out the terms that people are searching for – Google has tools to help you do this.
Setting a Budget
The next step is to set a budget – both for the total amount that you are prepared to spend and the amount you are prepared to spend per click. For example, there may be 10 businesses that would all like their ads displayed next to the term ‘tropical fish’. So whose ad does Google put first in the list? Google ranks the ads by combining two factors:
You can decide how much you are prepared to ‘bid’ for your terms starting from a few cents. Based on your business, select an amount that you are willing to pay – it can always to be changed later. At this stage Google will show you your estimated position and the average number of people you will attract each day. If you’ve ‘bid’ $0.10 per click for the term ‘tropical fish’ and attract 10 clicks per day, that’s means you will have spent $1 per day on your ads. If nobody clicks you will have spent nothing. Based on these estimates you can set the maximum amount that you want to spend in any day or month. Once you have reached your budget your ads will simply stop getting displayed.
You will be charged by credit card or direct debit each month for the number of clicks you had.
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Would you like more targeted traffic to your website? Contextual advertising could be the answer you’re looking for, especially if your business targets a specific niche.
It is an online advertising model where relevant ads are displayed on websites or other online media, based on the content that is on that web page. The advertising network searches the page for keywords and then delivers an advertisement that matches those keywords. For example, if you were reading a website about sports – and they use contextual advertisement – then you would only see ads related to sports.
For the advertiser it means that their ads are being displayed on pages related to their products or services. Chances are, if someone is reading that page, they may be interested in that topic – in this case, sports. That increases the chances that they will also be interested in your product or service.
No, pay per click is a model of how you pay for advertising, not how it is displayed. However, in many cases PPC is used alongside contextual ads – for example, Google Adwords and Adsense. When you type something into Google it searches the web and then displays the pages it thinks are most relevant based on the terms you typed in (your keywords). For example, if you type in ‘tropical fish’ it will give you a list of pages that use the term ‘tropical fish’ in order of relevance and importance.
On the right hand side of the results page Google also displays what it calls ‘sponsored results’ – this is Google Adwords and is a perfect example of a contextual ad. The ads that are displayed there are relevant to the keywords that you typed into Google. In this case you would expect to see advertisements related to ‘tropical fish’ – fish tanks, pet shops and the like. Each advertiser chooses the keywords that are appropriate to their advertisements and will only show up when those terms are searched for – i.e. contextual. They only pay however, when someone clicks on that ad – that is PPC.
Google Adwords combines the two – contextual advert and PPC – to great effect and has become one of the world’s largest advertising networks. Adsense is based on the same concept. Adsense allows website publishers to put small bits of code onto their website that deliver Adwords-style ads based on the text that is on the website page. So a page about boxing would have small boxing-related text ads appear on the page. When someone clicks on these ads, the revenue generated is split between Google and the website owner.
Google is certainly not the only advertising network that uses contextual ads and contextual advert does not have to use PPC.
The purpose of contextual advert is simply to make any advertising more relevant to what is on the website. That should mean that advertisers get a better response (and more targeted leads) and customers are not annoyed by irrelevant ads.
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Marketing Strategies to Improve Your Business
If you want more leads for your business then pay per lead is an attractive choice. But is it the right one and how does it work?
It is exactly what it sounds like: You pay for leads instead of paying a flat rate for advertising or marketing. There are lots of ways that this can be organized but the main benefit to you is that you don’t have to pay for any marketing that doesn’t result in new leads.
To pay for leads means you get a fixed price for each lead, which eliminates a lot of the risk that is usually associated with marketing and advertising your business. So long as you can do a good enough job of closing sales, then it’s perfectly possible to adopt paying for leads as a strategy to grow your entire business.
The way it works depends on what kind of system you set up or use. Here are a few options that might be worth looking at:
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Every business with a website wants to make the best use of online marketing tools to help them attract new leads and visitors to their website. Of course, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of internet marketing tools that you could use. So how do you choose the best ones for your business?
Finding the right tools depends as much on your business and your goals as the tools themselves. But generally online marketing tools can be lumped into one or more groups, including but not limited to:
Advertising online is much like advertising offline – you need to choose the best places to advertise based on your target market. Once you’ve chosen the best places to advertise, you’ll also have a choice of advertising types – largely split into display advertising and pay per click advertising.
Display advertising is exactly what it sounds like. Your advertisement gets displayed on a page and if people are interested they can click through to your website. The amount you pay will either be based on a flat fee or on a cost per impression.
Cost per impression means that you will pay every time your ad is displayed to a website visitor. This is usually expressed as a cost per thousand (CPM). For example, if you agree to pay $10 CPM then you will pay $100 for every 10,000 times you advertisement is displayed on screen.
Pay per click can look identical to display advertising but you only pay when a person clicks on your ad to visit your website. If nobody clicks, you pay nothing. Google runs the most popular pay per click advertising network called Adwords.
Further Reading:
Online content comes in many forms but in most cases you will be talking about written content either on your own website or created for other websites but linking back to you. Good content helps you perform better with the search engines (read our free report on search engine optimization basics). It can also help demonstrate your expertise or the quality of your products.
Further Reading:
Email can be a very effective online marketing tool provided you use it in the right way – otherwise you run the risk of being classed as a spammer. The right way is based on permission marketing. Permission marketing starts with you asking potential customers to provide their contact details, usually in return for some kind of information or special offer. The prospective customer will know and accept that they will receive future marketing communications from you.
Email can be particularly useful as it can help you automate a lot of your marketing and lead generation systems. In particular, you can use auto-responders, small software programs that send pre-written emails at set times, to help you follow up with prospects and deliver useful content.
Further Reading:
The Internet allows even the smallest businesses to use a variety of media to market themselves. It is now easy for businesses to use everything from video to recorded audio to live webinars to market themselves. The possibilities are endless.
Further Reading:
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Contextual Advertising & Email Marketing & How to Buy Leads & Online Marketing Services & Pay Per Click & Website Marketing Strategy
Do you want to develop leads online? The Internet can be a great place to develop and grow your business. In particular it offers a perfect opportunity to attract customers, build your prospect list and ultimately help you close new business. The good news is that internet lead generation is not all that different from traditional offline lead generation.
Yes, the Internet changes the way that people look for information. Yes, the Internet allows you to automate lead generation. But, ultimately the steps involved in good lead generation are the same:
Let’s take a look at each step:
Imagine your website as if it were a store. Your first job is to attract people to your store using effective marketing techniques. You can’t sell anybody anything until they’re in your store. Some of the marketing techniques to consider include:
It’s also worth remembering that you can still use effective offline strategies like direct mail to drive traffic to your website as well.
Once you have started to generate traffic to your website then the next step is to turn some of that traffic into a list of prospective new customers to follow up with. Usually this will involve you creating an incentive for them to provide their contact details, the first part of any good permission based marketing campaign. That incentive could be a special offer, or, more likely, further useful information.
What form this information takes is up to you. You could consider a blog that people can subscribe to, a free newsletter, or a webinar that people can take part in, for example.
Once you start building a list the next question becomes, ‘what do I do with this list?’. The goal has to be to move people from being interested to being willing to buy your product or service. Of course not every prospective customer on your list will end up becoming a customer.
That’s fine.
However, it is important for you to find ways of separating those with a genuine interest from the ‘tire kickers’. Tools like newsletters and autoresponders can help you automate much of this process.
Of course the final step is to close the sale. You can create online marketing tools that will encourage customers to buy from you. But unless you are actually selling a product via your website, you will almost always have to close the sale through direct contact with your prospective customer or client.
However, if you set your lead generation program up effectively; the advertising you use, how you build your list and what you do with that list can all help ensure that the people you actually spend time selling to are the most qualified prospects you could hope for.
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Low Cost Lead Generation
Would you like to generate more leads for your business but don’t have the budget to make it work? Think again. There are plenty of low cost strategies available once you know what you’re looking for.
Effective lead generation is a three-stage process:
Each of these three steps can cost money but if you’re putting together a low cost marketing strategy you can make simple decisions to keep the budget in check.
The first step in any lead generation strategy is to attract people to your business – and more particularly your website – with good marketing. For many businesses marketing means advertising, but advertising can be an expensive way to promote your business.
Marketing is bigger than just advertising and here are three simple marketing methods you can use:
SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of making your website and content easy for the search engines to find and more likely to turn up in the search engine results of your target customers. Do your SEO homework well and you can attract people who are searching for solutions – solutions that you provide – at no cost to you.
Good SEO comes down to five simple ideas;
You can find more detail about SEO in our free report.
PR (public relations) is traditionally about encouraging the media to write about you and your business – usually by issuing press releases and building relationships with journalists. More recently, online press release services have made it possible for businesses to create ‘direct to consumer’ releases (news releases as opposed to press releases).
These releases are designed to be SEO friendly and get picked up in the search results. If you’re writing for news releases try including a call to action that encourages people to visit your website. Either way, PR can be an effective way to attract leads without spending a fortune.
PPC (pay per click) is advertising. But it’s also one of the most focused and cost effective forms of advertising. A good example of PPC ads is Google Adwords. Adwords ads are the ones you see to the right of your normal search results. You can create an ad, decide what search terms the ad will appear next to, bid on how much you are willing to pay and then set a monthly budget. You only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad – meaning you can create very specific advertising campaigns on very limited budgets.
Once you have attracted people to your lead generation system the next step is to develop those leads and identify the ones who are ready to buy. This can often be a time consuming process if you try to do it manually – and the more time consuming it is the more expensive it is too.
Perhaps the best way to ensure that a low cost lead generation strategy is to automate as much of the process as possible, using:
The majority of your lead generation program is much more cost effective in the long run than relying entirely on paid staff (or your own time) to accomplish it. In short, if you need a low cost lead generation strategy, focus on using low cost marketing strategies and automate as much of the process as you can.
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Are your lead generation techniques working for you?
Have you tried different lead generation techniques, only to fall short of your goals for inquiries and new business?
If so, here are our top ten techniques to increase sales and new business inquiries.
1. Market and Advertise Offline and Online
A lead generation strategy is useless without a way of getting prospects to the first rung of the ladder. This means successful advertising and marketing of your business. A good marketing strategy can motivate cold prospects to become warm leads and take the first step in doing business with you. Read my FREE eBook for more information on this.
2. Build a List
Your list is your most important asset. Most prospects aren’t ready to buy the first time you come in contact with them, but they may be ready at some stage in the future. A well developed list, packed full of prospective customers allows you to see better returns, cut marketing costs and maximize the returns from the money you do spend.
Of course good list building is not just an excel sheet with everybody’s email address. A good list is detailed, segmented into different types of buyers and is regularly updated with new information. It’s the backbone of every good lead generation system.
3. Schedule Appointments
For those businesses with a more complicated sales process that requires a personal approach, the next step after a prospect shows interest is to arrange for a meeting. Depending on your business and resources, you might consider using a professional appointment setter to do the legwork.
4. Close the Sale
If your prospect expressed an interest or met you for an appointment, they’re interested in what you have to sell. How interested? Ask them to buy it. They can either say “yes”, “no” or “not now”.
Whatever the result, by closing the sale you’ve moved the process along. You may have a new sale. You may move a prospect along your sales system towards a future sale. You may have eliminated a prospect that could have cost you time in the future. Of course you don’t want to come across as pushy, but don’t make the common mistake of shying away from asking for the sale.
5. Build a Follow Up List – Clients and Prospects
As your list grows you’ll want to split it into two (or more) kinds of follow-up lists. One is for current and past clients. You’ll ask them for future business, sell new products and services and ask for referrals. For existing customers you’ll also need to use effective customer retention programs because these are the people you need to pay the most attention to. After all, it’s always cheaper to keep existing customers than to acquire new ones.
The second is for prospects who aren’t clients – yet. From that list you’ll want to implement Step 6.
6. Identify the Most-Qualified Prospects
As your list grows even more you’ll want to segregate it to make more money by spending more energy and time on your “A” prospects. Spend less time and energy to your “B” and “C” prospects. The first step is to create profiles of who the A, B and C prospects are.
The next trick is to starting using your automated systems to make C prospects into B’s and B prospects into A’s (and A prospects into paying customers.)
7. More Closing
If your prospect didn’t buy from you the first time, you should have put him on your mailing list. Find ways to follow up with him so you’re there when he is ready.
[Alec Baldwin - Best Performance On Closing]
8. Keep in Touch with Prospects
Keep delivering useful content to your prospects, keep making offers, closing, and asking for the sale with all your prospects who haven’t bought yet. You never know when they’re ready to buy. But when they are, you want to be there.
9. Keep in Touch with Customers and Clients
Once you convert a prospect into a customer, don’t ignore them! It’s more profitable to do business and keep in touch with clients who know and trust you. Advertising and prospecting for new business, in the cold marketplace, is the most expensive kind of business development.
10. “Rinse and Repeat!”
Turn your long-term lead generation techniques into a repeatable cycle. Turn lead generation techniques into a system. Don’t reinvent the wheel.
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Articles & Autoresponders & Closing Sales & Current Customers & Customer Retention Program & How to Buy Leads & Lead Generation & Lead Generation Techniques & List Building Strategies & Qualified Lead Generation & Setting Appointments
Creating effective lead generation ads is one of first and most important steps in any lead generation process. Of course, we all want plenty of eyeballs on our advertising and visitors to our websites, but those figures mean nothing to your business if you cannot convert them. Converting visitors to customers on any campaign is what generates income for the business.
Advertising works when it speaks to the needs of the prospective customer. The good news is that there is a simple formula that you can use to make your advertising more effective.
To create good sales copy for your lead generation ads, you can follow this guide – AIDA – which stands for:
Attention:
When writing your message, make sure the heading captures the attention of your target market. To appeal to your target audience, the heading has to be eye-catching, targeted and specific. Avoid jargon and marketing speak. Clearly state the specific benefit your audience will get from what you are offering.
Interest:
Once you have their attention, the next step is to keep them interested by giving more detail about the solution your product or service will provide. People want to know what’s in it for them. They don’t want to know why you think you’re so special. So, writing from the customers’ point of view, explain the following:
Desire:
Desire is emotion not logic. You covered the logical points in the Interest section above. Buying decisions are emotional too. Paint a picture for your customer of how their life or business will be better for having bought your product or service.
Action:
Get them to act! People don’t like making decisions. Making a decision is risky. This, of course, means your prospective customers need a little poke to get them moving – a reason to take the next step (and a clear picture of what that next step is). Create the sense of urgency, scarcity or savings. Now direct them to take the action you want them to (ex. buy now and save 40% off the total price).
Follow Up:
If you use the AIDA system to craft your marketing, you should be able to start generating leads – but remember, leads are not sales. Not everyone will buy from just seeing your first lead generation ad. You need to create a system that allows you to nurture the leads until they are ready.
With that in mind, your first line of marketing should encourage people to
(a) Buy if they’re ready or
(b) Find more info if they’re not. The ‘more info’ option is your chance to gather contact information for your list.
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How to Buy Leads & Lead Generation & Lead Generation Techniques & Target Marketing
Insurance lead generation for most companies is a straightforward process. You start by buying leads or generating them yourself through advertising online and off. Then you start selling.
Simple!
For the consumer however, buying insurance is confusing, time consuming, and tedious. They are afraid to ask someone like you for more information because they believe it will lead to a sales pitch. That means that you don’t get as many leads as you would like. This is unfortunate, because you’re probably the one person most qualified to answer their questions and help them make an intelligent decision.
In short, if you want to place more customers, you need a way of generating insurance leads that sets you apart from the other insurance companies who are targeting those very same prospects. So how do you do that? How do you make yourself stand out?
Starting with the customer in mind, the best method of insurance lead generation is to make it easy for prospects to contact you and find the information they’re looking for – without fear of the dreaded hard sell.
It might sound crazy but if you want to generate more insurance leads the smart thing is to…
… give your prospect the information they want, with no strings attached.
Providing content that answers your prospects queries will attract more prospects – the ones who are put off by the hoops that other agents make them jump through. Secondly it will make you a trusted resource that they will return to. Of course, you’ll also want to gather prospects’ contact details where possible. This is your permission to continue to market to them over time. To encourage prospects to give you this permission you’ll often need an incentive.
In your insurance lead generation process, the first step could be to create a special report that covers the key points your prospect should be aware about before buying your kind of insurance (life, auto, income disability, home, etc). The report should cover basic dos and don’ts and give him advice about what to expect when purchasing your insurance product. Then, at the end, you should include a simple way for them to get in touch.
Many times he will call you to finish what he set out to do – buy insurance. If not, you can still go back to route one and call them. Even if this does not lead to an immediate sale, you’ve started a relationship and are now one step ahead of your competitors.
Many prospects still don’t buy immediately, even if they need what you’re selling. Things happen. They get busy. Other life events take attention away from buying insurance. So what else should you do as part of your insurance lead generation process?
Simple. Follow up with them. By joining your mailing list the prospect has given you permission to keep in touch. You want to stay top-of-mind and ask for the sale as many times as needed until they become a client or ask you to stop contacting them. Depending on what contact information you have, you can stay in touch by phone, email, mail, or a combination of all three.
Ideally, you will automate this communication to save you time and allow you to focus on fresh leads as they come through. You’ll find by being consistent and communicating with lukewarm prospects over time, those that don’t buy now often buy in the future (or do other good things like refer business to you).
Now that you have a mailing list of prospects interested in insurance, you can cross-sell them other lines of insurance. For instance, if the first reason they contacted you was about information on Life Insurance, you can now offer information on purchasing Income Disability Insurance. Also, if you only focus on one line of insurance (for example, Business Owner Policies), you can partner up with another agent that specializes in a different line of insurance and split commissions.
Many agents use the leads they buy poorly. They buy them and wait days to call the lead back. When asked why, many say that they were busy or at appointments when the leads were emailed to them. Don’t let these leads go stale.
Have an assistant or sub-agent call them back immediately. If too much time passes the prospect’s enthusiasm dies and their level of interest disappears, making a sale harder or impossible. Chances are they’ll also be contacted by other agents. If you don’t get a sale right away, remember to encourage them to join your mailing list (again using free info as an incentive). This can provide a long list of prospects to contact in future with new offers or simply keep in front of until they’re ready to buy.
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Health And Life Insurance Lead Generation
How to Buy Leads & Lead Generation & Lead Management & List Building Strategies & Target Marketing
Health insurance lead generation or life insurance lead generation can be difficult. It’s a very competitive market and it’s difficult to distinguish your insurance products from those of your competitors. In some cases you’ll even be selling the exact same insurance products as your competitors. So how do you set yourself apart from the others and generate more insurance leads?
Actually, the answer is in the question. You need to set yourself apart TO generate leads. Let me explain. When someone is looking for health insurance or life insurance there will be no shortage of businesses and agents lining up to take their business. From the customer’s point of view it can be very confusing. They want to make sure that they get the best possible coverage at the best possible price.
You’re in a good position to advise them but they have no reason to listen to you over anyone else – to them it’s all just a sales pitch. They don’t know who you are. They don’t know what you know. You need to create trust.
Trust is important in any business but in an industry where the customer is confused by contradictory claims and jargon, it’s essential. Trust is based on a relationship – either with you personally or your brand – but you don’t have the time to go out and build relationships with every single prospect individually. You’re still going to buy leads in. You’re still going to do all the things that you usually do. But, to generate more trust — trust that leads to leads — you should consider the following three ideas:
People are confused. Ideally they want a simple, unbiased answer to their questions: what is the best coverage for me and what is the best price I can get that coverage for. To generate trust and build leads for your insurance business, you should look for ways to answer those questions, minus the sales pitch.
You could start with a few introductory articles on your website, covering general insurance topics. People searching for this information online are good prospects. Providing that information means that they will find you before they find your competitors – and trust you more because you’ve helped educate them.
People like doing business with other people – especially people they know. Again, it’s down to trust. There are plenty of opportunities to bring your own personality into how you market your business. You could start in your local market by being an active networker.
Online you should make sure that your website – and all marketing communications – display elements of your personality and include things like personal biographies, contact details and even photos. Finally, you can use any number of social networking tools to help build your personal profile online.
Referrals are great business because they come with an endorsement attached. Accountants, solicitors, financial planners or any other professional could well be able to refer business to you. When they do, your job is simply to uphold the trust they’ve put in you and do a good job for the client. Customers are also an excellent source of referrals in the same way.
However you choose to generate leads for your insurance business (health insurance, life insurance or any other kind of insurance), finding ways to build trust is an excellent way to set yourself apart from your competitors and encourage people come to you.
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How to Buy Leads & Lead Generation & List Building Strategies & Small Businesses & Target Marketing
