Dominate the Digital Landscape with SEM

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) should be a crucial piece of your digital marketing plan. Google, Yahoo, and Bing all offer advertisers an opportunity to reach potential customers, but only one of these search engines can be crowned king. You guessed it! Google is king and AdWords is its crown. So why is Google the best search engine to advertise on, and why is SEM such an essential piece of a marketing plan?

Let’s start with what distinguishes Google’s AdWords program from other SEM platforms. According to SEO.com, Google has 4.5 billion searches a day, Bing has 874 million searches a day, Baidu has 584 million searches a day, and Yahoo has 536 million searches a day. Therefore, the chances are higher that potential customers will be performing searches on Google than all other search engines combined.

Are you considering video as part of your marketing strategy? We’ve got great news. Google owns YouTube and has incorporated it into it’s Adwords program allowing advertisers to reach users searching for video. According to Omnicore, there are 5 billion videos watched on YouTube daily. That’s a lot of extra opportunities to reach potential customers on a more engaging medium. YouTube also has excellent targeting options. You can target by topics, interests of the user, keywords, retargeting lists, or placements which allow you to choose what YouTube channels to advertise on. 

Wanting to run animated or banner ads? The Google Display Network allows you to serve them on their AdWords platform too. According to Google, the Display Network reaches 90% of users on the Internet. A display ad, also referred to as a banner ad, is commonly featured at the top or side of a website. It can be featured on other areas of web pages but is always shown in areas dedicated to housing the ads. Similar to YouTube, you can target very broadly or choose the specific websites on which your ads are displayed. So far, it’s become clear that the opportunity to market to potential customers is there, but how valuable are these touch-points?       

What makes these touch points so valuable is that they allow the advertiser to match the goal of their campaign to the method that works best for the campaign. For instance, if building brand awareness is the goal of the campaign, a display campaign makes sense. You will only be billed for clicks of your ad, but your brand will be impressed upon an individual whether they click it or not. Therefore, if your ad generates a million impressions and 5000 clicks, you’ll only pay for the 5000 clicks despite having had your ad seen a million times. Advertising on YouTube is similar in that you’ll only pay for an ad that an individual has watched for at least 30 seconds. So, if someone skips the ad before that 30 seconds, you won’t pay for serving that ad. If you can place brand identifiers into your ad before the option to skip, you can build brand awareness whether you end up paying for the ad or not. 

Using traditional search engine marketing, you can reach potential customers who are further down the marketing funnel and who are closer to making a purchase. Specific keywords indicate a person is seriously considering purchasing a product or service. Keywords like “near me” and “what’s the best” express a high level of interest in the product or service they are searching for. For instance, a search like “what’s the best Italian restaurants near me” suggests that the person searching for this query is in the market for Italian food. An Italian restaurant that targets those keywords can have their ad shown above of the organic results, making it more visible and increasing the chance that a person will click through to your website and ultimately become a customer.

A final weapon in the AdWords arsenal is the aforementioned remarketing tool. Remarketing can drive a consumer another step down the marketing funnel from the consideration phase to the conversion phase. Remarketing is a tool that you can use across all of Googles networks. Remarketing allows you to target individuals who’ve already engaged with your brand online. Say for instance you want to target people who have visited your website or even just a particular page on your website. You can create a remarketing list of all those people and serve them a display ad that has a coupon code, or increases your bid on the search network to ensure your ad is at the top of the page, or serve them an ad on YouTube that highlights the benefits of your product or service.

Competing in today’s marketplace means understanding the consumer’s path to purchase. For the majority of products and services, this includes online research and shopping. Therefore, to remain competitive, having an SEM campaign is a virtual necessity. Merely having an SEM campaign, however, doesn’t mean that your campaign will be successful though. 

That’s where Mighty 8th comes in. Not only does our crew know how to build a thorough campaign, but we also have the designers to create eye-catching display ads, the videographers to create videos that will resonate, and copywriters/content creators to write ads that will engage and capture the customers that you are targeting. With Mighty 8th Media as your ally, conquering today’s digital landscape is a sure victory.