There are very few types of writing harder than writing copy for your pay-per-click ads.
Let’s be serious for a moment: cramming all of the information you want to cram into those short little ads and still managing to make them interesting and compelling is nearly impossible, especially because you are required to come up with more than one of these ads.
If you are experiencing some pay-per-click writer’s block and are looking for ways to improve your campaign, here are three steps you can take for better campaigns and less writer’s block:
Step One: Use your reviews and testimonials for inspiration.
The reviews that past users have left for your business can be great resources for coming up with new content for your PPC campaigns.
Many business owners have a hard time talking about what they do really well and determining what sets them apart from the crowd.
If you are looking for new phrases to help you market your business, looking at your reviews and user testimonials is a great place to start, even if you only have a few reviews so far.
Start by reading over all of your reviews (or a good portion of them, if you have lots and lots of reviews) and looking for trends and for useful phrases.
These should be short phrases that signify something that you did well.
For example, if your service was prompt, you’ll probably see people leaving you reviews that mention “arriving on time,” or “showing up on time.”
If you offer a service that requires you or one of your employees to be in a certain place at a certain time and you consistently meet those expectations, your customers will appreciate that and they will probably also leave you reviews that effect.
“Fast turnaround,” “great price,” “great customer service,” and similar phrases are all things to watch for.
These are phrases that you can use to market your business and are actually likely to bring more people to your business.
Past customers are a good indicator of what future customers will be looking for and will expect.
Take a look at the comments they’ve left you to see what they really appreciated about the service you provided to them and then use those phrases.
It’s an easy formula that will help you find new buzzwords for just about any PPC marketing campaign.
Step Two: Get to know your company again.
When you’ve spent so much time working with your business, living in it, and trying to market it, you can find yourself in a rut.
You’ll only be talking about how quickly you can deliver or how cheap your prices are, when your business actually has a lot of other things to offer.
If this is the case with your business, if you are finding it difficult to find unique features to talk about, it might be time to step back and get to know your business again.
Try asking yourself and some of your employees the following questions:
- Why did I want to start this business?
- What sets my business apart from other businesses?
- What about my business do our current customers or clients like?
- What about my business do our current customers or clients dislike?
- What can we do that no other business can do?
- What are my business’s goals? Where do I want it to go?
Answer these questions can help you come up with some new words or phrases that will help your puss through ad-writing writer’s block.
What makes your business different from your competition and the benefits that it provides are what are going to draw someone to your website and encourage them to click on your link.
Focusing on those aspects can make writing an ad much, much easier.
Step Three: Check out what your competition is doing.
While you don’t want to copy exactly what your competition is doing, you’ll never be able to beat out your competitors if you don’t know what they are doing to get ahead.
Why don’t you want to just copy their strategies?
Because between two companies that are doing the exact same thing, the one that is going to succeed is the business that was doing it first.
Take a look at their ads.
What aspects of their business are they promoting?
Do they harp on their low prices or their fast turnaround?
Do they have a special kind of appointment available right now?
Knowing what kind of buzzwords and “benefits” they are pushing can help you create an add that plays off of or makes yours stand out. If they spend most of their ad talking about how inexpensive their appointments or products are, you can write about how more cost-effective (maybe pricier, but also far more valuable) yours are.
In short, show the viewers why they should click on your advertisement, instead of your competitor’s ad.
Setting yourself apart is only possible when you actually know what your competitor is doing.
You can easily craft a pay-per-click campaign that sets you apart from your competitors when you know exactly what those competitors are doing to top you.
The Bottom Line
Once you’ve used these steps to break through your writer’s block and start crafting more effective and powerful ads, the last thing you need to do is test, test, test.
Don’t just through your ads out there and hope that they will perform.
Building an effective campaign is all about testing your ads to see what works, eliminating what does not work, and improving on what does.
