Are you looking for the most cost-effective way to market your business? If so, you need to consider Search Engine Marketing (SEM). SEM will help you reach your prospects when they are almost at the end of the purchasing funnel. Search engine marketing is quite different from writing blog articles for SEO. It involves paying for ads that run on search engines.
Many researchers have shown that over 90% of those who conduct online searches do so when they are approaching the end of the purchasing cycle. These are people who’ve decided what they want to purchase, and are only considering a variety of options available.
If you do it properly, and with relevant content, SEM will take your ads to the doorsteps of your prospects.
How your business can benefit from SEM
Here are the benefits of SEM we are going to discuss in this article.
- Brings Instant Awareness
- Boosts Your Sales
- SEM is Scalable – Grows With Your Business
- It Reaches Prospects at the Right Time and Place
- Reinforces Brand Recognition
- It Reaches the Target Audience
- Gives Competitive Advantage
- SEM is Less Expensive Compared With Traditional Advertising
Brings Instant Awareness
Social media adverts and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) both take time to bring results. According to Google, a high-quality website can start a reasonable ranking 12 months after its design. And for your site to rank, you’ll have to apply unique strategies that can outsmart your competitors. This means you have to be an expert in SEO for you to rank. On the other hand, SEM will put you at the top instantly.
Even if you currently lack brand recognition and online visibility, SEM will help you get some considerable attention.
All you need is to have a good system that will translate this recognition into buying customers. With such a system, you’ll see a big growth in revenues.
Boosts Your Sales
With the right strategies and a good ad copy, you can see your revenues growing right after implementing SEM. In fact, starting with SEM doesn’t require much effort if you have some ads. What you’ll need is professional maintenance so you can get a good SEM ROI.
SEM is Scalable – Grows With Your Business
SEM is incredibly scalable. You can start small, and gradually scale it up as your business grows. In the process, you can test things and pick what works best. As you start, keep the costs as low as your budget can accommodate.
As your business grows, courtesy of SEM, you can increase the marketing budget and put up more ads, while removing those that aren’t bringing in results. Refine your marketing strategies, and increase the amount you spend on ads daily. A starting daily ad budget of $10 will suffice to get you good revenue.
It Reaches Prospects at the Right Time and Place
About 50% of the world population are active internet users today. Of these users, over 90% start their online experience by carrying out searches for products and services. They rely on Google and other search engines to direct them to the sites where they can get what they need.
Regardless of your services or products, the journey to reach you begins online. That means being visible online matters a lot to your business because it puts you where your prospects are. Most people go online when searching for something.
Being at the top of the search results puts you in a better position to be chosen. And once you deliver the service or product, you gain the trust of your clients, and they can refer others to you.
Even if a person visits your site but doesn’t buy, they will have some information about your company, and many turn to be paying customers in the future.
Reinforces Brand Recognition
When a customer buys through your website, you might think it was just a random person who found your website and placed an order. Far from it. There’s a possibility that the customer started following you sometime back. By repeatedly and consistently presenting your brand, you’ll easily convert some visitors to paying customers.
It is estimated that a person needs to get into contact with you about 7 to 13 times before they can place the first order. Every time they see your brand on your website, on social media, or in their emails, your brand image, and your name gets reinforced. Meaning, the next time they need the product or service you offer, they’ll easily remember and contact you immediately.
Brand recognition means your prospects become familiar with you and what you offer. The more they get into contact with your brand, the more they become persuaded to try it.
It Reaches the Target Audience
Google and other search engines will allow you to focus on your real prospects in a way that traditional marketing methods can not achieve.
It is worth noting that placing an ad in Bing or Google AdWords doesn’t cost anything until it is clicked. But even before it is clicked, it will still be marketing for you.
You don’t need to create so many ads. Just create a few target ads, and you’ll be good to go.
Gives Competitive Advantage
Your competitors can earn the coveted first spot in search results through extraordinary SEO, but you can easily replace them through exceptional SEM. Paid ads perform better than SEO.
What if your competitor is already using SEM? That shouldn’t stop you from using the same technique. You can design your ads in a way that gives you a competitive advantage against them. The good news is that many companies rely more on SEO than SEM, so you’ll not have any difficulty replacing them at the top spot.
SEM is Less Expensive Compared With Traditional Advertising
Compared to other marketing strategies, SEM is quite affordable. Why? Because you’ll be able to control your budget.
You can easily narrow down your focus to a particular demographic to lower your marketing expenses. This also means your marketing efforts will bring in higher ROI than other marketing techniques.
If your ad performs exceptionally, you can scale it up to bring in more revenue. You can also suspend an ad if it’s bringing in more clients than you can handle.
Conclusion
SEM has emerged as the most effective marketing technique today. By doing it well, you can easily outsmart your competitors who rely solely on SEO. You can as well combine SEM and SEO to get better results.
The greatest advantage of SEM is that you can start with a small budget and scale up as your business grows.
How SEM can help my business?
SEM will help you reach your prospects when they are almost at the end of the purchasing funnel. These will lead to more sales for your business
What does SEM mean in marketing?
SEM means Search Engine Marketing. It’s a digital marketing strategy that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages
What is the difference between SEO and SEM?
The difference is that SEO is focused on optimizing a website in order to get traffic from organic search results. While SEM is to get traffic and visibility from paid search.