What You Need to Prepare Before Starting Your AdWords Campaign: 4 Key Things

When set up and managed properly, AdWords can be an extremely valuable source of new leads for your business. However, a failed campaign can result in disappointed clients or management, and wasted marketing dollars. Let’s not get into the implications of that, shall we?

Before we get into the technicalities of campaign set up and optimisation, though, we must first define your campaign strategy. Without a clear campaign strategy, your AdWords campaign will not be as effective, and it may even fail. Here are 4 important components to determine before running an AdWords campaign:

• What problem is your searcher looking to solve?

• Where would your target audience look for this information?

• What tone of voice will your target audience use?

• How much would your target audience look to spend?

• Are there any objections the searcher will think of before considering or buying your product? How can you anticipate or answer them?

By answering these questions, you can decide how to structure your campaign, target your content, write or style your ads, and select your keywords.

HubSpot also offers a tool to build your customer’s buyer personas which you can find here

2. Have A Strong Unique Selling Proposition

Where does your business stand in your market? Why should your customers choose you over your competitors? How does your product offering differ from those of your competitors? What is your brand’s tone of voice or choice of words?

Answering these questions will allow you to craft a suitable AdWords strategy that is unique, and that will bring in qualified leads for your business.

3. What Are Your Competitors Doing?

In every business, there will be competition. Successful AdWords marketers use this information, by identifying the high-performing landing pages, keywords, and ads, that competitors have created.

Start off your competitor analysis by doing a Google search on the keywords that you are thinking of placing your ads on. Ask the following questions:

• Who is advertising on these keywords?
• How are the ads written?
• How are their landing pages structured?

There are also competitive keyword analysis tools like SEMRush and SpyFu which allow you spy on your competition.

4. How Much Are You Willing To Spend?

Before you run your campaign, you must determine how much you are going to spend. To do that, you need to determine:

• How much are you willing to spend for each conversion?

• What is your desired profit margin for each lead generated?

• Do you have benchmark conversion rate / conversion data from previous campaigns?

Use Google Keyword Planner to look at estimated bids and competition information for your desired keywords. The more information you get, the more accurately you can benchmark your budget.

Alternatively, you can divide your total budget by the total duration of your campaign to get an estimated daily budget. Remember that budgets can be adjusted after the campaign is started.