Jared Lansky Ad BuySell Blog

By: Sharon Gantt
Once you’ve finally made the decision to begin a pay per click advertising campaign or any advertising campaign for that matter, what’s next?

Next you need a well thought out marketing plan.

Now that you’re finally going to get traffic to your website, what are you going to do with it? If you’re running a pay-per-click campaign properly, traffic will come. If you chose a Google Qualified and Yahoo Ambassador to manage your PPC campaign you should feel pretty confident that your campaign will be professionally handled. Outsourcing to a search engine qualified company will save you time and money. If it’s traffic you want it’s imperative you hire a company that knows how to get it. Remember, a well-run PPC campaign is vital to your business and usually is the difference between online success or failure.

Once you start getting traffic what do you really expect from a new visitor to your website? Are you expecting them to see a picture of your product,immediately reach into their pocket, pull out a credit card and click on your order form? If that’s your expectation let me save you some heartache. For the most part the scenario described above probably won’t happen.

Most likely, what happened is that you skimmed the offer, hit the back button, checked competing offers, and thought it over. Visitors to your web site are (more or less) like you. They’re going to do the same thing. Now, that should put some context into the mix for you, and tells you something you should be doing. Comparison shop.

Take a look at other sites that come up on the AdWord you bought. What offers are there? How are they presented? How does yours stand out from the mix, in a positive manner? What sort of mood would a customer be in if they’re hitting your site in a given search pattern? Will they be happy, sad, grieving, stressed, or passionate about something? Make sure your web site fits the mood of the visitor to make that positive impression, so they’ll come back after doing the comparison shop.

Notice what it isn’t asking for? Someone to put a high pressure sell tactic on them, and try to finagle their credit card out of their wallet. And yet, so many pay per click ads lead to web sites that are nothing but “buy, buy, buy” that it’s kind of scary how bad the marketing acumen is for the people who set them up.

Given that they’re going to hit the back button eventually, you need to find a way to build a relationship with them. Now, the best relationship is one where they bought a product from you, are happy with the product, and come back for repeat business; ultimately, you want to migrate all your contacts on your web site to this model. Before you can get there, you need to establish trust and responsibility.

The easy way to do this is offer them a taste of the content they’ll get for subscribing. You get their contact info, they get your information content (with offers for products they might be interested in), and it’s a fair trade. This also establishes that you have a deep and abiding interest in the subject matter, are willing to share information on it, and are willing to be patient enough to let them make up their own minds. That shows that you respect them. Which is the foundation of any lasting, long term relationship, whether romantic, or commercial.