It’s an exciting time for a start-up.

You’re gearing-up staff, finalizing your budget, and getting ready to go public with the offer you know is going to blow people away.

As soon as they know you exist.

That’s the job of your marketing.  You target your audience, empathize with their needs, and create a message that shows you have the solution to their problem.

But how do you get in front of them?

Digital marketing, of course, opens a wide-range of options, from search to social media.  You’ll want to evaluate them all for your long-term marketing efforts.

But when you’re at the starting point of developing your audience, there is one strategy you must focus on:  pay per click (PPC) advertising.

PPC is available on many platforms, with the major one being Google Adwords (Bing also has PPC, and social media platforms like Facebook also offer versions of PPC advertising).

Adwords – in particular – is the place you should focus your marketing efforts.

But there’s a catch:  you won’t want to.  Free’s too tempting.

You’ll want to try to get as much “free” traffic as you can.  You know about SEO, social media, blogging, free article syndication, and you’ll start to think like George from Seinfeld with pay parking:

“Why pay when, if I apply myself, I can get it for free?” – George Costanza

This is an easy belief to fall into when you start your online marketing.  But like the Costanza’s, it’s a “sickness”.

Note that this goes beyond the fact that there is no such thing as “free” marketing.  All traffic is earned, requiring work and resources.

The larger issue is one of strategy.  PPC advertising is the best way, early on, to test content and gather data on what your target audience responds to.

Because it’s a bidding platform, PPC campaigns give you elements of control you can’t get from organic, earned traffic, including:

• The opportunity to gain immediate ranking and exposure for prime keyword targets.
• The ability to split test ads, campaigns, and landing pages with precise control.
• Methods to execute timing and targeting unavailable with organic traffic.
• The highest ranking position on results pages, with particular dominance on mobile screens.
• Strong opportunities to use advertising content that targets your highest-value leads.
• Precise budgetary controls so you focus resources on top KPI’s.
• High advertising ROI because of all of the above.

You’ll run your PPC campaigns to gain initial traffic and capture important data that will influence all your future marketing.  But it doesn’t end there.  The best PPC campaigns are not just starters you turn-off later so you don’t have to pay for clicks.

Rather, they are optimized to the point that they offer as strong a return on your marketing investment as any other marketing channel.  In fact, PPC tends to be the best advertising channel for direct-response, conversion-focused material.  This targets leads further into the buying cycle, which gets you the highest conversion rates.

In short, PPC campaigns are likely to deliver you hotter leads and more new customers than any other channel.  Far from being a platform to avoid on the cheap, it’s a place to favor your marketing investment and seek the highest returns.

Sometimes it just works better to pay for parking.