Punch

Punch Communications Successfully Branches Into PPC Marketing

SMEs Waking Up To Cost Effective Online Marketing To Deliver Business Leads

Marketing-savvy SMEs across the UK are rapidly waking up to the benefits of a niche form of online advertising that can both boost their profile online and attract customers, according to PR and marketing specialist Punch Communications.

Pay Per Click marketing may sound like ad agency jargon but it actually represents a revolutionary method for businesses of all sizes to reach niche audiences, perhaps more cost effectively than ever before. In effect, this advertising filters out non-interested customers and provides a stream of potential purchasers at a cost which is often as little as a few pence per lead.

Unlike other forms of advertising, Pay Per Click marketing only costs the advertiser when a potential customer acts - in this case by clicking on a link to the advertiser's website - which, when compared to more traditional forms of advertising, potentially saves the advertiser huge sums of money as no charge is made just to display the advert for potential customers to see.

Many of Punch Communications' customers are already using Pay Per Click marketing as a means of complementing their online profile which has been generated via links to their site. Clients such as Alladale Wilderness Lodge in Scotland, London-based New York Properties, Buckinghamshire-based Only Organic and Sussex-based Manta Finance are all using Pay Per Click marketing to increase their profile online. Other clients using the service include London based Knowledge to Action, Cotswolds-based Batsford Construction and Kent based Email Systems.

Pete Goold, Managing Director of Punch Communications, commented:
"What is most interesting about PayPerClick marketing is that not only can regions be targeted on either a tightly defined local or indeed national scale, but audiences with specific interests can also be targeted. Since we unveiled this service just one year ago, Punch has won no fewer than ten accounts in this area - many of which were referrals from existing customers - alongside our more traditional Public Relations work."

Dominic Shadbolt, Managing Director of Punch client Only Organic, commented:
"As a lead generation tool, Pay Per Click marketing is unbelievably cost effective. Our business delivers organic produce within a 15 mile radius of our base in Long Crendon, Buckinghamshire. Consequently Punch created our PPC campaign to target all the key towns and villages within the business' target footprint and consequently adverts appear for any relevant search term that is associated with the area. A google search of "organic apples Oxfordshire" for instance, would trigger an advert including all three words ('organic', 'apples' and 'Oxfordshire'), therefore being extremely relevant to the search and most likely resulting in a highly prominently positioned advert. Although the campaign has just begun, we've already seen a marked increase in traffic to the website and the cost has been so low as to be virtually negligible."

Pete Goold continued:
"We are constantly looking at opportunities which will allow clients to be better marketed both on and offline and, having investigated PPC marketing and devised a campaign for Punch as a test case last January, we quickly realised that this would be a huge growth area for our business. We were proven correct as our new business in 2006 came principally from two sources, either repeat or referral related business, or business which came to us as a result of Pay Per Click marketing.

"The key to PPC marketing is relevancy. Irrelevant ads are not clicked on and immediately fall down the rankings to become invisible and therefore useless. We have devised a means of creating a highly relevant series of ads for groups of words at a painstaking level of detail. Indeed I suspect that it is this level of attention to detail in the set up process which stands our campaigns apart from the competition and allows our clients to gain such prominence online virtually overnight."

For more information regarding Punch Communications, visit www.punchcomms.com.