Pay-per-click advertising has been around since the advent of the Internet as we know it. It didn’t catch on at first, because it was new and not well understood.
Fast forward more than 10 years, and Google Adwords (as well as other search engines online) are now a necessity for nearly every type of business in the world.
It’s a beautiful thing, really. Pay-per-click advertising is especially attractive compared to the former popular methods of advertising, like the Yellow Pages, print newspapers, magazines, telemarketing, and manually distributed flyers. The two problems with those earlier methods were that the cost was up-front, and the results and effectiveness were difficult to track.
With pay-per-click advertising and other new methods of marketing insurance on the Internet, you don’t pay until someone clicks on your ad, and it’s trackable in every respect imaginable, from time of day to type of Internet browser, to the amount of time spent on your website.
How can you use pay-per-click advertising?
There are several ways to utilize this new and effective method of promotion for your insurance business. As always, you’ll want to consider what the purpose of your advertising is. Below are a few potential reasons to use pay-per-click advertising:
1. Recruitment
Job sites are increasingly expensive, and they only find candidates who are looking for a job. With pay-per-click advertising, you can target the type of person you’re looking to recruit.
2. Awareness
Perhaps your goal is to generate some awareness of your insurance practice, and there’s no easier way than advertising on search engines and websites. You can focus on search queries, or target the sites that have customers in the geographic region you’re looking to attract.
And if awareness is truly your goal, then you’re in luck, because you can get a lot of your message seen in a way that doesn’t encourage someone to click on the ad, but accomplishes the goal of generating awareness for your insurance practice.
3. Leads
A wonderful advantage of pay per click is that it can generate leads for your business. And there’s potentially no easier way to find leads than this type of marketing, because insurance is definitely the kind of product that people go to the Internet for, when they need it.
The problem with traditional methods is they are often wasted at the wrong time (when a customer is not looking for insurance), whereas Internet-based per-click marketing is perfectly timed to be delivered when the customer is actually looking for the product.
As you become more experienced with this type of advertising, you’ll learn that most websites and search engines will reward you with lower costs for a variety of reasons. You might get a discount in your cost for having an ad that is particularly attractive and clickable (therefore generating more clicks and revenue for the search engine or website provider).
You might get a discount for the quality of your ad, due to the text matching the search query that was typed in by the consumer (hence, an ad that was deemed to be relevant).
You also may get a discount on your advertising costs by having a solid website and reputable business that reflects what the customer is searching for. A good example of this is a directory of insurance agents in Chicago that delivers exactly what the searcher is looking for: insurance agents in the Windy City region.
That type of search result and advertising will generally receive a discount from the search engine because it’s what the customer was looking for.
