Date Written: 7/7/2022
Question: What local marketing advantages do I now have that I did not have when the week began?
Over the course of this week, I learned many beneficial things about marketing a local business. I learned about Google AdWords and how it can be an amazing local marketing tool. (When you Google something the links at the top of the page are the Google AdWords ads.) There are many reasons why AdWords is a great tool. There are so many benefits that I could only scratch the surface in this article.
The Main Benefits of AdWords
The first and most important reason is that anyone who sees your ads is actively searching for a product or service like yours. This is a great thing because it avoids what is know as interruption advertising. An example of interruption advertising would be T.V. ads or radio ads. People do not want to watch/listen to them so they are less likely to respond to the ads. When people are looking for a product or service like yours they are much more likely to respond to the ads. However in order to get this result with AdWords you must set up your keywords and related items correctly.
The second most important reason is that you can easily track the performance of your ads using AdWords. One of the most important things in advertising is tracking the performance of your ads. Surprisingly, many people even professionals will not track their ads. This is so important because you have to know how well the ad is doing to know when to: replace the ad, modify the ad, drop the ad, keep the ad, and much more. You won’t even know if your ad is making you any money if you don’t track it. AdWords makes this very easy by providing you with all the tracking data you could ever need. It’s digital format also helps them do this.
The third great benefit of AdWords is that you can have people see a specific ad with exactly what they are looking for. For example, let’s say you have a outdoors store with a fishing, hunting, and hiking department. If someone searches for hiking gear it could bring up an ad about your store in general and how it has great fishing, hunting, and hiking gear. Or it could bring up an ad only about hiking gear or whatever the person searches for and your ads will perform better. AdWords enables you to do this with their adgroups feature.
Keywords
Another key aspect of AdWords is knowing how to effectively use keywords. (Keywords are what words you want someone to type into the search box to see your ad.) You don’t want to use broad keywords because then you might draw people to your site who aren’t interested in your product/service. You pay for AdWords based on how many people click on your ad. So, if many of the people that come to your site aren’t interested in your product/service you end up losing money. You also need to make good use of keyword match types and negative key words.
Landing Pages
Another super important thing that you must have are good landing pages. (These are the pages people land on when they click on your AdWords ad.) These are super important because your landing page is what is going to convince the reader to buy what you are selling. A good landing page follows basically the same layout as a good ad. I am not going into the details as that could fill up many books. The point is, you must have a good landing page or everything else you’ve done has been for nothing. To see an example of a good landing page click here
You will here a lot of businesses say that AdWords is terrible and it failed them. But, most of the time these businesses just weren’t using it to it’s fullest potential. It is more than likely, that they either didn’t know how to properly use keywords or they had bad landing pages. Used properly AdWords is an amazing tool for small businesses.
I highly recommend the book “Ultimate Guide to Local Business Marketing.” It will teach you everything there is to know about marketing a local business using Google AdWords. To buy it click here.
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