In my last post, I talked about the benefits of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and one of the benefits that I talked about quickly was how you can use PPC to test out your copy and content for marketing ideas.

I think this is a great point that should be discussed in more detail. As a young business, we were very tight with money but we knew that we needed to advertise so we decided to start 2 campaigns - a post card and a 6 page letter. We were very excited about the campaign because we thought it had a great idea in it. We put a lot of money into each one to get as many contacts as possible (probably more than we should have). And we excitedly waited as our leads would come in.

Shortly after the campaign went out, we got 1 response from the postcard and 2 from the 6 page letter and we were even more excited because this just meant everything was going to work…. and then nothing happened.

After a week with no more leads, we realized it was a bust. Our huge (and very expensive) campaign was worthless. Luckily, we decided to do PPC as a whim just because we were very good at it and because that’s what the core of our business was. We just didn’t think it would get us the response we hoped for - maybe 1 or 2 to lump in with our 50 other leads.

Guess what happened? We got almost 100 leads from those online marketing methods, led by Pay-Per-Click. So many that our Cost Per Lead was just $4, a fraction of our best case scenario in direct mailing.

What’s the moral of the story? I actually think there are a few. The first one is obvious:

1. PPC is a great source of targeted leads for an inexpensive price
2. We should have tested out our ads first.

A lot of bigger companies would have just sent out more mailings, but we didn’t have the resources. What we realize now and continue to do, is to use PPC as our testing ground for the messages, headlines, and content that works. And once that’s perfected and tested out, we roll out the ideas to other forms of marketing.

In the next post, I’ll try to give you ideas on the strategy we follow at this point.

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