Have you ever attended a dinner party and been blown away by the cooking? You compliment the chef on the amazing meal and tell them they should open a restaurant.

Now, what if that person took your advice seriously and decided to open a restaurant the next month before making sure they have the right budget, team, process, and timing? Do you think their venture would be successful?

As a business owner, you may be reading articles or hearing from your colleagues about how effective pay-per-click advertising has been for them, or how you MUST try it. What these articles and colleagues fail to mention is that digital marketing isn’t as simple as hiring an agency and launching a few campaigns. Being successful with PPC takes preparation, budget, time, and the right infrastructure to handle the leads that will start flowing in.

At ParaCore, our goal is to help you achieve the sales and marketing results you’ve been looking for. While pay-per-click advertising is a powerful way to do that, it’s not right for everyone. Here are four warning signs that might indicate it’s not quite time to invest in PPC.

4 times to hold off on PPC

1.  When you don’t have the budget

Pay-per-click advertising requires lots of data to be successful. In order to gather lots of data, a business must have a healthy budget to invest. To see real results, your company needs to be comfortable with investing a few thousand dollars for at least 6-9 months. (Determine a more exact budget using our step-by-step guide to calculating a minimum budget.)

2. When you don’t have the manpower

If your company gets most of its sales from warm leads (like referrals or networking leads), your sales team may feel overwhelmed quickly if you don’t prepare them or staff up before implementing your PPC strategy.

PPC ads often drive leads to call a phone number, so make sure you have enough qualified employees available and prepared to answer those calls. (Call recording is a useful way to spot weaknesses in your customer service experience.)

If your team is struggling to manage the current pipeline, adding PPC to the mix may create more issues than value. Since PPC leads tend to be colder, your employees will need to devote more time and effort to addressing questions, identifying pain points, and overcoming objections in order to make the sale.

Managing this influx of leads that require more attention can quickly cause problems. If you have a small team that’s already at full capacity, consider whether you need to have other employees pitch in or hire additional staff before turning on the PPC fire hose.

3. When your process isn’t well-defined

Cold PPC leads require more work to move them down the funnel. This movement doesn’t happen by chance. It takes a well-defined process to make it happen.

Your sales team needs access to lead source information to know where leads are coming from, collateral to help educate and persuade potential customers, and technology to help them stay on top of their pipeline. If your company doesn’t have a CRM to organize and store lead information, think about putting one in place to help your team be more organized and effective once the PPC campaigns launch. Connecting call activity to the CRM is another smart way to track all touchpoints with potential customers (both online and offline) and streamline their path to conversion.

4. When you’re looking for a Hail Mary

Avoid putting all your eggs in one basket or one marketing channel. A PPC strategy produces the best results when it’s part of a larger marketing plan, particularly when it supports content marketing efforts like e-books, whitepapers, and webinars. It should never be launched as a silver bullet to drive sales or a last-ditch attempt to save your business.

It takes time, education, and strategy to realize a PPC campaign’s full potential. If your business can’t afford to wait, or if it doesn’t have the infrastructure to support nurturing more leads, a PPC Hail Mary won’t help you win the game.

Think you’re ready to get cooking?

We’re not trying to scare you away from PPC—quite the opposite, in fact! We’ve seen the power pay-per-click advertising has had for thousands of businesses. However, we’ve also seen many people jump the gun.

PPC can be a great way to bring in new leads and grow your business, but only when they have the budget, manpower, and process to support it, along with realistic expectations of what’s in store. If you’ve been putting the right pieces in place and think you might be ready, schedule a free consultation to tell us more about your business and learn our recipes for PPC success.

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