Marketers love acronyms, and trying to keep them all straight can feel a bit like swimming in a bowl of alphabet soup—overwhelming.

So, to cut through the cacophony of letters and bring meaning to your marketing strategy, let’s focus today on two specific acronyms that refer to tactics designed to enhance your print shop’s digital presence, help you reach your target audience, drive traffic to your website and ultimately grow your business.  After all, that’s the goal, right? To acquire more customers, bring in more sales and boost your revenue.

Let’s start with SEO—or search engine optimization.

Simply put, SEO is a process of adapting your website content in order to help your website rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs)—you know, the page you see after you enter search terms on Google or Bing. The goal of search engine optimization is to get more organic traffic to a website, which can lead to more opportunities to convert potential customers. So, keeping your eyes on the prize (e.g. more customers, sales, etc.) means getting more eyes on your website.

Why should SEO matter to you? Three reasons:

1. It improves your website’s ability to get found by people searching for print shops. Most consumers find businesses online before they go hunt for their physical location. If your website isn’t showing up in search results, it’s almost like it doesn’t exist—at least not to the millions of consumers and print buyers who are searching for “local printers” or “print shop near me.” Even if you don’t want to offer e-commerce, it’s still important for your business to show up in search results to attract all the potential customers who are doing their digital due diligence.
    
2. It increases brand awareness. You’re not likely to get an immediate click from every potential buyer who searches for a print shop near them. But each time your business shows up in search results, it’s another chance for it to register in the mind of the person searching. Over time, if you’re showing up more often and higher on SERPs, your business’ brand awareness is growing, and you’re establishing your print shop as a viable option.
    
3. It offers long-term benefits, like sustained lead generation from organic traffic and brand authority. Investing in SEO is not a one-and-done venture; algorithms change, your business grows, your website gets updated. So, while you want to consider SEO an ongoing process, you will reap what you sow over the long haul, like sustained lead gen and brand authority. On the flip side, if you don’t keep your website optimized for search engines—and your competitors do—your print shop is likely to fall behind in search results, become irrelevant and lose potential buyers.

While SEO offers you a boost in organic lead generation, PPC offers a boost in paid lead gen—let’s talk about why that’s important.

PPC stands for pay-per-click (or CPC, cost-per-click), which is a type of online advertising that’s very cost-effective because you only pay a fee when someone clicks on your ad. PPC is based on keywords, so ads only appear when someone searches for a keyword related to the product or service you’re promoting.

Essentially, PPC means that you’re paying for targeted visits to your website. Google Ads is the most popular PPC system in the world, and when it’s working right, the fee is trivial because the click is worth more than what you pay for it. Let’s say you pay $3.00 for a click, but that click results in a $250 sale. Two words: Worth it.

Here are three ways your print shop can benefit from PPC:

1. It can help you reach specific audiences based on demographics, interests and behavior. So, you can specify, “I want my ad to show up to these certain people who are interested in these specific things.” That means your ad will be served to the most relevant people, which ups the chance that they’ll be interested in your business. Your leads from PPC will, in theory, be more qualified.
    
2. You’ll have the ability to test, optimize and scale for maximum impact. Test, test, test! That’s how you learn what types of messaging and ads inspire action. PPC allows you to run different types of ads to see what resonates with your target audience and then tweak and zhuzh them to make them as effective as possible.
    
3. PPC allows you to track measurable results and ROI. With some types of advertising, like print ads or TV spots, it can be hard to determine effectiveness. Not so with PPC. You’ll be able to see exactly which ads drive traffic, how much return you get on your investment and who’s responding to your messaging. This means you know exactly how your PPC marketing efforts are paying off—or not.

Along with SEO, PPC is an essential digital marketing tactic for print shops that are trying to navigate a very competitive landscape, and if you use both correctly, they can put you several steps ahead of your competitors who are not. You’ll see increased website traffic, more sales, a wider reach and better brand awareness for not a lot of money.

They do require some effort and know-how, though—and if these are two tactics you’d like to explore more, we’d be happy to help you get started. Take a look at how PrinterPresence can help you grow your business by adding SEO and PPC to your marketing strategy.