Are you a small or medium-sized business owner/marketer? Do you have a content marketing plan or schedule? What other marketing initiatives are you moving forward with in the near future?
An article from eMarketer shows us that UK small and medium-sized businesses are planning on upping their marketing spend on things like social media and CPC (cost-per-click) in the coming year.
This is great news, not just for UK businesses, but for SMBs all over the world! Why? If you’re going to spend more money on your CPC marketing, you’ll be able to use your larger budget to generate more valuable keyword data insight. You can then employ this keyword data in your content marketing strategy and see more results in the form of increased (free) traffic and customers.
What is content marketing again?
The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as, “a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action”.
So how do content marketing and CPC gel together to become mutually beneficial to your business? Here are a couple things to consider:
1. Encrypted Keyword Data is Available
Google is now encrypting all organic search keywords, rendering most keyword tools useless. However, they’re still providing their Adwords customers with keyword data along with continued access to their keyword tool.
Small businesses know from their Adwords data which keywords they’re receiving impressions (views), clicks, and hopefully conversions for, as long as they’ve set up accurate conversion points on their websites.
The best keywords to use in your unique content marketing strategy are those that perform the best in your CPC campaign. They represent keywords that have a high amount of “opportunity”, meaning the are searched for a lot every month, yet there aren’t a lot of competitors using these keywords in their content.
Once you find a high-opportunity keyword in your Adwords account, you should immediately write a blog article around that keyword that goes into more detail on the subject matter. Show why you’re the expert and give your readers some valuable information that they can’t get anywhere else. You can then measure the amount of traffic your blog article receives vs. your Adwords landing page, calculate the cost/savings, and then distribute your funds accordingly.
See also: What Google’s Encrypted Keyword Change Means for Small Businesses Who Use BoostSuite
2. Optimize Ads and Landing Pages to Raise Quality Score
First off, what’s a landing page?
The conversion gurus over at Unbounce define a landing page as “any web page that a visitor can arrive at or “land” on. However, when discussing landing pages within the realm of marketing and advertising, it’s more common to refer to a landing page as being a standalone web page distinct from your main website that has been designed for a single focused objective.”
That single focused objective is to have your landing page visitor provide you with their contact/payment information to receive something of value from you in return (information, products, services). That action is known as a “conversion”. You need to use a solid call-to-action on these landing pages to increase the conversion rate.
Here are 5 examples of landing pages with critiques.
And Quality Score? What’s that?
Google tells us that, “Quality Score is an estimate of how relevant your ads, keywords, and landing page are to a person seeing your ad. Having a high Quality Score means that our systems think your ad, keyword, and landing page are all relevant and useful to someone looking at your ad. You can find out your Quality Score for any of your keywords”.
So, if you go back to #1 and find a high-opportunity keyword in your CPC account, you can employ this keyword and optimize one of your landing pages with it by adding it to the page title, meta description, h1 heading, and body copy (BoostSuite makes sure you do these steps properly). You can also add it to your ad text and display URL in Adwords. By doing this, you will get all of your keyword ducks in a row and increase your Quality Score.
Having a higher Quality Score means you will pay less per click for more expensive keywords than your competitors, who have lower Quality Scores for the same keywords. That’s because Google has deemed your ads and landing pages as being extremely relevant to each other.
Combining CPC with content marketing will help you 1) focus on the keywords that matter most to your unique business, helping you generate more high-quality traffic and conversions by placing more relevant listings in the search results (both paid and organic) and 2) boost your Quality Score to get your ads more impressions and click-throughs at a lower cost-per-click.
Those are two things that ALL small and medium-sized businesses can love, regardless of whether you’re in the UK, USA, or somewhere else around the world! So before you decide to start spending more money on CPC, try teaming it up with your content marketing efforts. Doing this will allow you to spend less and earn more! Working smarter is the key here.
Do you have any other suggestions on how SMBs everywhere can use CPC and content marketing together to generate more business online? Let’s hear your ideas in the comments!
Image credit via Flickr
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