Think of all the digital advertising platforms you have heard of… what comes to mind first? Google? Facebook? LinkedIn? Well, one that you forgot to mention and probably have not been using is one of the most popular out there, Microsoft Advertising! In fact, in a highly scientific LinkedIn Poll posted by our founder, Alex Melen, asking about digital marketers’ favorite advertising platform, Microsoft Ads received only 4% of the 100 votes.
Often left out of the advertising discussion (even with our clients), Microsoft Advertising has continued to expand its reach and market share in recent years and lets your business be seen on Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo search engines. In recent years, Microsoft has become one of the most innovative, most used and powerful search engines for users, and should be considered a crucial part of any marketing mix and strategy for businesses of all sizes. So why should you be advertising on Microsoft?
Competitive & Growing Market Share
One thing I hear all the time from our clients when mentioning Microsoft is nobody uses it, so what’s the point? We see a lot of surprised faces when we tell these clients that Microsoft Advertising has over 37% of the PC market share in the US, with searches totaling more than 7.5 billion per month!
Not only are a significant number of people on Bing, there are in total about 48.6 million PC searchers that do not use Google, so if you’re only advertising on Google, you are missing out on millions of potential customers for your business. Microsoft Advertising already has a good portion of the market, and they are growing with increased searches on various devices like Cortana, Xbox, Amazon Fire and Kindle which are all powered by Bing. One of the main pillars of the marketing mix is to find where your customers are looking for your product and to be there at the right time. Advertising on Microsoft for our clients has not only done this, but helped increase brand awareness, conversions and revenue due to the massive market share.
Less Competition = More Cost Efficient
Another result of everything we have mentioned so far is that Microsoft’s Advertising platform has much less competition, thus making its CPCs far less expensive and more cost efficient for your business, big or small. For example, one of our large law firms in the NYC Metro Area was having trouble competing with a sizable budget on Google as CPCs were $100+ for most targeted keywords – a few clicks per day would eat up their entire budget leaving them struggling to generate high quality leads and actual cases.
After struggling for months with the huge competition and CPCs, we were able to move them over to Microsoft. CPCs are now in the area of $15-20, allowing us to generate significantly more clicks with our budget and a lower Cost Per Lead. With this huge drop in CPC, we can be more efficient with our budget, experiment more with new approaches and campaigns. We are now able to generate more clicks with a smaller budget, have increased brand recognition for the firm, and generated more leads and real cases for the firm with the help of Microsoft’s cheaper CPCs and less competition.
Easiest Platform To Get Started On
You might be thinking that creating and managing these campaigns will be time consuming, which can deter you from getting started. Well, if you already have a Google Ads account, you can simply import your campaigns directly over to Microsoft in a matter of minutes, so getting started is faster than any other platform. The only thing you’ll have to do after that is adjust your budgets and set up conversion tracking and you’ll be ready to start. Bottom line, if you’re already on Google, creating campaigns, ads and everything needed can be done in 24 hours or less, so why wait? Get started ASAP.
Innovative Advertising Offerings
Not only does Microsoft offer just about everything on their platform that Google has, they have incredible new features and consistently are adding more. One of my favorite Microsoft exclusives is LinkedIn profile targeting. This feature is an amazing tool for B2B advertisers as you are able to target people with your ads by their job functions, industries and companies (it’s something not offered anywhere else; other than LinkedIn obviously). Now if you know who your audience is, you can target them on Microsoft and other people like them without having the extremely high CPCs of being on LinkedIn.
Another great feature for our car dealership clients is the automotive showcase ads, which actually show the inventory of vehicles available at a dealership just on the search engine results page and images tab on Bing. Our dealership clients love this and we see about a 6% increase in clicks from these campaigns on average. Not only are there these two powerful options, but there are a slew of other features that Microsoft has been adding in recent months, including multiple image extensions, so users can see everything they need before they even click your ad, more in-market audiences for hyper-targeted campaigns and more. Microsoft continues to expand and improve upon their platform and features and as we have seen, businesses of all sizes can utilize and generate great results from using their platform.
Microsoft Ads is often the forgotten platform by many small and large businesses that don’t see the value in spending their marketing dollars there. With a growing market share, less competition, an easy to use platform and more features arriving each month, Microsoft Ads should be a key piece to your online advertising puzzle… but right now it probably isn’t. We have seen countless businesses of all industries grow after starting to spend on Microsoft and we think your business can most likely do the same.
If you’re looking to get started and see some great results on Microsoft, we at SmartSites can help take your business and advertising to the next level!
