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Is AdWords Right for My Business?

Not every message is suited to every medium. There are a number of considerations that marketers must keep in mind while making a recommendation and formulating a strategy. That’s why we’re here to offer a crash course to answer the question: “Is AdWords right for my business?”

Who are you trying to reach? Do you have a broad audience or a niche audience? Are your targets accustomed to having conversations with brands like yours? Who is your target, anyways? Are they younger? Older? Blue-collar? White-collar? Are they people at all, or do you deal business-to-business? If so, are they small business, or corporations? Perhaps most important, what do you hope to achieve through your marketing? Do you want to sell units? Build recognition? Make a statement?

If you don’t have a marketing department (or if you’re the one in charge of marketing in your company), a lot of this can get overwhelming and time-consuming.

cityscapeAre you part of a large business, with broad, sweeping marketing initiatives? AdWords is practically made for you.

Google has designed the AdWords system to effectively manage any number of simultaneous marketing efforts. And with all of the performance tracking tools, the different facets of your various campaigns can be measured directly against one another, letting you see what’s working and what’s not, allowing you to better allocate your marketing dollars in the future.

Home business lunch at the laptopAre you part of a small start-up with a limited budget? AdWords is practically made for you.

Thanks to the relevance-related bidding system, small business can use a highly-customized, precision-targeted campaign to compete with the broad campaigns of larger companies, using only a fraction of their budget. In fact, small businesses have the advantage here: The more narrow your target demographic, the more powerful your advertising dollar.

Traditional English gift bagDoes your business sell to customers all around the world? AdWords is practically made for you.

AdWords has everything you could want from an international advertising platform: Selective demographic targeting, multilingual campaign support, and a high level of saturation in nearly all international markets. They even have a Global Market Finder to help discover and assess the demand and competition levels on a country-by-country basis.

City mapDoes your business only service the surrounding area? AdWords is practically made for you.

Thanks to the highly accurate targeting and tracking used by Google, AdWords campaigns can be reliably used to blanket the search results and banner ads within your service area. The smaller the community, the better: The more specific you can get, the more often your target will view your ad, which means the more likely they are to recognize and remember you.

Old-style woodworking toolsDoes your business service a niche market, or a very specific interest set? AdWords is practically made for you.

Thanks to demographic, interest, and content-based targeting, your advertising can be custom-tailored to target an extremely narrow segment of the population. No matter how slim the target demographic, no matter how obscure the niche, AdWords has the tools to track down new customers from all corners of the web.

Tnak You signDo you want to reach not people, but rather businesses? AdWords is practically made for you.

AdWords is often underrated as a Business-To-Business tool. With AdWords, as with all B2B advertising, it’s important to remember that businesses are comprised of people–and most people in the Western world find things with search engines. With smart use of keywords, appropriate ad content, and clever targeting, your business can distinguish between skilled tradesmen, curious amateurs, white-collar business professionals, and ordinary Joes.

WardrobeDo you have a set of products you want to sell? AdWords is practically made for you.

Have a handful of ‘big-earners’ that you want to put ahead of everything else? AdWords allows you to give each product its own specialized group, with its own ads, keywords, bidding strategy, and even landing page. This level of precision-targeting will drive down the bid cost, while greatly increasing the expected click and conversion rates (meaning more people click, and more clickers buy).

Have a sale you want to promote? AdWords can help you with that, too. With Ad Scheduling, you can automatically run recurring promotions (such as daily deals or weekly specials), and thanks to integration with Analytics, data from each sale you run can help you plan for and optimize future promotions.

Have an online catalogue? AdWords Display ads support HTML5 features which can include multiple featured products, Google Marketplace integration, or even interactive mini-catalogues.

Graffitti tagDo you want to raise awareness or brand recognition rather than selling anything? AdWords is practically made for you.

Thanks to the targeting power of AdWords and its array of features designed to focus down high-priority visitors (such as remarketing), a well-planned display campaign can expose priority targets to your branding with a high level of frequency, without running up a huge cost. In fact, CPM (cost-per-views) bidding options are designed specifically for this high level of repeated exposure. And, as you might already be aware, a high level of repeated exposure leads to greater brand recognition and recall rates.

So who isn’t AdWords ‘practically made for’?

Simply put, “Porn, recreational narcotics, hate literature, and anything outright illegal.” Google has a Terms of Use Policy that keeps their network relatively clean. Beyond that, however, there isn’t much that AdWords (and the Google Display Network) can’t do. It’s been around since 2000, and has been constantly refined to become an increasingly powerful tool.

With a little direction and some tender loving care, just about any business can benefit from a campaign.

William Hull
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