You could be lounging in your bakery, having completed a fresh batch of delicious pastries and laid them out in your display, but no one on the streets seem to linger for a look, and even fewer pass by to look at the promotional banner standing right outside your store.
Or you could be bringing in your new batch of kites and finished cleaning up your board and bar, yet the beach-goers scattered along the coast barely spare you and your kite-surfing booth a glance.
Chances are, you could be part of the 66% of small business owners who say that finding new customers is a top concern. It’s 2018; if you aren’t using digital marketing to your brand out there, you’re missing out. Whether you want to blast a new promotion out to your usual customers or attract new customers who have yet to try your product or service, a good digital marketing strategy is essential for branding and is highly likely to boost sales and audience awareness. SEO and SEM are 2 key areas in such a strategy.
SEM:
SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing and is paid search. The moment you search for something, relevant links will pop up, but the very first thing you see are advertisements that brands have paid Google for. These could be to announce new releases, sales, promotions, or just highlighting unique points about their brand.
These ads operate by pay-per-click (PPC), which varies between industries. Let’s say you set a budget of $5, and each time someone clicks into your site, $0.50 is the PPC, and is deducted from your budget, and for that PPC, you get 10 clicks into your site. Even if you have a small budget, in particular for small businesses, you can still make use of SEM to boost brand awareness. You can even track people to who buys or visits your page and re-market your advertisements to them.
Even if you find that ads are not as trustworthy to your consumer because of how ads are paid to be at the top, you can still be sure that your brand will eventually raise top-of-mind-awareness, and that the data you gather can still help your business.
SEO:
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is part of organic search, giving you the results you see below the paid ads. Now this is the part where people Google’s special algorithm sorts out the good and bad sites, taking into account various factors like how many times the searched keyword is included in the web page, whether it appears in the title, a blog post, or a list, or how many pages link to that page, and many more. A Page Rank is then given to pages that it believes are popular and trustworthy, given by a web crawler. Including relevant titles, pictures, and links will help with the PageRank Google gives your webpage, so the crawler scans and analyses your page can do so accurately.
Your content should be carefully curated such that it adheres to the theme and mission statement that your business carries, keep the target audience in mind, and have a clear goal in mind when crafting such content. As this is where you will be competing for certain keywords, based on how SEO-friendly your content is alone, you can be sure that it will be a tough but worthwhile fight to the top.
Combining these in your digital marketing strategy are important to define your brand and attract the right customers. OC Digital can customise the perfect strategy for your brand, making sure SEO, SEM, web design, and social media presence work hand in hand for the best results. As a certified Google Partner, you can be sure to count on the quality of our work. Simply contact us for a quote and we’ll get back to you! Engage your audience with our help today!
Stats and info from:
https://www.acquisio.com/blog/agency/15-reasons-why-sem-is-important/
