Starting new client relationships can be stressful. You know very little about their business (since you just started working together), so it’s harder to apply your marketing knowledge.
On the other hand, the PPC client’s trust in you is at an all-time low (because you just started working together), so it’s easy to feel a lot of pressure to perform.
To me, the first couple months of new client relationships feel like tests done in school, but where you need to show the teacher client that you know what you’re doing. If the first few months are the test, then the first week is the class, and the best way to learn in class is to ask many questions.
That’s what I do, and you should, too: ask a lot of questions about them, their business, their goals, their industry – anything that will be useful for your new partnership.
Learn everything you can about them and their business, so you can use all of that marketing knowledge you have in your big brain to help them achieve their goals.
Here are eight questions to get you started.
1. What are your business goals?
We’ll start out with the obvious one here. You can’t be effective in any form of marketing without knowing what the goals are, as strategies can differ wildly based on the client’s goals.
With ecommerce, you’ll be focusing more on shopping campaigns and making revenue, but a nonprofit organization may be more focused on awareness. That’s why it’s incredibly important to align on goals before developing your PPC strategy.
Dig deeper: PPC client kickoff: Strategies for a successful first encounter
2. Who is your target audience?
Marketing, at its core, has a simple goal: to get your product in front of the right people, in the right place, at the right time.
Keywords and location targeting cover both time and place, but we still need to know who we want to advertise to.
Most businesses have an “ideal customer,” or someone for whom their product or service is designed (e.g., Michelob Ultra is made for beer drinkers who are calorie-conscious).
Once you figure out your ideal audience, you’ll have a much easier time crafting ad copy and setting up display advertising on site’s those users frequent.
3. What differentiates you from your competitors?
Building upon your targeting audience, it’s critical that you know the specific selling points of your client’s product or service. These selling points are used to convince our target audience that you’re the answer to whatever problem they’re facing.
Returning to the previous example, Michelob Ultra’s fewer calories and carbs than most beers differentiate it from its competitors, making it perfect for health-conscious beer drinkers. If you look at all of their ads, they almost look like a sports brand, with all of their messaging focusing on being active and having the athletes enjoy their product afterward.
Finding your ideal audience and what differentiates you from your competitors is how you determine your brand messaging and should be one of your first questions when onboarding a new client.
Dig deeper: How to benchmark PPC competitors: The definitive guide
4. What is your marketing budget?
Before you go and develop a strategy, you need to know what kind of monthly budget you’re working with.
A local business with a $500 monthly budget can’t afford to be as aggressive as a multi-million dollar business can, so you need to tailor your strategy to that reality.
All levels of budget can be successful in PPC, but the lower your budget, the more judicious you need to be with where you put your money.
I like to start at the bottom of the marketing funnel and work my way up. With the lowest possible budget, you start at the bottom of the funnel (branded, certain non-branded keywords). As you see success and add budget, you can start to add mid and top-funnel strategies to the mix.
Dig deeper: Client onboarding and offboarding: The PPC agency’s guide
5. When are the busiest/most important times of the year for your business?
Almost every business has some sort of seasonality. For many, that’s the holiday season, when the majority of retail shopping is done, but it could be any time, depending on the industry.
If there is a busy time of the year, you’ll want to know so you can adjust budget accordingly. The last thing you want is to get to the holiday season and have the same budget as you had at the slowest part of the year.
6. Who are your main competitors?
Every business has competitors and finding out who your client’s competitors are will help with a couple of things:
- It will give you a good idea of how the client sees their own business. A clothing company that says their main competitor is Supreme is a lot different than them saying their competitor is Fruit of the Loom.
- It allows you to research competitors and observe how they advertise. Use those insights to decide what to do or not do in your own advertising.
7. What is the LTV for a customer of your business?
Some products only require one purchase, while many others have either repeat purchases or have recurring revenue attached to them.
Depending on the situation, tracking the revenue of the initial purchase may not be your best option. Instead, it’s more useful to track the lifetime value (LTV) of the customer. Tracking the LTV gives you a much more accurate view of how your ads are performing.
For example, if you’re advertising a subscription service that costs $20/month, then under normal conversion tracking, every purchase would attribute $20 to the campaign.
However, you find out that a customer subscribes for 10 months on average, making the LTV $200. In this situation, tracking LTV attributes 10 times more revenue to your campaign and gives you a much better picture of how aggressive you can be in PPC advertising.
8. How quickly do you expect results?
After discussing the business goals and strategy for so long, I like to end by setting expectations. While you may experience success in PPC quicker than other marketing channels, it is by no means an instant fix.
The best PPC results come from consistent and intentional work. I like to describe it as a snowball rolling down a hill: it starts off slow, but as you get more and more data, the snowball starts to roll quicker, and the results get better.
It is extremely important to be on the same page regarding timelines and ongoing optimization in order to have a great long-term relationship with clients.
Kickstart new PPC client relationships with the right questions
One of the best parts of the job is learning about new businesses and helping them succeed, but in order to get to that point, you need to start things off on the right foot. That means asking the right questions.
You can probably think of 10 other questions that I didn’t include here, and that’s great!
The more questions, the better.
Ask away so you and your client can both feel confident and prepared for this new working relationship.
Dig deeper: 6 tips to build PPC client relationships
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