5 reasons to try sem
In 2008, North American advertisers spent $13.5 billion dollars on Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and the World Advertising Research Center estimates that SEM will increase by 30% by the end of this year. Why should your business invest in Search Engine Marketing (and what is it)?
SEM promotes your Web site through paid ads on search engine results pages like Google, Bing or Yahoo. The benefits of SEM are vast, but some of the most important are:
- The ads are highly targeted and reach the right people—they will show up when someone searches for information about your service. In essence, you’re marketing directly to someone who’s looking for you, practically waving a flag in front of someone who needs you.
- SEM is extremely cost-effective. You can drive traffic to your Web site and raise awareness of your business, products and services for as little as one dollar a day!
- The results are measurable. Using campaign analytics provided, you can directly measure your advertising success in real time. You can track how many people responded by clicking to your site and even how many actually performed an action, like purchasing or signing up.
- Changing direction is easy—if you want to respond to a trend or change your promotion, you can easily modify your SEM message on the fly, without paying to reprint a brochure or worse, waiting up to a year to change a phone directory ad.
- SEM can by far outreach most other forms of marketing—millions of searches are conducted on the Internet each day, giving you the opportunity to capture any segment of a regional, national or worldwide audience that is looking for products, services or information.
Every small business should include SEM in their ad budget. Most consumers actively use the Internet to guide them in their buying decisions, and for such a minimal cost, you can’t afford to miss out.
—Special thanks to Brittany M. Miller, guest blogger!
