In this article, we’ll share important steps to set up effective pay per click advertising for SaaS marketing that will drive targeted traffic to your site and help increase your sales.
If you’re doing SaaS marketing, pay per click advertising is one of the best tools you can use.
In an earlier post, we discussed three compelling reasons why your SaaS or tech company needs PPC ads. To give a quick summary of that article, pay-per-click (or PPC) ads enable your software company to advertise to a targeted demographics (i.e., people who are likely to need or want your software or tech product), drive more traffic to your website, boost your competitive advantage, and ultimately, increase your sales numbers.
With all of these advantages in mind, you may be wondering now how to go about setting up your PPC ad campaigns. This article can serve as your guide in creating effective PPC advertisements that can bring phenomenal results to your software business.
Let’s hop in.
Table of Contents
Craft Your Pay Per Click Advertising Strategy
To have a successful PPC ad campaign, you need to prepare by having a solid marketing strategy. This means that your pay per click advertising campaign needs to have SMART objectives (i.e., Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-Bound).
You also need to clearly define your target audience: what’s their age range, location, nationality, spoken languages, interests, and so on. The more you know about them, the better, because you can target your PPC ads more specifically to be shown to them. In addition, the more details you know about your ideal customer profile, the more you can design ads that will engage them and resonate with them so that they’d want to use your software.
You also need to set your budget, which should cover ad creation, management, and optimization. As you may expect, the bigger your budget, the more users you can display your PPC ads to, and thus, the better outcomes you can expect. However, even a limited advertising budget can bring outstanding results as long as your PPC ad campaign is expertly set up.
Last but not least, you should decide which kinds of ads you want to include in your campaign: display ads, search ads, or video ads.
Ideally, your PPC advertising objectives are aligned with or support your tech or SaaS firm’s bigger business goals. Some common objectives are improving brand awareness, generating new leads, increasing subscriptions, and so on. It’s important to be clear with your objective because it will direct your efforts as well as your metrics for success.
Choose What Platform to Use For SaaS Marketing
If you’re planning to advertise your software company through pay per click advertising, you have several options when it comes to which platform to use. The most popular PPC ad platforms are Google Ads, Bing Ads, and LinkedIn Ads, but there are more (a simple online search will help you find others).
Each of these sites has its own pros and unique targeting features. The most popular may not always be what you need. When deciding, think about your target audience and objectives and make sure they’re aligned with the platform you’re considering advertising on.
Diligently Do Keyword Research
Keywords are critical in PPC ad campaigns because your ads are shown to users searching for keywords you bid on. Some tools you can use are Google Ads Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, and SEMrush, but again, there are a lot more that you can find and use for free online.
We recommend targeting keywords that are relevant to your software or tech products that have a high search volume yet low competition. Also, look at keywords for the solutions your software offers, your prospects might be searching for a solution for a pain point in their business.
We also recommend targeting more long-tail keywords, which are search phrases that have more words (or letters) and are more detailed. Fewer users usually search for long-tail keywords, but they often have much higher conversion rates because they’re correlated with user intent.
For example, if you’re launching a time management software with advanced features for busy top executives like automatic meeting scheduling, targeting for a keyword (technically, keyphrase) like “app to easily book business meetings” is more likely to bring you a targeted audience than a simpler, shorter keyword like “time management app”.
An important thing for you to know is that you can use negative keywords in your pay per click advertising campaign. These are keywords (or, again, phrases) that you can set to be ruled out in your campaigns. Setting negative keywords will stop your PPC ads from being displayed to users with searches that are unrelated to your business.
Write Powerful Copy For Your Pay Per Click Advertising
As with other types of advertisements, the words you use—the copy—can make or break your ad.
You’d want to develop ad copy that’s engaging and compelling. To do so, you need to tackle the pain points of your target audience. Think of what problems they have that your software product can solve for them. Will it make them research faster? Will it make them exercise more? Will it help them sleep better? Will it help them find their soulmate?
Whatever it is, make sure you know it and make sure they’ll know it from your copy. Write using simple, conversational language. It’s best to make your ad sound like a friend or an expert talking to them rather than an authority talking down at them. Make sure that you translate technical lingo into layman’s terms that they can easily understand and relate to.
Although PPC ads are shown to users based on a bidding system for keywords, it’s also important to write those relevant keywords in your copy. Finally, make sure that you write a specific call-to-action (CTA) in your ad copy so that users would know what to do. Your CTA can ask them to sign up for your free weekly newsletter, register for a free 1-month trial, and so on.
Ensure That Your Landing Pages Are Properly Optimized
Pay per click advertising brings users who click on your ad to your designated landing page. Getting people to see your ad and click on it is not a piece of cake, so it’s crucial that you optimize your landing page to effectively convert prospects into users of your SaaS or tech product.
To do so, you need to make sure that the copy in your PPC ad matches the copy written on the landing page it points to. Remember that users clicked on your ad because your ad sparked their curiosity or grabbed their interest in what you offer, so make sure that your landing page confirms that your software will deliver what your ad has promised. Doing this will also reduce your cost per click (CPC), improve your Quality Score, and boost your conversion rate.
Your landing page should also have a clear CTA. It’s best to have a funnel set up that will guide prospects from one stage to the next until they become your customer.
Finally, you need to ensure that your landing page is mobile-responsive and loads quickly. This means that mobile users should be able to easily read your copy and view the media on your landing page. For maximum conversion, your landing page should load in 4 seconds or less; otherwise, users may click the Back button and ‘bounce’ from your landing page.
Need Extra Hands in Doing Pay Per Click Advertising For Your SaaS Marketing?
There you have it: the 5 essential steps in setting up a successful pay per click advertising campaign for your software business.
If you need any help with any of those steps, or in optimizing your campaign to get better results, our digital marketing agency would be more than happy to help. Zero Company Performance Marketing has over 20 years of success in setting up, managing, and optimizing online marketing campaigns like PPC ads.
Book a free call with our pay per click advertising experts to make the most of your SaaS marketing efforts!
