It should come as no surprise that PPC agencies and freelancers can sometimes become so engrossed in the technical side of the business that they forget what it’s all about — the customers.
Digital marketing is an ever-evolving scene. Whether PPC Agencies or Digital Marketers want to accept it or not, being customer-centric is vital to stay in the game, for the long run.
The pay-per-click world sure can get insular. It’s a complex form of advertising, after all, and that makes it very engaging to the people who work with it.
Plus, the language we use in PPC is very specific, and there’s a tremendous amount of information we could communicate with our customers. Add it all together, and you get the picture of an industry that might easily alienate the very people it aims to serve.
How to stop it from happening? Think ahead. A customer-centric approach works best if you implement it as early as customer acquisition and infuse it into all the other segments of your customers’ journey. Here are five tips for becoming more customer-orientated whether you are a PPC Agency or a marketer on your lonesome!
Think about how your customers shop around, and what they see.
You might be the exemplary business that doesn’t use any of the dishonest, aggressive, borderline fraudulent ways PPC agencies can court to customers. You might not be the only one, either. But a few bad apples can do a lot of damage and paint the whole industry in a negative way, at least for some customers.
We’ve all seen it before. Some PPC agencies and freelancers try to tout PPC as a kind of a business panacea, a cure for every ailment your potential customers’ business might have.
Others give promises that are impossible to keep, such as the promise of always getting a return on investment for PPC advertising.
The very least you can do is not add to the pile. Think about all the red flags your customers might be warned against when looking for someone to handle their PPC. Then find ways to not display any of them. Most PPC Agencies and freelance know that there a couple of ways to develop a long-lasting and fruitful relationship. Here a few:
Prepare the right kind of content for customer acquisition.
Some PPC agencies and freelancers wouldn’t agree that content is king, if for no other reason than because it’s a point of professional pride. But all differences aside, proper content can facilitate customer acquisition by providing the customers with the information they need.
In business-to-business marketing, the two types of content B2B buyers say are the most effective are testimonials and case studies. It makes sense because both types of content provide proof of the effectiveness of your service. They do it in different ways so it would be best not to rely on one of them alone and use them together instead.
It’s also very important to tailor-make the content to fit your potential customers. If your case study shows, for example, how good you are at protecting ads from competitors’ clicks, you should use it to communicate to potential clients that have those kinds of problems, which are usually smaller, local businesses.
Provide services that deliver the most value.
“Providing value” in the context of PPC management services can sometimes be boiled down to “providing the best possible impact on the bottom line.” And it’s true — as a customer-centric business, you should carefully balance between caring about your customers’ bottom line and yours.
A great way to do that is to think about providing the services that deliver the most value to your customers. Remarketing, also known as retargeting, is one such service.
It’s an effective way to go after the 96% of people who leave your customer’s website without converting and bring them back to the benefit of your customer’s branding, conversion rates, and ROI.
The best thing about remarketing is that all the major networks are offering it. You can use Facebook Dynamic Ads for it. Google Ads offer five distinct ways to remarket with them. Remarketing is a great example of a service you can offer to deliver more value to your customers, and in turn benefit your own business.
Use the right kinds of tools.
Is a PPC manager only as good as the tools they use? Probably not. Would it be possible to do your job without good tools? Maybe — but the competition would eat you alive. Tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush are ubiquitous for a reason, as is Google’s Keyword Planner.
However, the tighter your operating budget is, the more important it becomes to use only the tools that give your customers exactly what they need. Nothing more, and nothing less.
Let’s say you’re using display advertising to remarket to your client’s customers. If you want to use a click fraud protection tool — as you should — it would be best that you used a tool that has specific functionalities in place for display advertising.
The ability to use ad placements as a source and block them can be of tremendous value. That’s why we offer it as part of our click fraud protection and prevention tool.
Success through communication for PPC Agencies and Marketer Freelancers
We mentioned before that the PPC community uses a specific language, but that it also has a lot of information it needs to communicate with the customers and clients. Reporting is an important part of customer retention. You should know what, how, and when to communicate with customers, and who is the best person to do it.
Your customers will want to speak with the person who is in direct control over their PPC money. It might be a good idea to let them if it doesn’t interfere with anyone’s work performance. Account managers shouldn’t sit by the phone 24/7, waiting for their clients. But they should be at least one of the people in the agency that are in contact with the clients.
Giving your clients a full insight into their account is incredibly important for transparency reasons. Some might know their way around the data and could be talked with as you would with another PPC professional.
Always be ready to deliver all the data that belong to your clients. Whatever data you deliver, do it in a way your clients will be able to understand.
Remember, you must be able to see things from your client’s perspective
As a PPC agency or a freelancer, your objective always stays the same — to use your customers’ or clients’ PPC budgets in a way that most effectively achieves their goals.
Your ability to meet that objective will depend on your ability to use data to analyze ad performance and find the best possible strategies for your clients. But don’t think for a second that’s all that matters. You must be able to see things from your clients’ perspective.
You have to understand what’s most valuable to them. And you need to be able to communicate in a clear and meaningful way. That’s what customer-centric businesses do.
