Search Marketing for Brands
Search marketing is a great way for brands to gain quick exposure, and if you including contextual advertising you can have a campaign running in 5 or 10 minutes. It’s easy to see its appeal but what advertisers don’t realize is they’re overlooking huge opportunities.
While paid search marketing can be one of the most cost-effective forms of digital marketing, it captures a small portion of the potential customers. When you compare paid listings versus natural listings, the Pay per Click (PPC) ads tend to get a little under 20% of the search traffic. That leaves a whopping 80% left to natural search results.
In a report called ‘Search Attitude’ by UK search agency Tamar, it’s noted that only 5% of Internet users are likely to follow a paid search result over natural listings.
One of the downsides of search engine optimization (SEO) is the time and investment required to get a campaign working. But when you consider the potential SEO ROI it soon becomes obvious.
When you perform keyword research and see the potential that SEO can provide as a sales channel, its obviously worthwhile.
September 30th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
There is also the question of who your customer is to take into account. In general (and this is a sweeping statement but it is backed up by figures), if your product or service is more likely to appeal to less well educated people who perhaps don’t use the Internet professionally then SEM is a good choice.
Imagine the kind of user who goes online to maybe do specific things when they need to rather than someone who is completely at home on the Internet and turns to it naturally for answers to everything. They are just looking for something to come up that meets their need and says ‘buy me’. That is a great target customer for SEM.
On the other hand if your product or service appeals to graduates and higher educated people then SEO is a much better tool to use. Maybe a better way to look at it is Internet junkies who are jacked into their computers all the time. It works on the idea that smart people look upon it as a badge of honour to find the exact match on the search engine that they are looking for. They are prepared to interact with the search engine and refine their search until they find the one that best suits them and click on that link. That is yr natural search target.
So picking SEO over SEM is as much about understanding who your customer and the channels that suit your products as it is about just looking coldly at the channels available.