3 Ways To Leverage Social PPC To Gain More Targeted Customers

Jacob Baadsgard, CEO of Disruptive Advertising, spent most of his professional life guiding Fortune 100 companies to greater profitability with Pay-Per-Click advertising at Adobe. He was responsible for adding $30M a year to Adobe’s bottom line. That was before he started his own PPC Management firm.

Jacob attributes much of his success in PPC to doing proper market research and using all the tools that Google, Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter make available to marketers. He also says that social is one of the most underutilized tools in AdWords. (Google allows you to include social extensions in your PPC ads, yet many marketers don’t — I will discuss this topic further down in the article.)

So here are Jacob’s 3 top guides for competition-smearing, social PPC tactics.

1. Facebook PPC Tips

The clout of social PPC, specifically where Facebook is concerned, is its targeting capabilities. With search, you are targeting keywords; with social, you are building/targeting personas. Precise targeting is the best feature of social PPC; therefore, it’s vital to use it to the maximum.

For B2B marketers, there may seem to be a lack of targeting options in Facebook Power Editor. While this is somewhat true, one of the most common tactics I’ve seen B2B companies use is targeting competitors.

You should target competitors, whether B2B or B2C, if you use any of the social PPC platforms. Specifically, this means targeting your ads to people who like/follow your competitors.

Jacob also recommends getting your hands dirty with Facebook custom audiences, a Facebook Ads feature that lets advertisers target Facebook users by phone, email, app user IDs or Facebook User IDs.

2. Remarketing Tactics

Using social media and PPC for retargeting purposes is an area many marketers miss out on. One of the myriad example groups you can retarget from your analytics are users who place items in their shopping cart but never check out; you would then generate a targeted social campaign for them. Occasionally, it’s simply that additional bump and extra exposure of your brand that transforms the consumer into a customer.

Use roughly identical strategies in both PPC and social media to prompt consumers that have seen your product previously. This ultimately forms trust. Use some of the same images and echo some of the same words in your ads. Offer something similar to what they have viewed before.

3. Taking Advantage Of Social Proof

As noted above, Google allows you to include a social extension on your ad that shows Google+ as well as reviews for your company. Including both of these extensions (assuming you have a decent amount of followers and good reviews) can help tip the scales in your favor, as they create an immediate sense of trust. Jacob asserts, “We have tested and found that our click-through rate on ads can be up to 20% higher with these extensions in place.”

In addition, you should heavily leverage getting Facebook likes on your landing pages. According to Jacob, “We have found that 2,000 or more likes, in most situations, gives a landing page up to 30% higher conversion rates than without.” Apparently, the difference between 2,000 likes and 15,000 likes did not seem to make a statistically significant impact on conversion rates.

Conclusion

Your online competition is going after your potential customers. Therefore, it is critical to take advantage of every tool available. Leveraging what has already been done by others (not recreating the wheel), using all current and future best practices, and taking advantage of social proof will significantly reduce the amount of time it takes to make any marketing campaign profitable.