The PPC (pay per click) is already quite unpredictable in a typical year. However, as we all know, 2020 was anything but an average year. No one could have imagined that we would have to face a pandemic that will strain people's health, psychological resilience, politics, and the market.
The impact of the Coronavirus was transversal and did not spare any aspect of our daily life, pushing us to change habits and face everyday life differently. While all this was happening, the PPC experts were intent on talking about the new trends that would soon hit the market: automation, SEO, new targeting strategies, and new ways of approaching privacy.
In the hope that 2021 will be a less complicated year than the previous one, at least as regards pay per click (PPC), let's see the trends looming on the horizon and how it will be necessary to innovate and not to stay back.
- Understand your audience and their paths
Gone are the days when PPC marketers controlled every ad and every offer through the use of words alone.
What does this mean in practice? If, as we said, we have to do without a lot of data, we will have to welcome the opportunity to become better marketers who know how to go beyond traditional keyword-based advertising.
To do this, we will need to focus on targeting paths. You will have to be careful to enlist real strategists focused 24h on your target audience in your team.
What matters is who sees your ads, generating qualified clicks.
You need to know who your customers are, how they think, and why they will decide to buy from you. You should also find out the paths they follow, what channels will guide them to purchase, and who has the best chance of being converted? Do you have to divide your audience into different segments and offer each of them something different? How can you do it?
These are the questions you need to ask yourself today to be successful.
Other important issues concern the timing of the sales process, the communication style, and the performance measurement of each aspect. This way, you can accurately analyze the reasons for your success or failure.
The search for the optimal audience will henceforth be the natural keystone in building success.
Here are the essential factors to be successful with your customers:
● Keywords: The goal is to target potential customers based on their specific needs. Therefore, you must map the keywords they use to understand better how they search.
● Images: the choice of images is a fundamental component of the customer experience (CX), which must be increasingly meaningful and inclusive.
● Investment in employee training
- Take advantage of marketing automation more
We expect automation processes to expand rapidly by 2021.
PPC automation helps save not only time and energy but also money.
Automating means using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to reduce the work done by humans and optimize the company’s different processes.
Like it or not, advertising platforms are taking control of PPC marketers out of control. Steve Hammer, president of Rank Hammer, believes this trend will accelerate in 2021.
“This will force us - says Hammer - to enter better data into the platforms, which will have the challenging task of detecting the quality of leads and giving value to the information based on this. If not, the platforms will automate for easy, low-quality leads.”
Automating means identifying the best ads, finding the right call to action (CTA) and optimal marketing strategies, monitoring performance, generating a high conversion rate, and much more.
If you want to be successful with PPC, it is crucial today to become familiar with the different automation systems.
It does not mean to argue that human beings are no longer needed but must somehow be relieved of specific tasks. This way, they can devote time and energy to the most critical processes.
The result achieved is what matters. Nobody cares to know if it has been successful thanks to automated strategies or “manual” processes.
As a rule, however, a good mix of both is recommended.
Advertisers will need to use automation to save time while figuring out how to harness human intelligence to manipulate automated systems. In this way, they will be able to gain an advantage over their competitors.
You may have heard of “smart bidding” concerning automation and wondered what it is.
Smart bidding is an automatic bidding system that uses machine learning and improves auction conversion value.
Some examples include better cost-CPC, target cost per acquisition (CPA), and target return on advertising expenses (ROAS).
Smart bidding is becoming more and more powerful, and the strategy to use it is increasingly performing.
- Make excellent targeting
One of the new trends regarding PPC marketing concerns the audience and its segmentation.
With Google ads and other platforms, we can target it quite easily today. These features allow you to focus on specific information such as age, gender, income, etc.
We can even set a target audience that we can exclude from our target market.
With Google Ads, it is also possible to combine keywords and demographics, reaching the audience that needs our product/service without excessive waste of resources.
This way, your ads will be highly and relevant.
One of the great potentials of Google Advertising is to engage your target audience, helping you get the most out of your budget for marketing and advertising. It gives you the ability to segment your audience very precisely.
In this way, you will be able to chisel your ads, tailoring them to the different audiences you will have to handle.
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Conclusion
The world is evolving, and Covid-19 has subjected everyone to adapt to a new life. It is paramount that technology will attach recent trends to PPC marketing. You have to constantly be in line with the key trends to use PPC appropriately.
With the new trends that we have observed in this blog, it is safe to say that just as PPC strategies constantly evolve, we expect your marketing strategies to do so.
Do well to be at the forefront of new technologies and best practices. The very fact that a strategy worked last year does not mean that it will have good results this year. The earlier and faster you evolve with your plan, the more likely you will generate profitable results for your team now and in the long run.