How Do We Run PPC Advertising To Help Grow Manufacturing Businesses?

For those in the digital know PPC advertising clearly stands for Pay-Per-Click advertising. Great.

But what if, like we find with the majority of the manufacturing based clients we work with, you’re not traditionally of a digital persuasion?

For all you know it could mean Precision Part Complete!

It’s a valid point. Why would someone in a manufacturing firm, more used to JIT and Lean methodologies, be familiar with pay-per-click advertising?

Yes, owners and marketing managers know they need to promote themselves to succeed in the marketplace. However, given the predominant demographic of senior manufacturing personnel, it’s very likely that those in charge of growing the business may not even have grown up with the internet, yet alone understand its potential for helping them to grow their business.

Instead, their priorities are in the production of goods, making sure things get made and managing operations. They are focused on the practical application of a set of well defined, step-by-step and tangible processes. There’s a part to be turned, an industrial component to be electroplated or a kitchen worktop to be manufactured.

The concept of online advertising can therefore be a challenging one. The notion of “digital marketing” might at best be regarded as an abstract notion by them, and, at worst, a con.

As a digital agency who specialises in helping small to medium sized manufacturing firms grow using digital marketing, we come across this quite often. It’s getting better but despite the internet as we know it being nearly 30 years old, there remains a certain suspicion and mystery about online marketing and online advertising in general.

As manufacturers, most of our clients are not marketers. They know how to do their job really well, but when it comes to online advertising having to rely on outside help can at once seem both relief-inducing and concerning, because you may be worried about someone throwing money down the drain. You may be worried about not knowing where your money is going.

Being asked to hand over money to someone to put into something that is not physically solid can feel unnerving. After all, limit budgets mean every pound has to deliver to the bottom line. For all they know, Mr Digital Marketing Maestro, with his promises of traffic and conversions, could be playing fast and loose with that valuable money.

You may have used companies before and not felt like you got the kind of results you wanted.

We get it. But like any other business (in fact we would go so far as to say perhaps even more than any other business because of the slow adoption of digital marketing into the sector), manufacturing businesses, need to market themselves in order to keep orders coming in.

And PPC advertising is one great solution. It’s one of the best ways to advertise your business online. And because it can be so targeted and therefore made extremely cost-effective, it is an ideal way of advertising online for small to medium businesses.

We do it a lot for our clients. We use the Adwords pay-per-click platform and get some fantastic results for them.

Understanding where to spend money wisely isn’t easy.

But PPC advertising can bring great benefits to exactly these types of companies. When done properly it can bring in new business opportunities to keep the business running.

For one Birmingham based client we work with, along with other our digital marketing work, our PPC methods, delivered new accounts and an outstanding return.

Read on to find out five ways we run more effective online ads to grow our clients’ customer base and revenue, with ppc advertising.

5 Ways We Run Effective PPC Advertising Adwords Campaigns For Manufacturing SMEs

1. Use location

Location can be a key decision factor for a prospect deciding whether to choose you or a competitor to supply them. Most of time, people are more likely to go with a supplier within a close radius of their location for ease. Therefore proximity can be a crucial deciding factor.

It’s something we keep at the top of our minds when structuring PPC advertising campaigns. By using location-specific targeting, we structure campaigns around specific areas and a specified radius. That way we can help you to capitalise on being known locally, especially if you already have a well established reputation.

We then structure ad groups around keywords that relate to that location. For example, if you’re an automotive parts supplier based in the West Midlands then we’d bid on words like “automotive parts supplier West Midlands”.

Likewise, adding location information within the PPC ad text is important too. Even if the targeting and keyword strategy is spot on, if location isn’t prevalent in the copy itself then a competitor who does include location is likely to win the click.

Getting specific with your campaign means better targeting which leads to more actionable outcomes from searchers when they see your ad.

2. Running Competitor Campaigns

Staying ahead of your competition in any industry is important. PPC advertising can really help with that. People will often search for specific companies. By bidding on competitor keywords so that your advert shows when someone searches on a competitor name, PPC allows you to market against them.

You know your competitors and your business most, so by working closely with you we are able to create PPC advertising campaigns that target competitor names to take advantage of that knowledge.

Through competitor targeting, we help clients beat their opponents in the search engine results pages, generate calls and conversions at cheaper cost-per-clicks (CPCs) and gain customers who are actually looking for your services.

3. Write Authentic and Trustworthy Ad Copy

PPC advertising copy can be the difference between winning a click and gaining site traffic, or not. When you’re in a particularly competitive industry, thinking strategically about Adwords copy becomes even more critical.

For example, if you’re a family-owned and run business and this is a great selling point of yours, talk about it. People respond to emotional triggers such as these. If you’ve won a particular award, mention that. Been in business for decades? Tell people.

All these signals show people your authenticity and give a sense of trustworthiness.

Be transparent and honest in your ad copy and let the best things about you sell you to the people searching online for your goods and services.

4. Let Your Customers Do The Talking

In the online world, where you don’t have the benefit of meeting a company face to face initially, customer testimonials are more important than ever.

People want to know what they are getting into. Reviews help to make the decision easier. Having a positive reputation helps to persuade potential clients they should use you over a company who might not have reviews.

If your company is lacking reviews, don’t be afraid to ask your happy customers for them!

In Adwords specifically we can configure a review extension so that when your search ad gets shown, it’s also accompanied by a starred review if you have them.

Bonus Tip

For our digital agency website design clients, we always create a dedicated page to showcase customer testimonials.

In a wider digital marketing context, you could incorporate reviews by:

• Encouraging customers to review you on several platforms (Yelp, Google, Facebook etc.)
• Publish your testimonials on your AdWords landing pages – the pages people land on after clicking your PPC advert
• Invest in video testimonials for your homepage.

5. Identify Negative Keywords

To maximise spend even further and ensure the accuracy of our clients’ online marketing adverts, we make sure we are proactive about identifying negative keywords.

These are the search terms that you don’t want your ad to appear for. By filtering these out, we ensure your PPC ads don’t show up for irrelevant searches.

It’s one of the most effective ways of making sure our clients’ PPC advertising is refined and targeted well so that it is more cost-effective and delivers a better a ROI.

The most effective PPC advertising campaigns make good use of negative keywords since doing so can save hundreds of pounds and avoid wasted budget.

Conclusion

Investing in online marketing can significantly grow your business. The ability to highly target PPC adverts also makes them one of the most cost-effective methods of promoting small businesses online.

PPC advertising might at first seem superfluous to your business goals. But we hope we’ve highlighted how beneficial it can be to helping you get more traffic to your website, generate more calls, drive new customer acquisition, more sales and ultimately boost your your bottom line and grow your business.

When you work with an online marketing agency who knows their stuff, PPC advertising is definitely worth the investment. They’ll know what to do with your money before dumping it into poorly structured campaigns running on highly competitive broad keywords. By nailing a solid strategy, we help our clients to put a reasonable amount of money towards their PPC campaign to make sure they are being competitive enough to appear in the top spots for their ideal search terms.

If you’d like find out more about how we can help put digital marketing to work for your business, please email Sarah on [email protected] or call her today on 0870 062 8760.

You might also like to read our previous blog about how we recently became one of the first agencies in the UK to sit the Google Digital Sales Exam and become Google Trusted Digital Media Advisors.