Google Ads can help your small business get discovered!
While I was spending time at my parent’s house over the weekend, I got to talking with my brother who is a full-time marketing manager that also runs a small clothing business out of the attic. He mentioned how he was beginning to become very frustrated that when searching the name of his online clothing store, his website is at the bottom of the search results, or nowhere to be found at all. Having an online presence is very important to him because he doesn’t have a storefront – only his website.
When mentioning that a paid search campaign using Google Ads could help resolve his frustration, he was almost immediately turned off by assuming he had to have at least hundreds of dollars to set aside for a campaign. It came to his surprise that Google Ads search campaigns can reap benefits for all sizes of businesses – big or small – without requiring massive budgets.
Supporting locally-owned small businesses has become increasingly important, especially after seeing the tragic impact COVID-19 has had on them. But how can people support a small local business if the business can’t be found? With the help of keyword bidding, Google Ads can ensure a website appears on a Google search results page when searching specifically for a brand or anything related to that brand. For example, my brother’s clothing website will appear when people search his brand name and also when someone searches “streetwear near me” or “local men’s clothing” as long as he is bidding on those search terms.
Google Ads also allows the person in charge of the campaign to set and manage their own budgets. This way, if someone wants to spend $50 or thousands a month on their paid search campaign, it is in their control. Although, whoever has the highest bid doesn’t always come out on top. Google also takes website relevance into the mix when deciding what website to show first.
The almost real-time results = better control
Being able to stick to a strict budget is another benefit of Google Ads with the help of its almost real-time results. Budgets can be broken down as far as daily spending. Therefore, if a small business is allocating $100 dollars a month and it is very important for them not to go over budget, they can make sure that their campaign is not spending over $3 a day. On the other hand, if they realize that their campaign was underperforming for a couple of days or so, they can go in and raise their daily budget to really drive traffic and make up for the lost time to ensure that they are hitting their budget, even with some off days.
Also with Google Ads, a business owner can go in and see what people are typing in the Google search bar that triggers their website to show. Say a local bookstore website keeps appearing on Google searches for college textbooks but they do not sell textbooks. The campaign manager can see this information in as quickly as a couple of hours and make the right keyword adjustments so that the website is only showing with relevant searches.
Overall, real-time results help to give so much control over the entire campaign and its spending.
Find the right audience – and keep them!
Finding the right audience can also be done through Google Ads. Let’s take a family-owned barbershop in Pittsburgh as an example. If they want people to schedule online or call for a hair appointment after seeing their website, they want it to be people in the Pittsburgh area (someone scheduling an appointment that lives in California is going to have a long drive for a haircut). Therefore, making sure the website is shown to the right audience is very important to ensure that dollars aren’t being spent on bidding to an audience that has a very small chance of converting. Eventually, ads can be created that include targeting methods to reach out to the most relevant audiences even more.
Google Ads can create an audience of people that have visited the barbershop website before, read barbershop blogs, mimic the behavior of someone that recently scheduled an appointment along with other attributes and behaviors. Google will then prioritize this audience when serving ads in an effort to spend ad dollars on the people most likely to schedule and to keep them coming back.
So, perhaps you’re a small business owner, or maybe you know one. Talk to them about Google Ads, it could be just the thing they need.
