How to Get Clients as a Google Ads Marketer
As we’ve said, you can’t hope to make money as a Google Ads specialist at all without getting clients who will pay you for your services. Thankfully, finding Google Ads clients isn’t rocket science and there’s a number of strategies that you can follow in order to attract new clients. So, if you’re interested in learning how to get Google Ad clients, read on to find out how you can find new clients.
Bear in mind that the below strategies don’t necessarily apply to all forms of Google Ads jobs, especially if you’re a Google Ads specialist employed by a marketing agency or as part of an in-house marketing team for a corporation. Unless your responsibilities include securing new clients for the agency, you would probably never have to interact with clients at all.
Build a Brand
The first, and arguably most important, strategy of how to find clients for Google Ads services is by building your own brand. This is especially important if you’re figuring out how to start a Google Ads agency, as part of building your business is by growing your brand and gaining more brand awareness.
However, this advice will equally apply to you if you’re a freelancer. Firstly, the most important step is creating a website in order to take the first step to establishing an online presence. Next you’re going to need to market yourself until your brand is basically plastered all over the internet.
Finally, the most important of building your brand is to identify the aspects of your business that stand out most and emphasize them above the rest. What are you providing that no other competitor is? What makes you different from the rest of the competition? Find those characteristics and put them to the fore so you can rise to prominence.
At the same time, identify what weaknesses you have in comparison to your competitors and focus on working on them to improve your overall product and become a better brand overall.
Find Your Niche
One of the most important steps involved in setting up your brand is picking a niche. This is also an extremely crucial step that you need to take when you’re also figuring out how to be a Google Ads freelancer, as picking out a profitable niche is one of the best ways to guarantee a steady stream of income.
Heck, you might even manage to make significant profits by choosing a particularly profitable niche, which makes becoming a Google Ads specialist even more worth your while than before.
But how do you know which niches are more profitable than others? Often this can be done by taking a lot at the competitive landscape: certain industries will have more competition, and it’s in these industries where more money is spent on marketing, so you know that there is a lot of potential revenue to be made there.
Another way you can find a profitable niche is by identifying those industries that carry a lot of consumer value; in other words, the services or products of that industry are perceived as highly valuable for customers. In these sorts of niches and industries, there is always work to be done as companies are continuously competing for customers’ attention.
However, picking a niche is not only important to secure your revenue stream, but it also helps with your workflow. For instance, if you pick a niche that you’re already familiar with then you have effectively reduced your workload by a great deal. Moreover, picking a niche helps you focus more.
If you’re spread thin across a number of niches then you’re going to need to work even harder to understand the nuances of each niche and succeed within it. This won’t be such a problem if you’re a massive agency with a lot of resources, but smaller marketing firms would do well to establish themselves within a niche.
Discover Customers Already Using Google Ads
Our next tip is a bit of a sneaky one and that’s to target clients that are already making use of Google Ads but aren’t making the best use of the tool. This could be because they either lack the necessary experience required with using Google Ads or else they contracted a “less-than-decent” agency or specialist.
This is also good advice to follow when you’re deciding on taking up a Google Ads side hustle, as you will need to reduce your workload as much as possible in order to be successful; otherwise, you might as well work a part-time or even full-time job!
If you manage to find a case like this, take it as an opportunity to swoop in and save the day by informing that business that their paid advertising strategy is lacking and that they could be losing money as a result. Then explain how your services could improve their strategy and increase their ROI (return on investment) as a result.
At the same time, use the opportunity to research the company to understand more about them as a company as well as the points of improvement that you would put forward. This shows initiative and a proactive attitude, which could further convince the company to hire you as their agency or specialist of choice.
Needless to say, in order for this strategy to succeed you will really need to know your stuff. Moreover, much like how you need an excellent Google Ads specialist resume to land a job as a marketing specialist, it would be best to have a portfolio of successfully managed campaigns at the ready, which would make your proposition even more attractive.
Offer Free Audits or Other Freebies
Everybody in the world loves getting things for free, and companies are no exception to this. Offering a service for free is a surefire way of getting someone’s attention, so providing a small but significant service, such as diagnosing problems with someone’s paid ad campaigns, could go a long way in securing clients.
Moreover, offering something like a free audit, a free consultation, or a free strategy session will convince your potential client that not only is being a Google Ads specialist legit, but also that your services have a lot of value that could help your clients achieve their business goals much faster.
Have Your Employees Promote Your Brand
If you happen to be an agency owner and you employ a number of employees, you could ask them to help with promoting your brand by using their social media profiles to share company posts (and as we’ll see eventually being active on social media is very important). This social media boost could potentially attract clients to your business.
Moreover, you could also consider sending your workers to PPC or general SEM conferences where they would effectively double as brand ambassadors in a way.
This is a win-win situation, however: not only would you benefit from the increased exposure and potential networking, but your employees can also take it as an opportunity to learn about new marketing concepts, give talks if they’re experienced enough, and even simply unwind during the conference.
If you decide on using this method, you can also incentivize your employees to participate in these conferences by reimbursing some of their travel and accommodation costs with the next payment of their Google Ads specialist salary. Everybody wins in the end that way!
Implement a Referrals System
If you’ve had plenty of happy customers in the past, you can use this to your advantage by creating a refer-a-friend program for your clients. And once you’ve created the program, you can notify your current, and even past clients, of the benefits of participating in your referral program, and then sit back and watch the clients roll in.
For your referrals program, you should ideally offer something enticing like a discount, a free service, or maybe even a point system that clients can redeem for discounts or the like—feel free to be as creative as you please, so long as you come up with rewards that a client would actually want.
With the program set up, make sure to notify all your clients through your official channels, whether that’s email or some other form of communication. If previous clients agreed to having their email address stored in your database, you can even notify them in case they would like to use your services again in the future.
Finally, make it a point to remind clients regularly about the program as it would benefit the both of you.
Gather Testimonials & Accrue Reviews
Finally, since we’re on the topic of satisfied customers, one of the classic ways of “promoting” yourself is through client reviews and testimonials. Gathering testimonials is extremely important when attempting to persuade potential customers to choose you over other PPC agencies.
Leveraging this social proof, as it’s called, is imperative when building your landing pages and even your homepage. In fact, you should make it a point to post your testimonials on all the pages that talk about your brand and services. The same can be said for reviews, although these are generally external.
What you can do here, apart from offering a fantastic service, is think of ways you could ask for your clients to leave you a review. This could be as simple as directly asking them for a review after using your services for a length of time to putting CTAs (calls-to-action) on your website.
How to Get Google Ads Clients for Free
Some of the methods we mentioned above necessarily require forking out some money, while others require you to “lose” money in order to gain money in the future, like offering a service for free. The next strategies we’ll be looking at together don’t even require you to spend a single cent, which helps a lot with shaving off extra expenses.
Get Certified in Google Ads
A great way to gain additional clients for your Google Ads services is by picking up a Google Ads certification. While we won’t go into how to get Google Ads certified here, as we’ve already gone over that in our dedicated post on the subject, we’ll be speaking about the benefits of getting certified.
While there is a lot of online discussion regarding whether the Google Ads certification is worth it or not, there are a number of undeniable benefits to getting your certification (not to mention that it’s absolutely free!). However, the benefits that are the most relevant to our subject here are two: firstly, having a Google Ads certification can help clients trust you more.
While a good number of experienced PPC professionals don’t see any worth in the certificates, a client that’s not familiar with Google Ads or pay-per-click marketing might consider it a sign of trustworthiness. The second benefit is that having the certifications is an essential condition in joining the Google Ads partner program.
The Google Partners program is a program designed by Google itself to help agencies and specialists in better serving their clients. There are many benefits associated with the Google Partner program, including being included in a directory of trusted marketing agencies as well as receiving the Google Ads partner badge.
And since the Google Partner requirements are quite strict, clients and other advertisers looking to partner up will know that your agency is as genuine as they come. Finally, if you wish to understand which Google Ads certification is best for your needs, we have a full guide about that topic, which we would suggest you read.
Make Use of Freelancer Websites
If you’re a freelancer rather than an agency owner, then you might want to make use of freelancer websites like Upwork, Fiverr, PeoplePerHour, etc. in order to find new clients. While you cannot totally depend on these websites for work (as clients hiring from these websites will generally choose the cheapest option), you could definitely use this method to pick up extra clients.
Share Your Knowledge
Another great way of obtaining clients for free is by sharing your knowledge (kind of like what we’re doing here with our blog) with other like-minded marketers as well as clients who have questions about various aspects of Google Ads. Naturally, these have to be questions that really affect someone that’s concerned about their business.
For instance, writing posts on how much it costs to use Google Ads, how much it costs for an agency to manage Google Ads, whether Google Ads is worth using, or even the differences between Google Ads and SEO, for example, are all great topics that directly impact business owners. It’s an effective way of gaining clients passively.
Moreover, by sharing your knowledge, you’re kind of promoting yourself as an expert in the field, which boosts your reputation, making you more desirable as an agency or specialist. Finally, it’s good to note that there are many ways of achieving this, either by writing a blog, creating explainer videos, posting tips on social media, etc.
How to Find Google Ad Clients on Facebook
Being active on Facebook can also be a great way of securing clients for free. Ideally, you should consider being active on all social media platforms, including Facebook, as each platform can prove to be a good opportunity to gain new clients.
Otherwise, you could even use Facebook Ads in order to market yourself. Of course, using Facebook Ads no longer makes this method free, but if it brings new clients and your CPA (cost-per-acquisition) isn’t too great, it may still be worth your while.
Other Tips on How to Find Google Ads Clients
We’re going to be touching on some other tips that don’t exactly teach you how to get clients for Google Ads services in the same way as we saw above; in other words, these tips don’t deal with specific strategies that you can put to use to gain new clients but to gain the most value out of the clients you have or the strategies you use.
How Do I Sell Google Ads to Clients?
But what if you’re an all-round marketing agency that not only provides pay-per-click services but also other forms of marketing services, like SEO (search engine optimization) and SMO (social media optimization)? Your clients might not be immediately interested in PPC services, so you’ll need to convince them to engage in this service.
Firstly, the most important thing to do is to make sure you’re transparent and explain everything there is to know about the service. Explain what goes on behind the scenes when you’re managing and optimizing paid ads, and briefly explain how Google Ads works (more on this later).
Secondly, you need to explain all the reasons why they should consider the service, and that’s by outlining the benefits of using Google Ads. However, you can’t hope to persuade clients just by giving them a list of reasons that can easily be found through a regular Google search: no, you need to make your explanation “personal”.
Which brings us to our third and final point: give them cold hard proof that the service is going to make them money. Explain the ways of how they can enjoy a respectable ROI through Google Ads and show them your calculations: don’t expect them to just trust some numbers that you threw at them. They might think you simply came up with them.
Show them how much they would need to invest, the costs of running the service, and more importantly, what they can expect in returns and revenue if everything goes smoothly in their paid ad campaigns.
How Do I Get More Customers on Google Ads?
Naturally, since you’re a Google Ads specialist or agency, you could also leverage your PPC expertise to market your services through Google Ads. By advertising your services through the Google Ad platform, not only are you putting your own expertise to good use, but you’re also enjoying the benefits of Google Ads.
After all, why should only your clients make use of Google Ads in order to reach their business’ marketing goals? Aren’t you running a business at the end of the day as well? Therefore, you should make use of every tool in your arsenal in order to promote your brand and reach your own marketing goals.
As a final consideration, make sure to calculate your costs when considering this strategy, much like you would when taking up a client. Ensure that advertising your brand through Google Ads will be worth your while in the end.
How Do I Target Rich People in Google Ads?
Looking to target only high-profile clients for your services? The answer lies in income targeting, which is one of the many factors that you can leverage in Google Ads’ targeting options. When targeting your ads, you’re going to need to tinker with the household income option, and set it to the parameters that meet your desired goals.
For instance, you might want to only display your ads to the top 10%, which targets only wealthy individuals. However, be aware that you might get far fewer clients that way—although this would be offset with the very significant amount you would gain from a single purchase.
Otherwise, you could target the top 30% of the population when it comes to household income. Sure, these aren’t all rich people in the regular sense of the word, but they would still be quite well-off. That way you’ll be targeting more people but not all of them would have the same purchasing power, despite all of them having substantial incomes.
In the end, it all depends on your own business goals and needs.
How to Explain Google Ads to a Client
One of the best pieces of advice we can give you is that when acquiring new clients for your Google Ads services, you need to also explain to them why they need your services. Potential clients who have never made use of the Google advertising channel will simply see it as another expense not an investment.
Firstly, you need to explain to them that Google Ads are worth the money by explaining all of the benefits that they can receive through using Google’s PPC platform. These include things like seeing results relatively quickly, having a lot of control over your budget, being able to really target your ideal audience, etc.
Then you need to explain how Google Ads essentially works, by telling them that you can set a budget, which is essentially the maximum amount of money they’re willing to spend every month, and that you have to “bid” on keywords much like you would bid on items at an auction.
Explain to them that the bidding is essentially the maximum price that someone is willing to pay for a click on that keyword. Don’t explain everything that goes on behind the scenes when you’re creating and manage their paid ads because then you will confuse them. Simply tell them what they need to know.
So, for example, don’t explain all of the campaign types, just the ones that are necessary for their own paid ads.
FAQs
How do I get clients for Google Ads?
There are many methods that you can use in order to secure a clientele for your Google Ads services, and not all of them necessarily come with a price tag, which is great for avoiding unnecessary expenses. Some of the standard ways that you can gain new clients for Google Ads is by building a website and establishing your online presence, offering freebies to potential clients, reaching out to people who are already using Google Ads (badly), and getting certified in Google Ads.
How do I make Google Ads more profitable?
A few ways you can make your Google Ads business more profitable is by attracting more clients, or even by convincing your clients to increase their ad spend. However, this must be done with the clients’ best interests in mind: so don’t just persuade them to up their budget simply to receive more revenue.
You need to do this strategically by explaining the benefits that your client will receive from increasing their ad budget, like the chance of gaining a higher Ad Rank. There’s also the option of increasing your rate, but arbitrarily charging more for the sake of earning more is a little dishonest, if we’re being frank.
