Why You Should Consider the Product Life Cycle in PPC

Pay per click advertising, of course, is a great way to gain contextual traffic to a landing page of your choice in the attempt to gain conversions. However, PPC does not work in all circumstances. By this, I mean that PPC can only work to your benefit if your product/service you are trying to promote needs PPC to publicise it. A huge factor all PPC advertisers need to consider is at what stage their product is in the product life cycle. All businesses develop their advertising campaigns depending on where their product is in the product life cycle so as a PPC advertiser, so should you.
 
The product life cycle basically describes the theoretical stages a product will go through during its life span . Here are the stages every product/service will go through:

• Research and Development – The product needs to undergo research and development to innovate and improve the product before it goes for sale. As well as this, it will also give the business an idea of how successful the product will be with market research.
• Introduction – This is the stage when the product is launched and on the market.
• Growth – This stage is when the product starts to get recognition and brand awareness. Due to this, people start buying it.
• Maturity – This is when the product’s sales start to decline since new products in the growth stage are entering the market and giving your product tough competition.
• Decline – At this stage, your product’s sales are rapidly declining. By now, your product needs to undergo the product life cycle again and needs to be improved with research and development.

It is amazing to think that every product out there is in one of the above five stages of their life. For this reason, advertisers need to understand that creating a PPC campaign for a product in certain stages will not be as beneficial for them as creating the campaign in a later or earlier stage. By making sure you give your product a campaign when it needs it will ensure you maximise your product’s potential earnings. Here is a list of the product life cycle with how it relates to PPC:

• Research and Development – Since the product is not on the market yet, the objective of any PPC campaign is to entice the web user into wanting something they cannot have (yet). This means that when the product does go on sale, they will buy it straight away. An example of this (in general advertising) is Google Glass. Google publicised their new wearable eye technology on YouTube and their website but it is still very long away from being launched. Even so, there are millions that are wanting to buy it.
• Introduction – This is the most crucial time to have a PPC campaign up and running for your product. Nobody knows what your product is or if it is for sale yet. Therefore, you need to advertise to the world that, yes, your product is for sale and this is what it does. The majority of your budget should go into the introduction of your product to boost its brand awareness.
• Growth – By now, people have bought your product and continue to buy them. This is a good point to continue with your campaign but update it. You don’t need to publicise that your product is for sale now. Instead, you need to include in your campaign what sets your product apart from the market competitors.
• Maturity – The only way you can benefit in the maturity stage is by trying to prolong the maturity stage altogether. When you see that your growth is starting to decline, boost your PPC budget to attract more potential customers. Your aim is to make sure your product never hits the maturity stage.
• Decline – If you run a campaign during the decline stage, it will be a waste of money since nobody is really wanting to buy your product any more. Instead, invest the money you would have spent in PPC into research and development and then start the whole product life cycle over again!