SECTION 1: Why You Should Advertise on AdWords
Part 2: AdWords For Small Businesses
Welcome to Part 2, AdWords For Small Businesses! Last time we discussed How AdWords Works. If you missed the introduction, feel free to catch the beginning of the series. Next time we launch Section 2: How To Set Up Your First Search Campaign, where we will detail exactly how to set up your AdWords campaign for success, so don’t miss it – be sure to subscribe!
How does AdWords specifically benefit small business owners?
Remember Stone Wesson, from the introduction of the series? Stone is the owner of a local, family-owned moving company, and he’s running out of ideas to make his business thrive. He is listed in the phone book and runs several billboards, so he doesn’t understand why the phone isn’t ringing like it once did. With the crunch of business overhead costs looming and barely enough leads to pay the bills, let alone make a profit, Stone is desperate to figure out how to generate more leads.
Leads are to small businesses as oxygen is to humans. Without leads, small businesses suffocate. But oxygen is harder to come by these days. Why?
With the technological revolution, the primary source of leads has fundamentally shifted: from traditional media streams towards online sources. Gone are the days when the majority of consumers consult their trusted copy of the phone book when they need a business to hire or have a problem to solve.
Essentially, the internet is the new phone book. Nowadays, when people have a problem to solve, they turn to their computers or grab their phones. “Hey Siri, find a local dentist.” “Hey Google, moving companies near me.” They search Google for “local custody lawyers in Dallas” or consult a local reviews site for “best wedding photographers”.
Many small business owners find themselves in the position of running out of leads and clients because their more tech-savvy competitors are ahead of them in the online advertising game. More people are looking for businesses on the internet, whether that be Google, Facebook, Yelp, or review websites, so small companies without a strong internet presence tend to start losing business.
The bottom line is: if you want to be a successful business in the modern world, you’re going to have a very hard time succeeding without an online presence.
Although Stone knows that an online presence is important, he isn’t the most tech-savvy person in the world, and he finds online advertising rather intimidating. Moreover, he doesn’t have a lot of time to learn a new system in-depth.
But when he realizes how important online advertising is to the success of his business, he decides to look into AdWords.
AdWords is Structured to Benefit Small Businesses
Stone is delighted to discover that the structure of AdWords specifically benefits small businesses in 3 particular ways:
- You only Pay Per Click (PPC)
We touched on this in the last article, but one huge benefit of using AdWords is that you don’t have to pay to run your ads upfront. You don’t have to pay for the mere privilege of running your ads, regardless of how many leads you get. You don’t have to purchase airtime or billboard space before you get anything to show for it.
You ONLY pay when people click on your ads. And generally the only people who will click on your ads are the people who are interested in what you’re advertising. Because you have a massive amount of control over who actually sees your ads (we’ll discuss this further in point 3), you can ensure that the ONLY people who see, and click on, your ads, are actually people who want what you offer.
AdWords, thus, gives you a huge financial edge: you don’t waste your advertising budget on people who aren’t interested, which means you can spend less money and still get great results. Which brings us to our second benefit:
- No minimum budget threshold
AdWords doesn’t require you to spend a minimum amount per month, which means that AdWords isn’t limited only to large companies with huge advertising budgets. Obviously, if you set a small budget, you probably won’t be able to show up on every relevant search, but you can also make sure that every search you DO show up on is relevant to your business. You can also change your budget at any time, so some people will start AdWords at $1,000 per month to test it out, and once they like their results, they bump up their budget to $3,000 per month.
Of course, even though AdWords doesn’t limit how little you spend, the free market can still limit you. If you are in a competitive industry, say, injury law, and want to show up in first position, you will have to bid quite a bit to hit that position, because so many other people are bidding for that same position. You’re not going to succeed in AdWords at $20 per day if the minimum bid to show on the first page is $50.
So when setting a budget, you do want to consider the actual cost to get the clicks you want. If you want 10 clicks per day in position 2-3 in the Google search results, and the average cost per click at that position, for your particular industry, is $7, then you’ll want to budget $70 per day.
To get real-time historical data on bidding costs, we recommend the AdWords keyword planner, a free tool that gives you all the information you need to choose your keywords and set your bids. But never fear, we’ll go into keywords and bidding strategies in-depth later in the series.
We have seen successful AdWords campaigns run at as little as $500-$1,000 per month, so you don’t need a lot to get going. We’ve also seen AdWords be successful at massive budgets of hundreds of thousands of dollars per month. So it’s truly up to you. At the end of the day, you have complete control over how much you spend, when you spend it and how you spend it. Which brings us to our next benefit for small businesses:
- High amount of control
AdWords allows you complete control over which searches you advertise on, your customers’ location, their demographics, and your ad schedule. Unlike a billboard, which is up for ANYONE to see regardless of time of day, demographics, or your business hours, you can set your AdWords ad to ONLY show up on searches that are made within 25 miles of your business office, between the hours of 9AM-4PM from Thursday to Saturday, from only the top 30% wealthiest zip codes, and also must include the phrase “local moving company” in the search term.
You can be as specific as you want. AdWords allows you to craft the perfect customer for YOU, and then to target ONLY those people.
While a larger company may be able to afford to blow some money on traditional advertising streams, you don’t have to. You don’t have to be at the mercy of whomever happens to be watching the TV or listening to the radio at the moment your ad plays. You ONLY show your ad to the very specific customers YOU want. Like we explained in point 1, this means that you don’t have to waste your budget on people who don’t care about what you have to offer, which means you end up spending less money just hunting for those people in the first place. In AdWords, your customers come to you.
Stone likes how much control AdWords gives him over when, where and how his advertising dollars are spent. When he learns that there are hundreds of Google searches for moving companies in the Dallas area every single day, he is encouraged that the business is out there, just like it’s always been. He just needs to learn how to use AdWords to purchase quality leads right off the digital shelf. A world of new business is out there waiting for him, and he’s excited to get started! Now to learn how to set up his very first AdWords campaign – stay tuned for Section 2: Setting Up Your First Search Campaign!
STOP. Read this.
These 3 benefits all hold true when AdWords is done right. Unfortunately, many advertisers don’t take the time to get enough base knowledge to run AdWords right. Without meaning to, they end up wasting a ton of money by showing ads on junk searches that aren’t relevant to their business, with nothing to show for it.
That’s why it’s so critical to get the education you need to run AdWords well. You need to know how to block all junk searches, how to set your keyword match types to only show up on quality searches, and how to choose the kinds of keywords that will bring in converting customers instead of curious bystanders.
We will cover all of this information and more throughout the rest of the course! Just please, don’t run and set your campaigns live tonight if you don’t have the knowledge you need to make AdWords profitable. We hate seeing wasted budget, and we want to see you succeed. Be sure to subscribe to the rest of the series to learn how!
