Search Marketing 101
Experiment with flexibility
Search marketing is also highly flexible. There is plenty of scope to experiment with different keywords and bids to see which ones deliver the best results at the best price. You can also raise and lower your bids on the fly should your profits increase or decrease. And because all of the tools for running a campaign are located on the internet, campaigns can be paused or adjusted at any hour of the day.
“Budgets are tight so it’s important that marketing is accountable and measurable,” Ramanathan says. “It’s important to work out how much money you’re actually making from each dollar you put into each marketing activity, and then see if you can make more by putting that dollar somewhere else.”
Google AdWords
There are numerous search marketing tools and programs available. Google’s AdWords for instance, places advertisements in prominent locations on its search results pages. Creating an AdWords account can take as little as 30 minutes with a one-off set-up fee of just $10 and no minimum monthly spend.
Various tools are available to make the process simple and effective for new advertisers, including a new Google AdWords online video learning site. Google also provides detailed information on how the campaign has performed, right down to the number of clicks that are actually converted into sales.
This ability to precisely know the result being generated has made search marketing an essential tool for the Cheeky Food Group, a six year-old Sydney-based company that runs corporate team-building sessions based around cooking classes. Company director Leona Watson says that as she became more confident using the tool she began increasing the amount her company was spending. “The more money I put into it, the more leads I get,” Watson says. “Up to 80 percent of our new business is from Google, so something’s working.”
Search marketing has also been essential in the growth of the adventure holiday company Chimu Adventures into a $1 million business. “It’s very, very targeted,” says co-founder Greg Carter. “You get the people straight into your website who want your product; it doesn’t get much better than that in marketing.”
According to Ramanathan, AdWords in particular is well suited to small-to-medium businesses, as they can start with a relatively small budget. “Anyone can do this and get great results,” Ramanathan says. “Take your time, and pace yourself. Start with a couple of ads, a manageable budget, periodically review results, and then improve on the things that work.
Do you know your SEO from your SEM?
A beginner’s guide to online advertising jargon
Search engine: A program that searches the internet for information related to keywords entered by a user. Google.com is a search engine.
Search marketing: This is also known as search engine marketing (SEM) and is a form of online marketing where a text ad appears alongside relevant search results.
Keywords: Search terms that people use to search in search engines. They can be words or phrases. If you are using search marketing, you would bid on a set of keywords that are related to your offerings. When prospective customers enter the same keywords to conduct their searches, your ads may appear alongside search results.
Sponsored link: A text advertisement and URL that promote a website and its products or services. Sponsored links are triggered to appear as paid search results when certain keywords are entered into a search engine. They are part of the cost-per-click advertising model, meaning advertisers only pay when a user clicks on their ads. In Google search, sponsored links are displayed at the top and to the right of organic search result.
Search engine optimization (SEO): The process of making changes to your website so that it becomes more relevant for certain desired keywords and ranks higher in ‘natural’ (or ‘organic’) search results. These changes can be made on the HTML source code of the site, structure and design. They can also involve fixing problems that prevent search engines from fully indexing them. Usually, the higher up a site is in search results, the more likely people are to visit that site.
Pay per click: A method of payment in online marketing where you pay for your advertisements only when potential customers click on your ad. Search marketing uses pay-per-click.
Bid: An amount of money you choose to pay per each click in order for your paid search ads to be able to show when potential customers enter the same keywords you have chosen to search for something.
Relevance: A measure of how closely a search result, or a search ad, matches the a person’s query in a search engine. Relevance is key to harnessing the power of search marketing. The more relevant your ad, the more likely the audience will be motivated to respond to your call-to-action. Irrelevant ads can cause users to ignore advertising altogether.
Conversion: The process during which a visitor or a lead turns into a customer. For example, if someone clicks on a Google AdWords ad and buys something on the website that that ad links to, the click counts as a conversion from a site visit to a site sale i.e. the visitor is converted to a customer. Tracking conversions is crucial for understanding how successful your search marketing efforts are in bringing in actual sales.
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