Social Media Marketing: Pay Per Click Promotion

Pay per click promotion has been used as a tool for search engines and websites to gain revenue through advertisement streams, now this has become less-elite and more widespread through the cheaper (in comparison to google) pay per click services available on the market.

Facebook averages at around 2p per click, which when compared to Google (50 cents per click) is a landfall saving. Especially when Facebook users constitute 40 million active users in the UK alone.

Now if you are paramount on investing in pay per click, there are some base features that must be considered when creating content and posting your advertisement;

The first consideration when considering any pay per click scheme is initially what do you want to get from it, this factor will then get the ball rolling with all other factors.

When you've decided what you want from your promotion, be it exposure, engagement, leads, retention etc. You then must decide who you want to see the post. The target audience. Software tools within mediums now allow you to key in the demographic that you'd like to reach, which makes it very simple to hit your target audience, down to their job title if you really want to get that specific in the case of Linkedin.

Content is king, never forget that. Unless you have relevant, scalable, quantifiable and relatable content, your investment is invalid. You need the content existing on your sites as all networks now have progressive algorithms. The more content you push out. The more they have to work on to get your paid posts to the audience most applicable to it, which is what really gets you the return on investment. This is the same reason that google adwords have lesser effect. Everyone, beginning with google and now across the market now have progressive algorithms that pick up content rather than solely relying upon investment. Ask expedia! They lost 25% of search engine visibility when the algorithm changed due to paid promotions and lack of content. For this reason SEO is on the decline, and anyone that really advises differently is actually just trying to steal your money. (Excuse me for being opinionated, its my job). Because of this, it is integral that you publish content of high quality, in order to be found, regardless of investment.

Base organic exposure is crucial! If you already have traffic going to your sites. That is fantastic! It allows you to get an organic reach, proper engagement, so that when you do invest in paid promotion, the effects are enhanced going to a much wider market. Facebook outlines this very well. Using the insights tool, it tracks your key demographic, ie the most users regularly engaging with your page, promotes to them first, then your other demographics, with the hope of gaining traction. Facebook also inserts into the feeds of wider audiences, but you really need the engagement to be able to get real traction. They love to hit you with figures of "paid reach 120,000" but then you look back and see that you have 6 likes on the post. Whats the point? This again goes back into the content aspect. You can pump as much capital investment in as you'd like. But without the content there or the base exposure and engagement, you will not get traction.

Testing is paramount with paid promotion, especially when you are willing to invest a lot into it, for this reason, there is a strategised format to all testing for paid promotions that we use, this is;

Impressions
Cost per click
Click through rate
Conversions

You also then take the test from the lowest traffic source (bing) at lower scale as the cost is lower to see the effectiveness, bing also uses the same algorithm as google, so whatever works on bing will work in google, then transfer across to the more expensive, higher traffic sites as to increase exposure and get the return on your investment.

Once you've done all of the above, getting high quality content, organic exposure, engagement, targetting, testing and finally actually investing, putting the promotion into place, you are ready to publish and see the result.

I hope this helps with a short oversight into the world of paid promotion, if you have any queries, don't hesitate to contact me (my staff) and they'll be more than happy to advise you.

Thanks for reading