If you run a business, you know the value of digital marketing. This term itself spans a vast number of marketing avenues — from email marketing to social media marketing. But what about marketing on search engines?
Search engines remain the primary avenue where internet users can find a new brand to engage with. While Search Engine Optimization (SEO) remains the primary strategy that brands use, one should not forget about SEM or Search Engine Marketing.
Search engine marketing benefits are countless.
We’ve prepared this guide so you can understand the benefits of search engine marketing and why you should consider it for your business.
1. Visibility
One of the best SEM benefits is that it gives your brand immediate and increased visibility on search engines. In fact, it has been shown that search engine ads have a significant impact on brand visibility.
When an internet user searches for a particular keyword, they will see a list of websites. This is the SEO approach favored by many businesses. But the SEM approach will show an actual ad that showcases the name of your brand, website, and a brief description of what is being offered.
Even if you don’t receive a single click you are likely to have greater visibility than your competition.
2. It’s Affordable
What frightens many small businesses is the cost of digital marketing. While there are many free methods to market your brand online, these aren’t always the most effective. However, the cost of digital marketing is a risk that many entrepreneurs are unwilling to take.
One of the best benefits of SEM is that it’s arguably the most affordable form of digital marketing.
You can often invest as little as $5 to create a search engine ad. You can invest as much as you are comfortable with. The results will obviously vary based on your spending, but you can still see results with a minimal investment.
3. Analytics
As with other forms of digital marketing, a further benefit of SEM is that you receive analytics.
These analytics will let you see how your ads are faring. They will help you make decisions regarding your search engine marketing strategies. You can figure out new ways to create ads or market your brand. These analytics can even help you decide if you need to make any changes to your products and/or services.
4. Local Market
SEM is particularly great to reach out to your local market. If you run a business that reaches a particular region, you have an additional challenge of competing with local businesses. If you think international competition is intense, wait till you see the local competition!
SEM is the way to stand out from your local competition. For example, many search engines offer packages to brands to promote their work directly to local markets.
If you need to reach your local market, you want to take advantage of the initiatives that search engines offer for reaching them. This benefit alone is why so many brands favor SEM and why those who ignore SEM lose out in the long run.
5. Faster Results and Responses
With any form of digital marketing, you might have to wait for engagement. It can take years to get an adequate following on your social media profiles. It’s a tremendous struggle to build up your email subscriber list.
With SEM, you will see faster results and responses. It usually doesn’t take long for your search engine ad to be approved by any search engine. The ad will appear shortly after approval on search engine results pages.
You will also see responses quickly. Without having to wait, you will see if your search engine marketing efforts and working or need further work. With building an audience, you must take the time to build an audience before you can analyze how well your brand is doing.
With SEM, you can determine your success or failure without having to wait to build up an audience first.
6. Stuck in Traffic
When you engage in search engine marketing, you’ll be stuck in a good kind of traffic. You can expect to receive consistent traffic to your website when you invest in search engine marketing.
When your other forms of marketing aren’t doing well, you can count on search engine ads. While SEO has its benefits, one of the benefits of SEM over SEO is that you can expect continuous traffic when SEO traffic fails or fluctuates.
7. Make Changes When You Want
With a search engine ad, you can make changes to the contents of the ad whenever you please. As you look at the analytics of the search engine ad, you can make changes accordingly. If you feel that the keywords or any other part of the content of the ad need to be changed, you can change it on the fly.
This is one of the biggest advantages of SEM. As you can always make changes when you want, you can ensure you are always miles ahead of your competition and are always engaging with your audience.
8. You’re At The Top
When you create a search engine ad, you are likely to be at the top of a search engine results page. In fact, you are likely to be on the first page of a search engine results page. While this isn’t always guaranteed, SEM is a great way to push ahead of your competition and make your brand more visible as we discussed in Benefit #1.
If you find that your brand is always pushed back in search engines, despite your SEO and other marketing efforts then you want to consider SEM.
9. Mobile Marketing
Finally, SEM is suited for mobile marketing. Many internet users engage with brands and search engines solely through their mobile devices.
SEM is made to show up on mobile devices and search engine ads are optimized to show up well on mobile devices. If you aren’t working to be mobile-friendly, you are missing out on your marketing potential.
Let’s Help You With Search Engine Marketing
Now that you know the benefits and uses of search engine marketing, you are ready to get started.
We are happy to help you with SEM and other marketing efforts. Check out the services we offer to see how we can help your brand today!
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