How to Compete With Big Brands on PPC

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is budget driven. The more money you have to place bids, the more keywords you can target and the more ad displays you’ll receive. Big brands have big PPC budgets and routinely manage campaigns targeting literally millions of keywords.

As a small business, how can you compete? Here’s how:

1. Target long-tail keywords with high conversion probability, such as “headlights for 2004 toyota camry.” A query like this may have far lower volume than “auto parts,” but it is cheaper to bid on and more likely to produce a sale. Targeting thousands of phrases like the latter will make your budget go further and produce a healthy conversion rate.
2. Target high-volume keywords, within limits. A term such as “toyota auto parts” may be too expensive for a small business to bid on 24/7/365 on a national basis. However, PPC enables you to put limits on when and where your ad displays. Targeting this phrase, for example, on Mondays between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. in five major markets will enable you to carve a slice of conversions away from the big brands.
3. Make your offer too good to refuse! If you’re competing against big brands, you’ll need a strong offer to make up for your lack of brand recognition. Something like 30 percent off the first order or two for the price of one will make search engine users pause and take notice. A strong offer is the best way you have to improve click-through rates (CTR).
4. Create a relevant, persuasive landing page. Small businesses undermine otherwise good PPC campaigns by directing clicks to their website’s home page or an appropriate product/service page. Mistake! By taking users to a landing page tailored around your offer, you give users a clear path to place an order or make an inquiry—and good reasons to take it. Not only does a dedicated landing page improve the conversion rate, it helps improve your Google Quality Score, which is essential to reducing campaign costs over time.
5. Do NOT run competitor campaigns. Some small businesses think they are being clever by targeting keywords that include the brand name of competitors. This is a self-defeating practice. First, because competitor campaigns have low relevance (users are looking for your competitor, not you), they lower your Quality Score, making your PPC campaign even more expensive and ineffective. Second, competitor campaigns have an extremely low CTR for the same reason—users are not looking for you.
6. Test. Small businesses sometimes approach PPC as a one-and-done exercise. In actuality, PPC is an ongoing process of methodically testing: testing one offer against another, one ad text against another, one landing page form against another, etc. By testing wisely around a campaign structured as a peripheral attack (as outlined in the previous five points), you will gradually gain a bigger share of PPC traffic—at the expense of bigger brands.

Remember: use PPC to attract leads around the edges. You may be a PPC mosquito on the hide of a big brand elephant, but you will eat pretty well, since that big elephant won’t even know you’re there.

Be sure to read the companion to this article: How to Compete With Big Brands on SEO