Biggest Challenge Selling Google Ads to Customers
If you’re going through the process of understanding all the requirements, pitfalls, and benefits of opening a Google Ads agency, then you need to also be aware of the challenges that you might face when starting your agency. Of course, what we’re going to say here can also be applied to becoming a Google Ads freelancer.
What we have found to be the toughest aspect when trying to sell Google Ads services to potential clients is overcoming misconceptions about the nature of PPC and marketing in general, as well as trying to justify a form of marketing that requires continuous payment in order to work.
Unfortunately, there are many false ideas floating about regarding the nature of work, like whether being a Google Ads specialist is legit or not. So, you’ll have to patiently explain to each client not only how Google Ads and pay-per-click in general work, but also the benefits of making use of this form of marketing.
We’ll be looking at how to overcome these challenges later on in this article.
How Do I Get Clients for Google Ads?
Of course, you won’t be selling any Google Ads services if you won’t attract new clients to your business. This is why it’s also fundamental to understand how to bring in clients just as well as how you can convince them to start making use of your paid advertising services. Otherwise, you won’t be able to make money as a Google Ads specialist at all.
Unfortunately, there’s no quick tricks that you can make use of that will suddenly bring you clients in droves; sadly, it simply doesn’t work that way and acquiring clients is another skill in itself. This is a reality that you need to accept if you ever want to make becoming a Google Ads specialist worth it.
Thankfully, however, there are many ways that you can attract clients to your business, with the most important being building a strong brand. Therefore, you need to pull out all the stops in order to make your business a very attractive option for clients looking for Google Ads services.
As you know, this involves all the marketing tricks in the book. So, much like you would work on your clients’ websites and make them attractive to customers, you need to do the same for your own brand.
Other than that, you can use other “tricks” to find Google Ads clients, like offering a free service, having your employees promote your brand, and accumulating reviews.
How Do I Price Google Ads to Clients?
Another important skill that you need to pick up when learning how to sell Google Ads to clients is knowing how much to charge for Google Ads management. And it’s easy to see why: pricing your services appropriately requires a delicate balance of charging enough money so that your business venture is profitable but also remaining an attractive option to clients.
If your services are unaffordable to the majority of clients you’re pitching your services too, then no matter amount of persuasive skills can convince a client to take you on as the Google Ads agency for them: at the end of the day, your clients need to make money too, and if you’re asking for too much, they’ll just go to someone else.
What’s most important is that you understand what pricing models exist, what the differences between them are, and what benefits and drawbacks each model offers. For instance, you should know the differences between the flat fee and percentage of ad spend models, and what each one has to offer.
After taking what sort of pricing model you’d like to use into consideration, then you’re going to need to judge what a good rate with regards to your industry is. Therefore, you should check what sort of prices your competitors are offering and try to match them, or even offer lower prices—if you can afford it, that is.
And that’s because you also need to factor in what sorts of costs and expenses you’re encountering in the day-to-day running of your business. Striking this balance is important in order to be able to attract clients effectively.
How to Sell PPC Services
Now it’s finally time to look at all the ways that you can secure clients for your Google Ads services. Some of these “tactics” are actually quite simple, while others are more complex. We recommend using as many of these as possible in order to secure the greatest number of clients possible for your business!
However, before we go on, an important point that should be made is this: there is a subtle but fundamental distinction between knowing how to get clients for Google Ads and knowing how to sell Google Ads management services to those same clients. The difference is very nuanced, we admit, but it’s there.
For instance, there’s an important difference between getting leads (that is, people that seem to be interested in your services) and conversions (people who have actually proven interested in your services and have made a purchase). Many of the strategies that deal with finding clients in reality only explain how to gain leads and not how to secure them into full-fledged customers.
Moreover, if you run a marketing firm that doesn’t just offer Google Ads and other pay-per-click marketing services, but offers multiple forms of digital marketing like SEO, then it might be the case that you’ll have clients that aren’t interested in paid advertising. For example, if that client contracts you for SEO or video marketing services, then they might not be immediately interested, or interested at all, in PPC.
This is where knowing how to sell PPC management services comes in. By presenting a powerful case for the client, where with an investment in Google Ads they can receive more clients, revenue, and brand awareness, then you might be able to persuade them that pay-per-click management services are worth investing in.
That way, the both of you emerge as winners: your clients will reap the benefits of paid advertising, and you’ll receive more income as well.
Be Transparent, Honest, & Consistent In Your Sales Pitch
One of the biggest problems in the pay-per-click marketing world is that you often have agents that overpromise and underdeliver. While we don’t want to accuse anyone of any dishonest tactics or call any other agencies snake oil salesmen, it’s still an issue that is prevalent.
Honesty is the best policy, so the proverb goes, and this is the mindset and attitude that you need to adopt if you want to succeed in selling Google Ads. If you would like to consistently get clients, you need to be upfront in everything you tell them. This means that you need to explain the services that you’re offering, what clients can expect by a certain date, what the expected expenses are, and so on.
And this even goes so far as declining to take on a client if you think their business is not ready for Google Ads yet, or is not even a good fit for pay-per-click marketing.
Finally, make sure that what’s being delivered to the client matches what was promised to them. Otherwise, this is a serious breach of trust and you would easily lose a potential long-term client. Furthermore, if that client decides to write a bad review about you, then your future prospects are forever damaged.
Naturally, no one can stop bad reviews from occurring, and there’s also the possibility of shady competitors making up fake reviews to damage your reputation, but putting that aside, our aim as agency owners is to minimize the number of bad reviews we receive. This is why we need to give consistent and excellent service every time.
Everyone Should Know Their Stuff
This is related to the previous point we’ve made, but whether it’s you, as the agency owner, handling the sales, or anyone else that you’ve hired as a salesperson, you should be familiar with Google Ads.
And this is for a very obvious reason: while you can very well sell a product you know little about, this will result in a discrepancy between promises and results. In other words, there will be a noticeable difference between what’s been promised at the sales stage and what will be delivered once the campaigns are worked on.
Even if the difference isn’t particularly great, a client can still become upset when what’s delivered doesn’t match what’s been sold to him. When the salesperson has an idea of how the platform and what’s possible, they can make way more realistic sales pitches.
However, they don’t need to be Google Ads experts to the extent that they know every trick in the PPC book and can manage paid ad campaigns with their eyes close; they don’t even need to have an amazing Google Ads specialist resume; but they do know need to be able to understand the fundamentals very well.
So, it doesn’t matter if you hire a salesperson that doesn’t know the first thing about Google Ads: all you need to do is train them on the basics and you’re good to go. In fact, you can even get them to become certified in Google Ads, which can also help your agency as a whole when applying to become a Google Partner.
Despite what marketers might think about whether the Google Ads certification is worth it, it still provides a foundational understanding of the platform—and it’s even free!
Educate Your Clients & Counter Common Objections
As we’ve said, you need to be extremely candid when it comes to selling Google Ads: anything less and you’re putting your reputation on the line, which isn’t good for gaining more clients in the future. This involves explaining to the client what exactly they’re getting into.
While it can be considered to be a neat marketing trick to say that your agency has unlocked all the special Google Ads secrets and knows what makes the algorithm tick, it’s still wise to explain how the platform works to a client, as well as the fully prepare them for the required expenses, the expected time until results can be produced, and any other potential setbacks.
There are also a number of objections that may crop up when trying to convince a client to take up Google Ads. These most common of which that we’ve found are the following:
“I’m already using SEO!”
Sure, SEO is a powerful marketing channel, but it should hardly ever be the only one you use. This is especially true when so many changes to Google’s results pages, and those of other worthwhile search engines, are resulting in more and more clutter, pushing organic results further into obscurity.
And that’s not to mention that certain SERP (search engine results page) features encourage users not to click on organic results at all! This is why you should also leverage the power of PPC, and other marketing channels, when engaging in digital marketing. It guarantees more results that way.
“Using Google Ads is way too expensive!”
Well, firstly, not even SEO is free: it may appear “free”, but in reality there are a lot of costs involved, such as tool subscriptions. Secondly, just because you need to constantly pay for PPC for it to work, doesn’t exactly mean it’s expensive. PPC is only expensive if you don’t take into account the returns you’re receiving from it.
Finally, as a marketer you’ll have lots of control on how to reduce your clients’ ad spend, such as setting a maximum budget, maximum cost-per-click, and even optimizing ads so that your clients’ only pay for the clicks that really matter.
“PPC doesn’t convert and doesn’t produce a good ROI!”
If your client has already made use of paid advertising but they didn’t see any good results from it, then you need to probe a little bit at this point. You need to figure out what went wrong with their previous paid ad strategy and explain to them how and why the strategy failed and what you would do differently to guarantee a good ROI.
For instance, a common issue could have been that they were using a substandard landing page or else that the company’s offer wasn’t compelling enough for users to convert. In these situations, no amount of PPC pixie dust can fix those problems, and other solutions will need to be found.
Other common problems would have been a lack of conversion tracking, a lack of remarketing campaigns, not utilizing negative keywords to their fullest potential, etc.
Reach Out to Clients That Already Use Google Ads
One of the most effective ways that you can sell PPC services is by making contact with businesses that are already making use of Google Ads. The effectiveness of this strategy lies in the fact that you don’t need to convince your client about the power of Google Ads: they’ve already seen it with their own eyes.
A good idea to make use of at this point is to gather a list of businesses that are already advertising their services. You can either do this manually by Googling certain prominent keywords in your niche and taking note of the businesses that are advertising, or else by using tools that can do this work for you.
Once you’ve compiled your list, you should analyze each one of those companies’ paid ad campaigns and see if there is anything that you would do better yourself. For instance, maybe a particular company isn’t making smart use of ad extensions or else you can tell that their ads aren’t particularly working well for them.
This is when you reach out to them and pitch your offer to improve their paid advertising strategy. Otherwise, you can even contact them and see if you can offer a lower price and/or better results than the agency that they’re currently contracting.
As a side note, this is also an effective tactic if you don’t plan to run an agency at all, but simply take up a Google Ads side hustle. When taking up a side hustle, you’re going to need to minimize the amount of work you need to do by as much as possible, and so approaching clients that already use Google Ads saves a lot of the work of having to set up their account, campaigns, etc.
Offer Google Ads Services to Your Existing Clients
If you’re an agency owner, or a marketing specialist with multiple areas of expertise, it would also be a good idea to pitch Google Ads to clients you already have but make use of your other services. The benefit of this method is that you would already be knowledgeable of your clients’ businesses, their needs, and marketing goals.
For instance, if you know your client is a good fit for Google local service ads because they run a physical business, then you already have an angle of how to pitch your services to them.
Moreover, since you’re already aware of their budgetary constraints, what their goals are, and how many leads they would require in order to guarantee profitability, you can easily draft up a strategy plan that you can use to pitch Google Ads or other PPC services to them. In the end, you only need to make sure that the client is coming out on top.
Finally, if they’re already using your services for another form of marketing, let’s say SEO for instance, you can show them a plan of how adding PPC to their overall marketing strategy will definitely pique their interests, making your life all the much easier. In short, you need to present them with an offer that’s too good to refuse.
Optimize Your Sales Pitch to the Fullest
Sometimes, it’s not always possible to sell your services to clients that have already made use of Google Ads; you’re going to need to pitch to business owners that know about the marketing channel but wouldn’t know the first thing about it, or others who have never even heard of it!
This is where you really need to double down on your salesmanship: you really have to hammer home the benefits of Google Ads and convince them that Google Ads are worth the investment. This would include explaining benefits such as quick results, multiple targeting options, lots of control over budget, in-built data analytics, etc.
But the most important benefit for your client is clearly the immense amount of customization available within Google Ads. This allows you to offer tailor-made solutions to your client, which makes any offer you put forward even more enticing. And as you well know, the number of options that Google Ads provides is almost limitless.
If your client has a physical location, then there local services ads and location ad extensions. If your client wants to display their product in a video, then there’s video ads available. If your client only wants calls between certain times of day, then there’s the call ad extension and dayparting options.
If you can show them that their needs can be met thanks to how highly customizable Google Ads is, then your offer will be all the more tempting, making it easier to sell.
How to Sell Google Ads to Clients for Free
The best ways to sell Google Ads to clients for free is through either accumulating as many testimonials and reviews as possible, by partnering up with other agencies, and by creating a refer-a-friend program. Collecting testimonials and reviews costs nothing but can go a long way in convincing future clients to purchase your services.
If you have friends that are also agency owners, or you’ve come to know other agency owners through networking, then you might reach an agreement with them by offering PPC services to their clients. This is only possible, of course, if their agency doesn’t provide PPC services but their clients are actively looking for a Google Ads agency.
Finally, a refer-a-friend program won’t cost you anything either—although, truth be told, whatever freebie or discount you give out will cause a tiny dent in your returns. However, this is easily offset by the acquisition of a new client, as you can imagine.
Best Audience to Sell Google Ad Management To
Finally, let’s close off this blog post by identifying which clients are the best to pitch PPC services to. As we said before, one of the best kinds of clients that you can pitch your services to is the client that is already paying for Google Ads management services.
These clients don’t need convincing to try out Google Ads: they only need to be convinced that you are the best agency for your needs. However, there are other clients that would make great candidates for selling PPC advertising to. And these would be clients whose business makes perfect sense for Google Ads.
Clients that are in an extremely competitive niche, for example, would be perfect to sell Google Ads to. This is because they need every help they can get in order to succeed and so they’re likely already willing to invest in marketing. Other ideal customers are those that have high consumer value, high profit margins, and continuous seasonal promotions.
Clients with high customer value are those that are most likely to have long-term clients themselves; for example, dentists, family doctors, mechanics, personal trainers, etc. Most people will stick to the same doctor for the rest of their life, for example, so getting them a new customer via PPC is extremely valuable for them in the long run.
Clients with high profit margins are those that gain a lot from a single purchase; these would include car dealers, furniture dealers, lawyers, etc. The cost-per-click and cost-per-acquisition for their keywords end up being negligible compared to a single purchase.
Clients with seasonal promotions include florists, party shops, event planners and organizers, retail and ecommerce stores, etc. These can make good clients for PPC as they can benefit from a surge in sales on certain occasions, like Black Friday and Valentine’s Day.
FAQs
How can I make money from Google Ads?
There are many ways that you can make money from Google Ads, ranging from working Google Ads specialist jobs at an agency or a corporation to freelancing as a PPC expert to becoming your own agency owner and offering Google Ads services.
Just be aware of the differences between these methods: with the first one you’ll be making money from your Google Ads specialist salary, while with the others you’re going to need to invoice clients for your services. All of them have their pros and cons, which you ought to be aware of.
How do I sell my PPC ads?
Just as there’s more than way to skin a cat, so the gruesome saying goes, there’s more than one way to sell your PPC ads. One of the best ways of selling Google Ads to clients is simply being honest about what the service consists of, what the expenses are, etc. By being honest with clients, they will appreciate it and will want to contract you even more.
How do I get more PPC clients?
Getting more PPC clients involves a number of strategies that you need to pursue, some of them easily achievable and completely free, while others require a lot of time and investment. The most important strategy to use is to build up your brand in every possible way: so that means creating a website, being active on social media, creating a blog, advertising your services, etc.
How do you promote PPC?
There are numerous ways of promoting your PPC services, including marketing yourself through conventional marketing methods such as SEO, social media, or even PPC. Otherwise you can implement other kinds of strategies like creating a refer-a-friend program or by gathering as many testimonials and reviews as possible.
