PPC for Startups: 10 Steps to Launch a Successful Google Ads Marketing Campaign

There’s no shortage of startup marketing strategy ideas to pick from when you’re launching a new business. However, finding what works for your new venture can be a bewildering task.

The reason that Google Ads is so successful is that it is a cost-effective channel for companies of all sizes, from large Fortune 500 corporations to small one-person operations. Google Ads requires time and patience, and smart decision-making — throwing money at your account doesn’t guarantee results.

That being the case, a bootstrapping startup can generate a high return on investment (ROI) with a small budget, if they know what they’re doing. When you’re launching a new marketing campaign for your online business, the last thing you want to do is blow the budget with a poorly thought-out strategy.

So, in this article, we’ll give you all the guidelines you need to avoid disaster. Read on to discover the tips and techniques that will ensure your startup marketing strategy ideas yield dividends.

1. Determine Your Niche

Here’s the big secret about Google Ads success:

It’s all about relevance.

Take a close look at the structure of your Google Ads account. Your keywords, ads, and ad groups should all be closely related. When you have everything aligned, Google will reduce your advertising costs.

Remember that Google Ads campaigns cost you money every single time somebody clicks on your ads. Therefore, you must do everything you can to turn those clicks into something of value for your business.

To achieve this, keep your ideal customer in mind when you are writing your ads so that you can hone in on a defined niche audience.

Try using the AIDAS principle to stay on track with ad creation, so your ads will:

• Attract the attention of your audience;
• Raise customer interest;
• Convince customers that they desire your product;
• Lead customers to take action (include a call-to-action) and provide value.
• Provide satisfaction.

This guides your startup marketing strategy ideas, giving them focus to deliver precisely what your niche wants.

2. Perform Competitor Analysis

Once you define your niche, you can compile a list of valuable “buying intent” keywords. Before spending heavily on these, it’s a wise move to conduct some competitor analysis.

By leveraging competitor intelligence to discover more about works in your market, you can get valuable insights that will help you maximize your pay-per-click (PPC) budget. This is a crucial step that ensures your startup marketing strategy ideas bear fruit.

There are tools available to collects and organizes historical advertising data from thousands of online advertisers and companies. You can create a profile and quickly search for any of your competitors to examine the keywords they are using for their PPC advertising campaigns.

By doing this type of research, you can identify specific keywords that are likely to earn a positive PPC ROI. Also, you can identify low-value keywords that should be paused or cut from a campaign.

With some careful consideration, you can manually search lists from your competitors to select specific keywords, adding them to your list.

Bonus tip: After reviewing the keywords, click the Ads tab to check out your competitor’s ad copy. See how they use the keywords in their copy, and get some ideas for your ads!

3. Segment Your Audience

You may think that defining your niche is the last step before getting started with Google Ads. Many people dive in at this point, but it’s better if you invest some more time and resources to understand your audience at a deeper level.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• What websites does your target audience use?
• What are the brand voice, tone, and language style like on these sites?
• What kind of ad campaigns are these competitor sites using?

You can research your audience for free on Google Ads, which makes it easier to understand the people you are targeting. With more information, you can segment your audience by interests, ages, and spending habits.

For example, consider the following examples of audience segmentation:

Segment 1

Teachers and educational professionals in the USA. If your company has products for this audience, you could tailor your ads to attract attention from teachers in elementary or high school.

Segment 2

People who are based in Europe that travel multiple times a year. Ideally, you’ll be targeting non-professionals who like an adventure.

These examples are very basic, but they give you a starting point. By building on this, you will have a more definite sense of direction for your startup marketing strategy ideas.

4. Select Your Marketing Channels

When it comes to showing ads to your audience, how you segment users will determine what ads they see. For instance, you could serve ads to various subsects of your audience based on:

• Who they are
• Their interests and habits
• What they’re actively researching
• Their past interactions with your business

It’s easy to do this in Google Ads by adding audiences to your ad groups. However, keep in mind that audience targeting is not available for every campaign type.

Audience Search

This feature helps you find audiences without the need to enter specific categories. You can use the audience search feature in all campaigns that support audience targeting or observation.

Try using this technique to identify new audiences that are related to your chosen keywords in your campaign. You can see the audiences you have recently selected in the space below the Audience search in the Google Ads dashboard.

Audience Ideas

The audience ideas option is found in the Ideas tab in Google Ads. This feature guides audience targeting, so you can increase your reach to find more prospective customers.

These suggestions will be based on your audience selection, your website, search campaigns, and other advertisers like you. Google Ads relies on aggregated advertising data to offer you accurate suggestions that should be closely aligned with user intent.

5. Use the Pareto Principle to Prioritize Your Startup Marketing Strategy Ideas

The Pareto Principle, commonly known as the 80/20 Rule asserts that, in any given activity, roughly 80% of the impact or effects come from approximately 20% of the causes.

PPC managers can use this principle to focus on 20% of channels that matter most. By prioritizing these important few, you can generate great results, even when the other 80% of your channels aren’t being fully utilized or maintained.

Just remember that your business and the market will evolve, so you should keep a close eye to watch out for new partners or channels that may deserve a spot in your top 20%. Similarly, you may want to drop specific channels out if they start underperforming.

How to Apply the Pareto Principle to Your Business

Follow the steps below to use the Pareto Principle in PPC advertising:

1. Setup Google Analytics
2. Start monitoring the ‘Acquisition’ section.
3. Analyze your traffic sources and identify the top three referral channels
4. Identify the top keywords in your campaign
5. Identify the top search queries that generate the most impressions
6. Identify your best-performing campaigns
7. Focus your time and budget to optimize these aspects.

By focusing on what is already working, you can maximize the ROI from these components in your campaign. You can also apply the 80/20 rule to determine the best social media channels for your business, and even to identify the vital few in your workforce.

6. Devise Your Content Marketing Plan

Creating great content is just the start. After that, you must figure out how you will distribute it. Think about how your audience will view your content, and then tailor distribution accordingly.

Ideally, your content marketing channel plan should comprise seven factors:

1. Situational analysis
2. Channel objectives
3. Content/conversation plan (how you’re telling your story)
4. Metrics
5. Personas addressed
6. Content management process
7. Editorial calendar

With a solid content marketing plan, the best startup marketing strategy ideas have a real chance to go places.

7. Identify Key Performance Metrics for Your Channels and Traffic

Measuring performance is massively important in online advertising. Google Analytics gives the data you need to gauge the impact of your efforts, and visual reports make it easy to evaluate everything.

The big problem for many marketers is knowing which metrics to consider.

Here are eight metrics you should keep your eye on:

1. Click-density Analysis — Discover what your site visitors are clicking. You can analyze each segment to see what actions they are taking.
2. Visitor primary purpose — Go beyond page views to find out why people arrive on your site by using a simple survey that gathers user opinions about your website. Just be careful you don’t deter prospects with too many questions!
3. Task-completion rates — Track user actions to see if people are completing tasks on your web pages.
4. Multichannel-impact analysis — Measure traffic from various channels, such as TV, radio, or print ads.
5. Web traffic data — See valuable data on your site traffic, including how many people visit your site, where they come from, and what pages they viewed.
6. Web transactional data — This is useful for e-commerce sites, as it shows you information on your customers, their orders, and daily revenue.
7. Weblogs — This is the most easily accessible data source. They capture customer data, which you can then use to improve your online marketing.
8. Web beacons — These small transparent images work in combination with cookies to record on-site actions, so you can better understand customer behaviors.

8. Engage Your Customers

Remember that great customer who was regularly buying until six months ago? And what about that customer who wrote a fantastic review that helped earn you hundreds of referrals last year?

As your business grows, it gets harder to offer the same level of personalization in your customer service. Sometimes, you can lose touch.

Here’s the truth:

Your existing customers are your most valuable asset. It’s easier and cheaper to keep them than it is to get new customers. By nurturing existing customer relationships, you can build stronger bonds, and earn repeat business.

If you’re feeling awkward about reaching out after a long time, here are nine tips for re-engaging your existing customers for more business:

• Send them a valuable note in the mail — By going back to traditional handwritten mail, you offer a personal touch they will value more than just another company email.
• Wish them “happy birthday” — Do this on the right day, of course! A timely birthday email or mailed birthday card is a great way to show customers you care.
• Ask for referrals — This is a win-win situation, as you don’t just reconnect with a past customer, but you also get leads for new business.
• Regularly request customer feedback — Gathering social proof through positive reviews is an excellent way of building your brand. It also makes customers feel valued and understood when you ask them for feedback.
• Host customer events — You can rent out a conference room at a local business or hotel once or twice a year to give customers the chance to connect with you face-to-face, effectively building customer relationships and sharing new startup marketing strategy ideas.
• Invite them for food — Whether it’s breakfast, lunch, or dinner, a casual meeting over a meal is a great way to strengthen a bond with important customers.
• Call them with a clear purpose — Your customers are likely to be busy people. So, when you call, make sure you quickly cut to the chase with a clear offer that they will be glad to hear about from you.
• Send them your favorite business book — This isn’t a common one, but that makes it all the more special. Try sending a neatly wrapped package with a great book, and a handwritten note outlining why you think they’ll love it too. It’s sure to make an impact they won’t forget in a hurry.
• Share their content on social media — You can use social sharing to build a rapport with past customers, effectively keeping up the friendship.

9. Analyze the Bottom-Of-The-Funnel

Bottom-of-the-funnel content is created for prospects who have moved beyond awareness, and are now interested in products and services, ready to take action. It is optimized for buyers — not social, email, or search.

Marketers can optimize their bottom-of-the-funnel content in many different ways, such as:

• Customize presentations – One size doesn’t fit all, so you need to tailor your pitch and content for each prospect.
• Free trials — Giving people the chance to try something can often be all that’s needed to convert them into a paying customer.
• Live demonstrations — This will increase customer interaction, and stir up interest in your product or service.
• Detailed Q&A session via web conference — Following up with a Q&A can alleviate common concerns, and answer questions from people who are almost ready to buy.
• Customer testimonials — Collecting and displaying reviews from happy customers is a good way of convincing new prospects to make a purchase.
• Evaluation and comparison sheets — you can use these for technical analysis, which will make your decision-making more efficient and effective.
• Encourage social media engagement — With Blogs, social media posts, and regular activity on the threads of key influencers, you can build brand awareness, and establish your value proposition.
• Email marketing — You can build customer relationships by sending newsletters and personalized emails.
• Discount offers — Coupons and discounts give your customers a quick-win that they will love.
• Clear pricing guidelines — Your pricing is a critical aspect. By working out a cost-effective structure that saves your customers some money, you’ll win their trust.

10. Final Tip: Measure the Customer Journey

It can be tough to get into the mind of your ideal customer. You may wonder why a customer spends a long time flipping through the pages, adding products, only to then abandon the cart.

Understanding the customer journey is crucial. If you don’t know how or why customer interacts with your business, your startup marketing strategy ideas will struggle to gain traction.

This is where a customer journey map comes in, as it offers multiple benefits, including:

• You can refocus your company with an inbound perspective.
• You can create a new target customer base.
• You can create a customer-focused mentality throughout the company.
• Remain customer-centric in your strategy and change your strategy based on customer journey data

Ultimately, by breaking down the customer journey into separate phases, and aligned each step with a goal, you can restructure your digital touchpoints to make the right offer to the right person, at the right time.