Pay per click advertising is a great way to make money online through publicizing and increasing the brand awareness of a certain topic. For most advertisers, the stereotypical thing to do with PPC advertising is to advertise a product or service where the conversion is in the form of a sale for that product or service. The fact of the matter is that PPC advertising can be used for so many more reasons than to just sell a product or service. For this reason, here are some other ways advertisers can use PPC to their advantage other than to sell a product or service.
 
 

Increase Brand Awareness

Before many businesses start selling their products or services, they need to increase the brand awareness of the product/service because the product/service is in the early life of it’s life cycle if it has just been released. To do this, many businesses simply use PPC to make web users more aware of upcoming products and services such as what Microsoft did.
 
Although this example doesn’t apply to PPC, the way Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines single became so famous was through the same approach to advertising. Instead of simply releasing the song straight away, he put the music video on YouTube first and gave the music video lots of publicity. This made people aware of the song and crave it since they cannot buy it yet on places such as iTunes. When it was officially released, everyone then bought it. You can use the same technique with PPC. Make a campaign to advertise a product/service that hasn’t been released yet. From doing this, web users will want to buy it more because they cannot. Once you have enough brand awareness, you can then go on to actually sell the product/service.
 
 

Improve Your Social Media Audience

It is becoming more apparent that users of social media such as Twitter, Instagram, Vine and even YouTube have a large influence on the internet. Therefore, you can use PPC to advertise your social media page with the conversion looking to be a follow. If you find that you gain better results by advertising through social media than PPC, look to use PPC to gain more followers so that the audience you are advertising to on social media websites becomes larger.
 
 

Specific Advertising is Key

So there we have it – two other ways in which you can use PPC. However, before I leave you, I think it should be made clear that PPC is most effective when you advertise specifically. By this, I mean you are not vague and offering the web users many things. When the web user moves to your landing page, they should expect something specific and related to the text advert they clicked on. A great example of specific advertising can be found with Sony’s PPC campaign. Of course, when you type in ‘Sony’ into Google search, they are organically the number one spot. However, this will take the web user to the homepage. When Sony used PPC advertising, they bid on their own brand name so that their advert was placed above the number one spot for the search results of ‘Sony’. This meant Sony can now specifically advertise a certain product which, in this example, was the VAIO laptop range. Ultimately, to make a success from PPC, know exactly what you want to advertise.