Generating leads today in a slow economy is not an easy task. Business budgets are on hold or have been cut back and marketing departments all over are working amidst an air of uncertainty. As marketers are having to do more with less, there is an increasing demand for PPC programs to deliver more and more leads. The adage of doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result applies here. Now is the time to take action and make the necessary investments in your pay per click campaigns.

It may seem counter-intuitive and your inclination may be to resist making any changes until the market turns around, but this is an environment where raw leads are harder and harder to come by. An increase in competitors fighting over a shrinking pool of prospects has a ripple effect throughout a PPC program;  there is a direct correlation to a rise in cost per click charges and a steep increase in the overall cost per conversion.

Sitting idle and remaining a prisoner of hope is not going to be enough. You can maximize your budget by making improvements in your offers and landing pages.

Your offers have shelf life and may have run their course by now. Offer development can be as simple as refreshing and updating an existing offer, making it more applicable to current conditions, or, yes, even creating a new one to fill in a gap where a weak one currently resides.

One strategy is to bundle offers together, providing a heightened perceived value to a potential prospect; a good example of this would be a white paper coupled with a related webinar.

The ultimate goal of landing page development is to improve the page’s overall conversion rate. Identify where a landing page is falling down and what measures can be taken to improve performance. This could be in the design, layout, or even messaging of the page.

Making the commitment to make changes now is a way to improve your campaign and take full advantage of your existing budget. As the tide begins to turn and the economy begins to rebound, your PPC program will benefit by being in a better position to capture raw leads and perform at an optimal level.

For more information on pay-per-click strategies, check out our white paper, “Optimizing PPC Search Marketing”