A tricky beast that can be dangerously accessible, but extremely powerful for small businesses and SME Manufacturers looking to boost sales leads...Of course I’m talking about Search Engine Ads like Google Adwords or Bing Ads for example. The idea of being able to appear on page 1 of a search engine without* the laborious need for expensive and time consuming SEO is eminently attractive to any small business marketer. In this article we cover some key topics and provide you with an Infographic that takes you through some critical considerations for taking on Pay-Per-Click advertising…

Buying Your Way To The Top...

However alluring the idea of getting to page 1 of Google Search Results (SERPs), by just paying for an Ad - IF someone clicks on it! These Ads are still an investment and for that reason, Return on Investment (ROI) should be front of mind. More often than not, many small businesses have poor ROI on their Pay-Per-Click efforts due to a misunderstanding of how to optimise, target, test and evolve their Ads - Including UK Manufacturers and Engineering Businesses.

Inevitably, poor return on investment eventually leads to abandonment of the cause. In worse cases, the poor execution of the campaign can even lead to damage to the organic ranking of your website and the customer perception of your business. In some cases many businesses can’t even judge whether they’re getting good ROI! So good practice in PPC setup and measurement tracking is not to be taken lightly.

However, that all being said, if you can optimise, test and evolve your Ads on these platforms they can produce results - even for Industrial and B2B markets.

This costs money. This isn’t one of our “How to Improve Your Web Presence In 10 Minutes” articles (However, if you’re interested in how to do it for free, check out our series of articles). Whether it’s SEO or Sponsored Ads they are going to cost you money, and they don’t yield the same results.

Organic Vs Paid Advertising (Organic Still Kicks Ass)

Organically appearing in search engine results is still proven to lead to more conversions (Clicks). Using Sponsored Ads therefore doesn’t replace Search Engine Optimisation, or any other form of online presence building.

The Infographic below provides a pretty extensive list of things to consider, implement and learn more about if you’re planning on taking on Google Adwords. The principles do transfer across when talking about Bing Ads aside from the slight differences in the platforms.

Before you get into the Infographic though, I’ve highlighted some key elements you should pay some special attention to as a UK Sub-Contract Manufacturer.

• First and foremost, understand who is competing for attention in your market space. That’s easy, just do a search for your services. Make sure you mix it up! Remember that different people, buyers, customers etc. they all call your services something different so there will definitely be different search terms.
• Not only will your customers search for different services, they’ll search in different geographical areas. Narrowing your geographic reach to a county, city or town using the Adwords to limit when your Ad will appear is one way. Another way would be to add “...In Manchester” to the end of your sponsored keywords. You may have national customers, but are the majority local? You could end up wasting Ad spend advertising in the wrong parts of the country.
  Just a note on this one as it seems to surprise so many people. Your Google search results are different depending on where you are in the country when you click “Search”. This is even more prevalent with Google Ads. Don’t worry about how they do it, just keep it in mind.
• Don’t blindly throw money at short tail keywords, nail the long tail keywords instead. If you don’t know what I’m talking about - check out our article explaining Keywords for UK Manufacturers.  Knowing which words you should compete for and maximising the relevance of your Ads as an SME Manufacturer is key to making PPC cost effective.
  Just chasing “Laser Cutting” as a search term is likely to be costly and inneffective. Not just because you’ll compete with every other laser cutting company, but you’ll also compete with people who aren’t business competitors, like the laser cutting machine manufacturer for instance.
• Make sure the Pay-Per-Click Ad is part of a marketing funnel. Just having an Ad which leads to your homepage may not be the way to maintain the searchers attention. A specific landing page is far more effective. Using the same words on the landing page as used in the Ad will put the searcher at ease, improve your relevance and to a certain degree your quality score.
  To truly make your Ad part of a “Marketing Funnel” the landing page should drive action. The ultimate goal at this stage being to capture information about the lead. Get them to hand over their email address, contact number or name in exchange for a monthly newsletter, free downloadable guide or a weekly email showing your machine capacity etc.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of a Marketing Funnel, you need to get this article explaining marketing funnels for manufacturers onto your reading list - Check it out now!

If you want to know more about how you can get visitors to your manufacturing business website to hand over their email address you need to check out this article explaining what a Lead Magnet is and How can you create one today.

You Don't Necessarily Have To Go It Alone...

If you don’t fancy running your own PPC campaigns it is also possible to outsource to a professional. You will find that a lot of online marketing agencies do offer the service, but there are also a bunch of Adwords management companies out there who have a greater depth of expertise in this specific area. Some of these companies have achieved Google Partner status for example, companies like AddPeople

This does come at a cost to setup and manage, so if you were put off by the cost of SEO this is probably not the perfect solution.

3 Key Takeaways

Pay-Per-Click whether with Google, Bing or any other Search Engine platform can be quick to setup, tricky to generate and verify good ROI and take a long time to master, monitor and refine.

If you can’t wait around for the Google Gods and Search Engine Optimisation to pay off then Adwords may offer a short term answer, especially if you’ve created a brand new website. Page 1 could be in your reach on day 1, however the costs may be unsustainable compared with the return.

There are a shit load of things to consider when pulling together a good Sponsored Ad campaign. Everything from Keyword research, landing page design and creation, marketing funnel implementation, Call-To-Action optimisation, Ad design, not to mention Testing and Data Interrogation... The list goes on. Despite this being only one area of online marketing, it actually encompasses skills and knowledge from almost all areas of online marketing as a whole.

I hope you enjoyed this latest installment from the Manufacturing Network Sales & Marketing Blog. PPC is a complex topic, but our target was to provide you with a starting point and a map for you to develop your skills in creating and managing a PPC campaign of your own - we think we achieved it!

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