The Rise of SEM: How Paid Search Listings Can Boost Your Business
“We get it, Jenna – the internet and digital marketing platforms are taking over.” Yes, I do feel like I’m beating a dead horse, but I cannot stress enough how incredibly helpful an online presence is in 2019.
We’ve covered the importance of social media before, so we’re going to dive deeper into the digital marketing world. SEM, retargeting, and display ads. What?
Search Engine Marketing. Search Engine Land defines it as “buying traffic through paid search listings”. In simple terms, you bid for your website to be the very first (or close to the top) search result when someone searches keywords you associate with. This method makes your audience become so much bigger than when you advertise through traditional media. This gives you the range and adjustability to fine-tune your campaign rather than throwing the ad out and hoping it attracts the right people. SEM will allow you to record more data about what works best for the ad you’re using to then be able to optimize it to it’s best working self.
Do you ever feel like when you close out from online shopping and ads following you around, showing you the same products you almost purchased? That’s retargeting. Businesses are now able to track you around using some simple code until you finally purchase – win, win, right? As annoying and creepy as these ads can be, they will get the job done. This is an advertising method that probably won’t go away any time soon, so it’s important to catch up to this trend. You want to make your dollars work for you because you want the strongest ROI possible. Taking time to implement a simple ad to someone who was already interested in your product or service will get them so much closer to completing a transaction. “26% of customers who are exposed to retargeting will return to the website according to a study conducted by SeeWhy. Only 8% return without retargeting.” Getting more traction on your site, especially returning customers, is normally the best way to complete sales.
Last but not least, display ads. These are going to be “paid advertisements that appear in front of users on website pages in the form of graphics” according to Thrive Hive. These are the different banners and photos you see on different shopping sites or YouTube, sometimes Amazon, anywhere really. This is an effective way to grab your consumer’s attention because they’re aesthetically pleasing. Everyone loves something that attracts the eye so when working with display ads, it’s always important to know your audience and what will stand out to them most. Being able to post these display ads on different sites whenever and however you want is also a great benefit – this technique is very flexible and easy to work with. It’s not something like a newspaper ad where you buy the space to advertise and that’s the only place you see it, for maybe a few seconds as the consumer skims the page.
The best part of online advertising is the trackability. We meet with clients all the time who want to switch from traditional ads to online ads simply because we are easily able to track basically everything about it. The ability to know where the people saw your ad, who they are, what demographic they fit in, the time they saw it, where they went after, etc. is a major step forward in the marketing world. All we’ve ever wanted was to target our audience more specifically, and we can finally do that with these methods.
Info from: Relevance, Search Engine Land, ThriveHive, and Seroka.