So, you’ve decided it’s best to hire a company to manage your marketing campaigns - good for you!

Whether you’ve made the decision because you’re no longer able to handle the day-to-day management single-handed, or because the complexities of PPC are proving too much for you, or simply because your business has grown to the point that you can’t determine the strategy you need to continue your success, it’s generally a great idea to get professional help with your PPC marketing.

But who do you choose? We think that one major criterion doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Local PPC management is not a huge buzz term. In fact if you Google it, you get many more hits for geo-location than for ‘local management of PPC’. But we think it’s a crucial concern and here’s why:

PPC keyword research is cultural and sophisticated

Now this may not seem true at the beginning of your PPC career but trust us, as you continue to develop your pay per click expertise you’ll come to see that there are twin goals to achieve:

• Get maximum revenue/profit from your ppc budget.
• Master high conversion rates from your adverts.

Did you notice that we didn’t even mention ranking first? That’s because competition for the ‘top spot’ is often not in your best interests and might even be a total waste of time. Your business goal is almost certainly to be more profitable, or create more revenue, or develop better brand recognition (although PPC is probably not the best way to achieve brand recognition if that’s your aim). Also, new accounts will struggle to get the #1 position because account history has an influence on your search location with AdWords. Finally, when you’re in a really intense market sector, you simply may not even be able to spend enough to win that location, but that doesn’t mean you can’t create a profitable campaign with the help of a team of PPC experts.

The point is that while you can use free keyword tools to create a basic PPC campaign, there’s quite a high degree of risk that you’ll select less than optimum keywords which will burn through your budget and give you little or no return.

Good local PPC management takes a lot of expertise, and - for a USA business - hiring a US based company to handle your marketing campaign means you’ll be able to call upon expertise that they’ve developed to ensure that your keywords aren’t just adequate, they will be successful, persuasive and convertible. Because it’s not just about getting the right keywords to rank your advertisements - it’s about having the right ad copy to create conversions which is our next point.

Local PPC management defines effective advertising copy

That point about keyword research being cultural? A local PPC management expert will call upon a lot more than keywords to create a successful campaign - converting copy requires an understanding of your market and an understanding of your marketplace. It calls on a detailed picture of your organization as it’s located alongside its competitors to ensure you get the maximum conversion rate for your PPC budget. Local PPC management also understands intuitively when it’s the right time to offer deals that win you market share away from your rivals. These areas of expertise can’t be ‘learned’, they are an intrinsic part of the landscape, culture and environment in which you do business.

In the USA there’s a whole language of business - and also a whole language of consumption -that needs to be idiomatic if your budget is to produce maximum value. Here’s a simple example - Black Friday is the biggest shopping day of the year in the US; it’s been around officially since 1952, and it’s even a public holiday in several American states. Making Black Friday copy work requires an intense understanding of how this consumer-driven holiday works. In the UK, Black Friday has only been around since 2010 and while it’s gained a lot of traction, it has nothing like the power, or the competitive drive, of its American cousin. Despite sharing a common language, a British PPC expert and an American one would have completely different approaches to the Black Friday phenomenon - and if you’re in the USA which would you rather have on your side? Obviously it’s the team with the cultural understanding of a seventy year celebration of bargain buying, not the ones with less than a decade of handling the holiday! Even worse, imagine putting this kind of online event in the hands of some outsourced marketing team in a part of the world that has no understanding of the phenomenon. They’d struggle to produce persuasive copy. The intrinsic skill and understanding required for a marketing campaign aren’t just based on PPC and keyword expertise, they draw on an innate recognition of the market to create results.

Experience trumps cost when establishing good PPC activity

There’s one simple thing that can lead to superb Pay Per Click results - previous experience. Let’s put it in perspective: if you had a choice of being operated on by a surgeon with a twelve year track record or by one with no track record, which would you choose? Most people would choose the twelve year track record every time.

Seeking out a PPC expert who has worked with others in your industry can really make the different between success and failure, but it may not always be possible - why not?

• Many PPC management teams don’t take on competing clients - this is an obvious reason that may limit who you can work with; you really don’t want your marketing expert to be working with your closest competitor do you?
• Niche markets may be difficult to find experience in - new industries or highly specialised niche activity can mean that finding an expert in your field is difficult to impossible.
• Your budget limits who you can work with - expertise and experience cost more, that’s just a fact and it might be the case that you can’t find somebody you can afford who has the relevant experience in your field.

So what’s the solution - obviously it’s fantastic to have a PPC expert who knows your industry or product, but if you can’t manage that, it’s really vital that the people you work with are familiar with your broad market, such as your geographic location, customer base and offering.

Good PPC landing pages don’t happen by accident

Have you ever looked at a web page and just got the sense it was ‘off’? Sometimes it’s because the page looks generic, as if constructed by a robot, or put together in a factory. On other occasions there’s a feeling that the text and images don’t quite match, or that the words make sense by they aren’t the right vocabulary for the subject of the website. If you’ve had these experiences you’ve almost certainly arrived at a landing page that was either created by a ‘mill’ and/or by somebody who isn’t part of the culture they are trying to depict.

‘Mill’ webpages used to be the kind that you bought as a shell and then just dropped your copy into - today they’ve morphed into something slightly more sophisticated: you still buy a shell but the copy is written by a gig enterprise copywriter, the SEO for the site is done by another and the shopping cart is enabled by yet a third. Those gig enterprise hires are probably pretty competent, but they have no experience in your field, little interest in your organization and a strict deadline by which to deliver. They may be in India or Ireland, and they may simply churn out something that fits the bill without ever considering that you’re basing your future on their work. Some campaign management agencies hire gig writers for your web pages, so it’s good to find out whether your copy/images/cart are being developed by experts with understanding of your field or by whoever happens to be free when the work needs to be done.

What does a landing page need to do? The answer is clear:

• Reflect your PPC marketing campaign perfectly - or Google in particular will penalise your ranking.
• Contain convertible copy - because there’s no point having click-throughs that don’t convert.
• Share images and offers that meet the needs of your market - or you’ll loose potential customers to rivals who fine tune their pages to meet customer need.

So how can you ensure you get what you need? Make sure that your local PPC management is really local - which is not to say that your marketing team shouldn’t use outsourced expertise, because that might be a good way to save you money and to deliver results rapidly, but that somebody in the organization you’re working with should be able to screen the various elements of your page with real competence in your field, your PPC campaign and your geographic locality to ensure that everything works towards meeting campaign goals. Local PPC campaign management can really give you the cutting edge in a competitive market.