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Q: When’s the best time to advertise to tourists?

A: When tourists are actively searching for your product, service, or experience.

 

Tourists seek the Internet’s help when they’re looking for attractions, products, services, and experiences. Do you show up in the search results?

PPC advertising, also known as “Paid Search” and “Google AdWords”, enables you to be there when tourists are searching. Stats show that nearly all clicks occur in the top few Google listings—people don’t like to search for long! Are you at the top?

 

Reach Tourists, Get New Business

By targeting search queries relevant to your business, you can win business from tourists and locals alike. Perhaps a tourist would like to find a winery. What do they do? They search phrases on Google such as: “wineries near me”, and Google serves ads along with search results based on their location. How can your business guarantee you show up with those relevant search queries? By using pay-per-click advertising.

 

Generate Leads

Creating pay-per-click ads can generate leads for your business. A lead means a potential customer completed proposed defined action like submitting their contact information to be contacted, signing up for a newsletter, downloading a resource, or completing a purchase.

As you know, a lead which becomes new business carries potential for continued business, whether that customer comes back or sends a friend. There’s almost always an opportunity to upsell as well. Often, a lead turns out to be more than a simple one-time transaction.

 

 Target The Right Customers

Setting your geographic target area is an important step—without it, you’ll reach people in other countries across the globe (wasted ad dollars). If you’re in Pulaski County, Missouri, you probably want to target inside your county in most cases. Therefore, targeting Missouri in general may cost you $1,800 a month versus $500. In addition to countries, states, cities and counties, we can also target radiuses of certain areas—even certain addresses. Places of interest, such as airports and universities, can sometimes be targeted as well.

Next, you will need to do keyword research and determine which search queries to target.  AdWords has a Keyword Planner to help with the process.

It’s also important to research “negative” keywords.  Negative keywords are as important as intentional keywords. For example, if you’re a B&B, you probably want to add “jobs”, “careers”, “salary”, etc. as negative keywords.This way, if someone is looking for “bed and breakfast jobs” you don’t waste money on clicks that won’t convert to a lead or sale.

There are additional targeting options such as age and gender, but these targeting options aren’t always advised simply because you can miss out on reaching users who don’t tell Google their gender or how old they are. This is especially true for smaller audiences. Targeting gender and age in a national campaign would make more sense, where your audience needs to be narrowed.

 

PPC Management For Success

While it can be very effective, it’s easy to burn money managing PPC on your own, or leaving it to an agency that doesn’t specialize in PPC Management. PPC advertising isn’t like purchasing stock, where you buy and hold. PPC takes proper setup in the beginning, followed by active management and optimization.

 

Want to learn more about Google AdWords PPC advertising or digital marketing in general? Caledon Virtual helps local businesses thrive by using digital marketing tactics such as paid search, social media marketing, search engine optimization, web design and more to attract tourists and locals alike to your business. Call us at (573) 446-7777 to learn more and talk about your marketing goals.