5 essential PPC skills every agency pro must have

Want to start your PPC agency career correctly (without skipping essential steps)? Here are the top five skills to focus on. The post 5 essential PPC skills every agency pro must have appeared first on Search Engine Land. - Most digital agencies today are willing to hire beginner marketers. Unfortunately, many do not provide meaningful training on pay-per-click (PPC) marketing. Even worse, some colleagues might hide or misrepresent essential information. While you can find much of that information online for free, it’s often a complicated mess. To address this, here is a basic five-step growth plan to become a PPC expert as fast as possible. 1. Master client relationship I realize it may sound cliché for the top skill.  But after over a decade working in PPC (and training hundreds of specialists), it’s by far the primary reason for PPC people to climb the agency ladder. Why? Because you’re responsible for driving your client’s growth – and that’s a people-first business. Be aware PPC expectations are high, and performance is never a straight, easy line.  You’ll have to fix stuff that people think is critical or convince those same people not to touch anything despite what they perceive as red flags.  And that can quickly become stressful, getting in your way when it comes to handling relationships. To go through these relatively tough times all while keeping your client happy and on board, you’ll need to display composure, explain technical and analytical concepts in plain English – and remain patient! So how do you master client relationships, you ask? It’s a deep topic to unpack in a few lines, but here are some pointers to get you started. Build trust Trust comes with time. Whenever your client needs you for real, make sure to be the one person your client knows he or she can rely on.  Let’s take an example: picture a last-minute project that really matters to your client but not so much to you. (Not to mention that it’s slightly out of your scope.)  An untrustworthy agency point of contact would not support this client. But you should. With trust comes long-term, impactful achievements. Show expertise Believe it or not, I’ve seen plenty of agency people not preparing for client meetings. Some don’t anticipate questions and can only respond with “I’ll get back to you.” Do not be that person. Send meeting agendas in advance. Provide meeting notes, action points, and deadlines.  In short, be reliable. Be empathetic Not everybody behaves the same way. And not every meeting has to be sunshine and flowers.  You don’t like your client that much?  Guess what, that’s OK.  Give them a break: not everybody likes you either, anyway.  Make sure to be the person in the room who makes the project go forward, even if times are tough and people are getting rigid.  2. Think strategically OK, I know. Strategy is one of those buzzwords, along with cloud computing, innovation, big data and blockchain. However, it remains absolutely vital for successful agency PPC specialists. What does it mean to be strategic? It varies a lot based on the field you work in. Just read this HBR strategy article, and you’ll see it doesn’t quite apply to day-to-day PPC work. So, with all its flaws, allow me to provide a very PPC-centric, operational strategy definition:  “Strategy is a combination of items that allow long-term, significant business growth. Significant being at least 30% of your top KPI.” In other words, thinking strategically means prioritizing your efforts based on the outcome.  Here is an example to help make it clearer. Next time you want to run an A/B test, go through the following steps: Take a hard look in the mirror. Identify if your A/B test doesn’t drive a 30% growth in your top KPI. Reprioritize using higher-impact items. PPC beginners will rarely work on operational strategy. However, if you can understand the above, it’s a great starting point.  To help you get to the next step, here is a media plan-like framework to structure your strategy thinking: Goals For ecommerce clients, it will often be revenue paired with return on ad spend (ROAS).  With lead gen clients, marketing qualified leads (MQLs) will be paired with cost per MQL.  Can you challenge those?  For example, include margin to improve ROAS. Or MQL value instead of simply MQL volume. Budget It will either be “unlimited as long as you hit a specific ROAS target” or a specific $ number per month/year. Can you challenge that?  For example, is the budget allocated to the right product line or geo to maximize your goal? Is seasonality taken into consideration? Targeting You want to reach a target audience. To do that, you will want to use ad networks and channels. Sometimes, those items aren’t set up to maximize your goals.  When you find such pockets of growth, you can think strategically. Messaging, landing page and CTA Now, that seems like an obvious one, right?  Careful, though, since there’s never just one way to talk to prospects and have them act to reach your goal.  Use your critical thinking and Ads Libraries to develop other (hopefully better!) ways to address your target audience. Get the daily newsletter search marketers rely on. “> “> “> Processing…Please wait. SUBSCRIBE See terms. function getCookie(cname) { let name = cname + "="; let decodedCookie = decodeURIComponent(document.cookie); let ca = decodedCookie.split(';'); for(let i = 0; i

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