How Hedge Funds Can Benefit from Pay-Per-Click

A quick primer on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising; if you’re already familiar with the concept, skip this paragraph. PPC ads work in a way that ensures you are paying for people to see your ads. Unlike newspaper ads, PPC ads will actually tell you how many people were (1) exposed to the ad and (2) clicked on the ad (thereby looking at the resulting information on your website. When you run a PPC ad, you are paying only when someone clicks the ad. The fact that PPC ads cost nothing unless they are clicked on gives you two benefits: (1) You can control the cost of the campaign. (2) You can use PPC ads for branding (leveraging the free exposure). PPC ads have many, many more benefits than these two and are an art form on their own. But this article will focus on the basics and how hedge funds can apply PPC ads to their benefit.

Getting Started with PPC Ads

When most people talk about PPC ads, they are talking about Google’s ad system. However, you have many choices with what PPC ad network you want. You can use other search engines, you can use website network ads, and you can even use single website ads.

Generally, for testing your ads and getting a large amount of exposure at the beginning, you’ll want to start out with Google. Google simply has the largest amount of users, which can help you quickly gain recognition in the hedge fund industry. The only downside with Google in my experience is that it tends to be more expensive that other PPC networks. But you pay for what you get.

Why PPC for Hedge Funds?

Hedge funds can benefit from PPC more than other types of businesses because of the precise targeting and branding opportunities PPC ads offer. PPC advertising is one of the most controllable forms of advertising, allowing you to laser-guide your ads to the right people. You can also strictly control your budget, the timing of your ads, and even whether you want to use your ads for lead-generation or branding (optimizing for clicks and optimizing for impressions, respectively).

In addition, because most hedge funds are not using PPC advertising (yet), you stand a good chance of getting leads from a source not yet targeted by other hedge funds. Because the hedge fund marketing industry is still quite primitive, you would benefit from starting your PPC advertising campaign earlier rather than later.

Hedge-Fund Lead Generation

The problem with advertising in magazines, on websites through banner-ads, or even by direct mail and cold-calling is that you have no way of controlling the type of lead you’re getting. Anyone can purchase a financial magazine, and much of that magazine’s readership is going to be people unsuited to investing in hedge funds. Even direct mail doesn’t allow you to completely control who gets your package. Not only are there always some mismailings and old information in mailing lists, but you can never know if your leads have opened the package or are even interested in what you have to offer. But PPC solves all these problems.

When you run a PPC ad, you not save thousands of dollars on your campaign but get interested leads. You know your leads are interested because they are willfully clicking on your ads. Thus, the people looking at your marketing materials after the click are very specific leads: People who you’ve decided you want to target and who also are interested in hearing about you. These are the leads you want. If you cannot sell your hedge fund to them, you can’t sell it to anyone.