It’s important to understand that marketing is a competition and often requires a strategy to succeed. You must go beyond doing very well in your marketing message, you must excel. You need to stand out from your competition to have any worthwhile success.
A big part of the conversion rate equation is in how well targeted your traffic is. While it might seem counter-intuitive to spend money on PPC it just might be the best investment you could make, for several reasons.
Better targeted traffic tends to convert at a higher rate. Nothing allows you to target more precisely than a properly managed PPC campaign on the search network. Even if you are not able to reach a positive ROI on your initial campaign, it can provide very valuable insight into what will help you improve conversion rates.
You can test individual keywords, headlines, value propositions, and call-to-actions to see what your audience responds to the most. Those insights will allow you to craft better ads and better landing pages. It also provides useful data about the value of each market segment that you might consider targeting.
With the insights gained from your initial round of testing, you can build a better campaign, using better targeting, better ads, and better-converting landing pages. It is also of great benefit to isolating specific market segments to test your improvements against, which isn’t nearly as easy to do outside of a keyword search campaign.
Generally speaking, a guy using PPC and scientific test methods on search networks will reach profitability much faster than the guys who don’t. Once you’ve established the value per click on each segment you can adjust your bids for a predictable profit.
Search marketing is just the tip of the iceberg. With the insights and improved conversion rates gained in your search campaign research you can dive deeper into market segments in the display networks and social networks to target specific demographics, interest groups, and affinities, gaining insights all along the way, providing continuous improvements to profits.
