Does PPC work for a retail store?

Hard to give solid advice with half the puzzle, but I understand the want to protect your niche.

I think you are running into a problem. You have to educate your audience on the product, then convince them it's worth buying. Usually as Internet Marketer's we only have to match people who already know a product and are possibly interested in buying.

Since it's a tourist type product area I'm assuming you can target areas you have stores in. You need to educate these people on your product, but can't find them, until they find you.

Create a hubpage, squidoo lense, and youtube video all closely related to the same topic. Depending on your ROI, I would recommend submitting to all the top tier article sites as well with terms familiar with others, yet similar enough to convert for your product.

Example:
Things to do in Lancaster, PA
-related keywords to win - events in lancaster, PA

Tourist Attractions in Lancaster, PA
-related keywords to win - tourism lancaster, PA

Quirky gift shops for tourists in Lancaster, PA
-related keywords - shopping Lancaster, PA

You can quickly see how you are covering your target demographic. You won't be paying for clicks, but be paying for the content to be distributed. Each article will of course link back to your brick and mortar store and perhaps mention the product to warm them up to the idea.

The reason you can't skip to PPC is because of the education phase. If a Google searcher, searched for shopping in Lancaster, PA and was immediately taken to your product page they might bounce immediately as they don't realize they need your product yet.

If the youtube vid is done decently, with yourself or someone talking about the area + product then you can promote that through adwords PPC. Videos have naturally great ROI so you can do just this step if you want to test, but the above would blanket any possible leads (assuming they are tourists, you know your niche better than me).

Hi Pex7,

First let me say i have an agency that does PPC management for clients, including clients with brick and mortar stores. So yes, you can absolutely drive foot traffic through PPC, probably better than any other available method.

What may be a bit of a challenge is getting targeted traffic for a product that is not in demand. Key to successful PPC marketing is extremely targeted traffic.

A good approach may involve creating curiosity about your product in the Display Network, driving them to a landing page that encourages calls, visits to your showroom, or where applicable, onsite estimates and quotes.

A better approach may be to select a closely related, high volume, commodity type product to feature along side your primary product line. You can then target ads to your high volume product to get foot traffic, and website traffic, in front of your primary product line. You could even do a loss leader to stimulate other profitable sales of your primary product line.

If there are no blogs centered around your product niche then you have an excellent opportunity to establish yourself as the thought leader in your industry niche. Create several blogs, one specifically about your product line and a couple others that target the interests of your primary customer base and work blog posts in that generate curiosity about your primary product, complete with links to you primary blog, and primary money site.

The idea behind this approach is to create separate websites/blogs targeting the 3 stages of the buying cycle: Interest, Information, Purchase. You then develop separate campaigns targeting the specific stages of the buying cycle, optimizing each for that particular phase.

Target the emotional benefits. What is the benefit of "color changing clothes"?

I believe the key to marketing your product is to bundle it with certain types of common high demand offerings. An obvious one that comes to mind is sunglasses. Perhaps sun related products, sun tanning products, swimsuits, beach wear, etc.

Your product line would probably do well as a novelty gift too. Novelty gift shops, Souvenir shops, and similar keywords.

The key to success is market segmentation, there are probably thousands of viable keywords to target once you start segmenting your potential markets.

As a company we do have a website with an online store, but that is not my job. My specific job is to increase sales in my brick and mortar stores, so I need to drive traffic to the stores.

We do some local marketing, but I have been thinking there has to be a way to use the internet to drive some traffic.

I'm not sure if PPC will work for this product because there are no laser targeted keywords to use.

I like the idea of doing some social media to try to rank for things like "lancaster shopping"

If we had articles written to optimize those keywords and then linked to a landing page with a coupon, but I could not submit those to ezinearticles could I? Is that more of a "how to" article database?