Guide to PPC for Construction Companies
When you utilize PPC advertising you acquire a cost-effective way to grow your business, with measurable success. PPC for construction companies is a model of internet advertising in which the advertiser pays for each click of their ad. Hence, it's a way of buying qualified traffic to your website.
With PPC, you can reach thousands of customers on all major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, including popular social networks. This form of advertising works efficiently for entrepreneurs, startups, and enterprise-level construction companies.
PPC works via a bidding system where you bid on specific keywords. So, hypothetically, when potential clients search for these keywords, your ads show up at the top of search results.
In this blog, we weigh in on the benefits of PPC campaigns for construction companies and go through the basics of creating your own PPC ads to capture relevant traffic.
SEO or PPC for Constructors?
We often get asked if SEO or PPC is better for construction companies. This question doesn’t have a definitive answer, although we usually adopt an integrated marketing approach that takes advantage of both.
There are two primary differences when comparing SEO and pay-per-click advertising. The first is paid ads appear at the top of search engine results, above organic SEO listings. The second is organic traffic from SEO is free, whereas PPC traffic is paid.
The crux of the matter is this: Once you’ve paid for SEO, it works 24/7, barring minor tweaks you’ll need to make every six months or so to keep up with changing consumer behavior. However, with PPC, the moment you stop paying your ads cease to appear.
Therefore, it’s good to consider SEO to be a long-term marketing strategy and PPC to be more short-term. PPC delivers immediate leads, whereas SEO yields a steady stream of leads over a longer period of time.
In reality, SEO is the foundation of all digital marketing efforts and should always be in place before investing in PPC marketing. Most construction companies run PPC marketing campaigns to boost their SEO efforts and advertise specific construction services during particular times of the year or to raise brand awareness while they wait for their SEO efforts to deliver results.
PPC Ads Benefits for Construction Business
PPC for construction companies is a surefire way to drive more traffic to your website, no matter what your marketing budget is. If you’re on the fence about its value, let’s convince you otherwise:
- Instant traffic: PPC advertising drives results almost immediately. It’s the fastest and easiest way to drive traffic to your website in less than 48 hours.
- Pay per click, not per impression: You only pay when people click on your ads. Therefore, you pay for tangible results.
- Measurable results: It’s easy to keep track of your advertising spend and see which ad placements drive the most return. If something isn’t working, you can change it in real-time.
- Budget control: While the average cost per click in Google Ads across all industries is $2.69 for the search network and $0.63 for the display network, there is no limit, and you can spend as much or as little as you like.
- Reach a local audience: For local searches, paid ads claim 24% of all search result clicks. So running ads that target your service areas is guaranteed to bring in more leads.
- Get a leg up: Search engine optimization (SEO) can take a while to work, whereas a successful PPC campaign allows you to compete with the toughest competitors.
Creating an Effective PPC Campaign for Construction Companies
As a digital marketing agency specializing in construction company PPC services, we know the most successful campaigns share comprehensive keyword research, and a logical and organized structure, as well as ongoing management and maintenance.
With the right mix of strategic planning and creativity, the steps below can help you create PPC campaigns that produce increased profits.
Narrow Down Your Audience
A PPC campaign can fail spectacularly if you don’t know your market. PPC services for construction companies lets you target ads by search, audience, and content, or a combination of all three. You can elect to exclude or include keywords or audiences by different categories such as life events, remarketing, location and gender.
Not all PPC campaigns are based on search terms. Google’s Dynamic Search Ads use your organic website content to determine the ads it displays. Nevertheless, you can see the importance of having clearly defined audience groups.
The beauty of PPC is that you can set up different campaigns for various audience segments. At the very least, you’ll need to know their demographics and customer-intent, so you can target them correctly.
Determine Your Budget
Paying for every click quickly adds up, so you need to determine a budget to avoid overspending. Sadly, there’s no magic template because every industry’s keywords differ as do their customers.
Generally, you’ll have to consider your competitors and keywords when setting your budget. The more popular a keyword is, the most expensive your cost-per-click (CPC) will be. One way to go about it is to estimate the qualified traffic required to meet your business goals:
- Required traffic = customers needed / conversion rate
You can use your traffic and average CPC rate to build a reasonable budget by working out these two variables:
- Highest traffic required x highest average CPC = highest total budget
- Lowest traffic required x lowest average CPC = lowest total budget
Traffic Required to Meet Your Goal:
- Required traffic = customers needed / conversion rate
As a rule of thumb, every PPC marketing campaign you run should always be specific and align with company goals. For example, “increase leads by 20% in the next three months.”
Keyword Research
For your online marketing campaigns to succeed, you need to use the most optimal keywords that relate to your business and your target audience. Imagine you’re them—what phrases are they using on Google to find your service?
These are the basics of conducting keyword research:
- Use a free or paid tool like Google Keyword Planner or Moz to develop a list of applicable keywords.
- Research keyword metrics such as a keyword’s monthly volume and cost-per-click. You want to find a good balance between popularity and price.
- Disqualify negative keywords. These are closely related phrases that aren’t relevant to your target audience.
- Next, you’ll want to group related keywords that you can use for specific ads to improve your ad’s relevance, raise your Quality Score and lower your cost per click.
Conducting competitive research is also useful. Google keywords as though you’re a competitor. Pay extra attention to the Ad titles and the meta descriptions—these are filled with keywords.
Optimized Landing Pages
Custom-built landing pages are web pages internet users see after they click on your ad. They’re built to match your pay-per-click ad’s message and convince visitors to convert into leads or paying customers by directing them to your website or promoting them to make a purchase.
According to Unbounce, a good landing page has: “Strong contextual images, a benefit-focused headline and sub-headline, and a singular, focused call to action.” Bear in mind, landing pages tend to convert better when they’re easy to read and not overly long. Avoid complicated business jargon, keep your sentences short, and make your offer appealing to your target audience.
Remarketing
No digital marketing strategy would be complete without remarketing. Remarketing is essentially targeting ads to existing customers based on customer data such as product preferences, past buying behavior, and so forth. It’s highly effective at getting past customers to do repeat business with your construction company.
Research found remarketing converts up to 50% of traffic, a considerable difference when compared to a 2% conversion rate produced by search campaigns alone. That’s because the targeted users have already expressed interest in your construction company.
Create Engaging CTA’s
When you write ad copy, you have to make your words pack a punch. Your audience wants to know what’s in it for them, so your copy should make them excited about your products or services. The same goes for visuals. Whether image-based or video, they must be enticing and compelling.
There are so many types of PPC advertising to capture potential customers:
- Search ads
- Display ads
- Remarketing ads
- Video ads
- Shopping ads
- Paid social ads
- Gmail sponsored ads
- Amazon advertising
Regardless of which PPC ads you use, they should always have a strong call to action, compelling your visitors to act. If an ad doesn’t instantaneously get them to make a purchase, it must guide them further down the sales funnel.
Monitor Your Ads
PPC management is important because it allows you to measure your pay-per-click marketing efforts. Because paid ad data is rich, you have a granular level of control and can make improvements in real time based on what’s happening in each of your PPC ad campaigns.
Put it this way, if changing a headline can boost traffic, you’ll want to do that while your campaign is live to get more bang for your buck. Google Ads and Google Analytics are excellent tools for monitoring click-through rate, conversion rate, and cost per conversion.
How to Find a Good Construction Company PPC Services Provider
A good PPC agency is data-driven, transparent about pricing, and has experience delivering results for the same types of businesses as yours. They’ll understand your goals and have a clear process with deadlines, campaign start, and end dates, and present monthly reports. Most importantly, they’ll look to adapt your campaigns to get better results with each campaign.
On the other hand, clear signs an agency cares more about making money off you than making money for you include: a lack of transparency, poor communication, promises not backed up by case studies and data, as well as a cookie-cutter approach to campaign development and implementation.
Create Clickable Construction PPC Campaigns With Comrade
PPC for construction companies yields 50% more conversion than organic advertising. Executing a robust PPC campaign requires some expertise and time, especially since you need to maintain consistent monitoring for optimal results.
Comrade’s construction company PPC services are ideal for businesses that wish to ramp up their paid advertising efforts but lack the expertise and time. Contact us online to learn more about how we can increase your qualified leads and cash flow.
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