Last week, I wrote a post titled: “The question the smartest remodelers ask about PPC advertising.”

That question is “What’s the maximum number of leads you can get me?”

(If you want the answer, send an email to noriskppc@mymonline.com. We’ll take a look at your services and location to crunch the numbers and give you an estimate.)

I went on to tell you about some of our biggest PPC clients, including a company that spends up to $230,000 a month on pay-per-click advertising.

Now, let me tell you the fun little story behind the company that spends that much…

I started working with them in 2011. I went up to their office and met with them for a “kick off” meeting like I always do, where we discuss strategies and budgets.

One of their budget items, of course, was PPC. At the time, the company was doing about $40 million a year and had a marketing budget of roughly $4 million.

I scratched my head when I looked at their PPC number for the previous month. It was $20,000.

“$20,000?” I asked, “Why is this number so LOW?”

They responded that that’s just how much they had budgeted. It was $20,000 a month in peak months (seasonal business), and only $10,000 for non-peak months.

When I asked how they came up with that number, they said it was “just how much they allocated.” Basically, it was an arbitrary number.

So I had them pull the records from the previous month, and asked them if the $20,000 lasted the whole month, or if they “ran out.”

Turns out, they had “run out” of PPC money to spend on the 11^th of the month.

In other words, from the 12^th to the 31^st of the month, they spent NOTHING on PPC. Zero. Nada. Zilch. They had no budget left.

Then I had them research what their cost per lead and conversion rate on their PPC leads had been.

Turns out, PPC was their absolute LOWEST cost per lead of ANYTHING they were doing… and the conversions were actually HIGHER than average compared to their other lead sources!

Then I found out (to my horror) that they were only running the PPC campaigns in less than HALF of the geographic area they serviced.

Why? Obviously, they hadn’t allocated enough budget.

Here’s what I said to them, word for word:

“ARE YOU CRAZY?! You should spend every possible PENNY that you can on PPC… BEFORE you spend a single cent on anything else…and I mean ANYTHING else!”

They got the point. They immediately shifted their budget out of less productive things to free it up to “max spend” on PPC.

Over the next six years, their company continued to grow (to well over $100 million), and as their footprint grew, their PPC budget grew as well… all the way up to $230,000 a month.

Honest to goodness, that’s a true story.

And here are the takeaways:

1. Not everyone “gets” the power of PPC right away—even really smart people running really successful companies. That’s okay.
2. You can grow into PPC. Yes, “unlimited” is the best number of leads to buy. But start with 50 or 100 a month—we’ll help you grow to as many as exist.

If your entire marketing budget is only $20,000 a month, the thought of spending all or most of it on PPC might be frightening.

But realistically, if you stagger your lead flow (50 the first month, 100 the 2^nd month, 150 the 3^rd month, etc.), you can just let the sales from PPC finance the growth of your company.

In other words…

Instead of having a $20,000 budget and a $2-million company, why not have a $40,000 marketing budget (half in PPC, the other half in whatever you’re already doing) and have a $4-million company?

Boom, you just doubled your sales. And there’s no risk. For proof, visit MYM’s No-Risk PPC Lead Generation page.

Next post, I’ll run the actual numbers on how No-Risk PPC Lead Generation can finance the growth of your company.

© 2017, Rich Harshaw. All rights reserved.