Recently we have been talking to a lot of small to medium sized companies about Pay Per Click advertising with Google. The perception of a lot of business owners and marketers is they have to spend lots money to get attention. This is one of the biggest mistakes made when putting marketing campaigns together.

When building campaigns for our clients we work on a very simple formula, where we calculate the value of a customer and how much our client is willing to spend to convert that customer. Once we have extracted this information, we can then research how many leads that business will realistically convert.

With this model and the use of analytics and monitoring of the campaign we can quickly grow the sales for that company. This process is how we were recognised and awarded for growing revenue and success of local business at the start of this year by Google.

One phrase I surprise my self when saying is PPC works with small budgets. It is not always about how much you spend, but how you spend it….

PPC is a fantastic way of targeting your consumers and visitors at every stage of their buying experience and no other form of advertising medium allows you to track your conversions though every step of the buying process.

Start at the end, focus on the what you want from your customers, and direct them to the products or services you want them to convert with. The closer to the completion stage, the higher conversation rate you should expect.

If you are trying this your self, try and avoid broad matches in your key words as this can waste a lot of time and money. The more relevant you make it the more relevant hits you will achieve and the less money you could spend. If in doubt, get some one to do it for you!

So, you have your key words set up and you are ready to go…If only it was that simple. Now you need to decide the message you want to show your potential clients. The days have gone of expensive print adverts and brochures. PPC is a fantastic tool to try different content, messages and different combinations to see what works the best. Try split testing your leads to different landing pages.

Consider whether the promise from the ad is delivered consistently on the landing page and both in the headline and body. We’ve found rearranging copy in a headline or changing the description line from prose to a customer quote can increase click-through rates by 8 percent or more.

Numbers trump opinion and emotion. When funds are tight and every lead counts, use data instead of your opinion to make decisions. We use Google AdWords and Bing Ads, along with some sophisticated tools like GA Content Experiments and Optimizely. These combined with our own analysis allow us to measure which market segments are the most valuable. We double down on those and turn off those that are under-performing.

Marketing on a small budget might seem a tough row to hoe but there are ways to get results. A carefully planned, highly detailed PPC and metrics program can generate the results your company needs without spending an arm and a leg. As businessman and author Jack Welch once said, “An organisation’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.”