Should I Blog or Run a Pay per Click (PPC) Campaign?

Question: Should I allocate resources to set up a blog and spend some time blogging or allocate that same budget towards an effective pay-per-click (PPC) campaign?

Both blogging and PPC are good Internet Marketing techniques and can deliver great returns. However, they deliver results based on different goals and require vastly different approaches.  I would like to point out at the very onset that that it’s not an either/or situation. Even on a limited budget you can use both PPC and Blogging at the same time. I will outline five main marketing benefits businesses can attain by blogging and then do the same for PPC.

Blogging Benefits:

Drives Organic Traffic: Google loves blogs for a number of reasons. First the content of a well run blog is always fresh, causing frequent visits from GoogleBot, also generally blogs receive more inbound links due to content quality and variety. There of course additional factors at play, but effective blogging can start generating organic search traffic within a few months.

Positions You as a Thought Leader: One of the main reasons to blog is to demonstrate your value and expertise in your industry. Effective blog communicate your value proposition and helps you quickly differentiate you against the competition.  As you begin to share your expertise you will start to become a thought leader in your industry. This helps in many different ways. It can draw attention from local news reporters, cause readers to recommend your content and become a source of information in your industry.

Drives Long Term Relationships: Blogs generate content that can be delivered directly to your customers on a long term basis. This allows you to stay top of mind in your target audience. Additionally, research has shown that 25% of customers in the US read blogs on a regular basis and 14 % of online consumers leave comments on blogs. This means many in your audience will turn to your blog for information on your industry/product.

Greater Opportunity to Showcase all Your Product Benefits: Twenty keywords, and fifty phrases cannot possibly describe the many benefits or your company’s product. Blogs allow you the platform to communicate all of the benefits of your product, from the smallest detail to the biggest differentiators.  Which means that as this content is now indexed and searchable by consumers, increasing your ability to make a sale based on the subtle differences in your product.

Brand Building Tool: Deciding to have a blog is more of a strategic brand building decision than a tactical one such as PPC. While PPC can help drive traffic and can have tremendous ROI, blogs provide long term value to a business.  It helps to position your company as a powerful force in your industry and can shape the way consumers interact with you over the long term.

PPC Benefits:

Quick to Implement: The implementation process is quite easy, after making a list of relevant and desirable keywords all that is left is to set up the account and deploy the ad.

Drives Targeted Traffic: Since the ads are delivered based on keyword searches, PPC can be effective in driving  the audience you are seeking. Since you have control of the keywords who arrives at your site is entirely up to you. With billions of searches daily on Google it is easy to drive traffic to your site on a high volume search engine.

Directly Measurable: Google Analytics and other similar PPC monitoring tools allow you to instantly measure the click through rates all the way to conversion. Which allows for near real time ROI reports and gives you time to make adjustments to your keywords and ads to improve performance.

Cost Effective in Niche Industries: While some keywords can be very expensive, when you’re dealing with a niche market or even a niche segments of a large market, the keywords can be relatively cost effective. Of course the resulting trade off may be the traffic volume will be correspondingly lower. However,  effective mix of keywords and landing pages can improve conversion.

Effective for short term targeted campaigns: PPC is a great tool if the objective is to drive short term traffic to a transaction based website.  The key to PPC success also resides in making effective landing pages and designing compelling ads.

So which is it Blog or PPC?

As I mentioned before there is no reason why both cannot be implemented at the same time. The right mix would depend on your budget, but also on your time frame and desired results. As previously discussed blogs can take time to deliver, and PPC can drive traffic immediately. Blogs take effort and commitment over a period of time whereas, PPC can be turned on and off as desired. Over time blogs bring organic search traffic and can help drive the overall marketing communications effort in your business.

Whether to implement a blog or a run a PPC campaign is entirely dependent on your goals. If the goal is to drive traffic and sales for the upcoming holiday season and then PPC would certainly deliver on these faster. However, if the goal is to develop a solid long term presence on the Internet and drive business through organic search, then a blog would be the preferred solution.

Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/joethorn/272181350/sizes/s/

Tags: blogging, Internet Marketing, Marketing, Pay per click, Web search engine