Pay per click advertising is a great way to reach a specific target audience and catapult your company pages to the top of search results.  When used in conjunction with other inbound marketing techniques paid ads can increase brand awareness, drive website visitors and maximize the exposure of your content. 

Google Ad Words is perhaps the most common form of PPC but most social networks now offer paid ads and it is a platform that is quickly growing.  Essentially PPC consists of advertisers bidding on keywords that people type into search engines in order to display a related ad to those users, thus drawing prospects to their company website. 

There are several factors that determine where your ad will be placed.  It is a combination of your bid and the ad’s quality score, which is determined by how relevant the ad is to the keyword, how relevant the landing page is connected to that ad, the click through rate and the historical performance of your account. 

The first step in creating a PPC campaign is to determine the keywords that you are going to target.  This can be done by examining the terms that best describe your offerings and using one of the many available keyword suggestion tools.  It’s important to realize that search trends will change frequently and updating your keywords on a regular basis is essential to the success of your campaigns.

Once you’ve determined the keywords you would like to target you will need to organize them into compact segments.  Relevance is considered heavily in calculating your quality score so grouping your keywords accordingly will give you the best ROI.

The same can be said for paid social media ads.  When sponsoring content you should group blogs and premium content together that contain similar keywords within their titles.  This allows you to narrow your target demographic and lower the bid necessary to reach your target audience.  Include a mix of blogs and premium content for each campaign so that those who are not willing to provide their contact information immediately will still be directed to your website.  After reading a quality blog post they may see the value of your content and decide to download a premium content piece or even make a purchase.

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