What is Paid Search Marketing?

Paid search marketing, also known as PPC (pay-per-click) marketing, is where you create a campaign with the search engines to show up in the search results. You show up as a “sponsored” listing for the keywords you want, and pay for every click your advertisement receives.

The above image shows where the “natural” search listings appear versus the paid search marketing listings. There are over 2 billion daily searches on Google: 82% of consumers use a search engine to find a local business. Only 44% of small businesses have a website. Take advantage of the traffic and get your online marketing efforts started today.

Benefits of Paid Search Marketing

There are many benefits of paid search marketing when adding it to your overall marketing strategy:

• Highly Targeted and Predictable Traffic: Paid search marketing allows you to select the specific search terms (keywords) you want your ad to display for, what locations you would like to appear in, and the hours your ad is displayed. By choosing all of these, you can determine when you get your traffic, and how committed the visitor is when they come to your website. For example, if you bid on a keyword “buy iPod Touch,” you will get a more qualified visitor who is ready to purchase something than someone who searches for “iPod.” You can use this for all products and services.

• “Immediate” Implementation and Results: It can take just a few days to set up a campaign and start seeing results rather than a few months with SEO. Once you have defined your paid search marketing strategy, all you have to do is implement the campaigns and turn it on. Each search engine takes about 3 – 6 hours to display your ad for the first time.
• Low cost and Better CPA: Since you only pay per click and you get to determine what you want to pay per click, you can set your daily budget and keep to it relatively easy. You can see what is working and what isn’t very easily and can make changes to poor performing campaigns immediately, which allows you to keep your costs low and improve your CPA (cost per aquisition).
• Measurable Results and Tracking: You can see results to your campaign in as few as 3 hours and, if you have website analytics installed, can track what happens to each visitor after they visit your site. This also allows you to determine what is working and what isn’t working in your campaigns very quickly and reallocate your budget away from items that are not working.
• Affordable Testing: Most marketing channels take a while to test different marketing messages and images. With paid search marketing, you can test different messages and determine what works and what doesn’t quickly, easily, and with a lower cost than traditional media.

There are many other benefits of Paid Search Marketing: overall, it is a channel that should be included in your marketing strategy to give you immediate, and long term, results.

Ready to include paid search marketing into your marketing mix? Contact Envision SBM today to get started.

What EnvisionSBM Does for You

EnvisionSBM has the experience implementing and optimizing brand-new campaigns to campaigns that are established and just need to be refreshed. We have managed paid search marketing budgets ranging from a few thousand dollars a month to over $3 million dollars per month. We start every campaign with the same steps, so we can learn what is unique to your company and to make sure we use what is already working for you.

1. Determine business goals: We meet with you and determine what the goals are for your paid search marketing campaigns and how it fits into your overall marketing strategy. We will also review your current marketing efforts to see what is and is not working for you.
2. Review search behavior: We look at the search behavior for your specific company and industry and start coming up with keyword suggestions that will bring in qualified “buyer-ready” visitors.
3. Evaluate how your website is used: While we send visitors to landing pages that are segmented for their specific search, we need to see how people who come to your website are currently using it, what is working and what is not. If we don’t need to reinvent the wheel, we won’t.
4. Create a campaign strategy: After we know what has worked for you in the past, what search terms people are using to find sites similar to yours, and how your website is currently being used, we create a paid marketing strategy for you, including the search engines, keywords, ads, and landing pages that will be used to market your business online.
5. Implement, monitor, and adjust: Once everything has been created we will implement the marketing strategies, monitor the success, and adjust the campaigns as needed. It won’t be perfect the first time, but we can easily turn the knobs of the campaign and make sure we’re spending money on what is working – not what isn’t.

Get help from experts in the field: contact Envision SBM today to get an evaluation of your current marketing strategy and see how Paid Search Marketing can benefit your company.

How Paid Search Marketing Fits into Your Marketing Strategy

Paid Search Marketing allows you to show up in the search engine results for key terms that you may not yet rank for. It a long, time consuming process to rank for specific key terms that can bring in many visitors to your site: by implementing paid search campaigns, you can easily bypass that time and show up on page 1 of the results.

It also allows you to test messaging, content, and images. You can determine how much money you want to spend testing a new message and then test it within a few weeks, rather than a few months, and see what works more easily than changing your entire website or spending the money on a new traditional piece of advertising that can eat up a few months of time and cost you more.

Paid Search Marketing also allows you to test the effectiveness and intent of visitors using certain key terms. You may think that one key term will bring in better visitors, only to find that another works better. By implementing paid search marketing, you can reduce the overhead and time it takes to find the perfect key terms you need to rank for naturally.

With Paid Search Marketing, you can add something that will have immediate and long term value to your business within a few weeks. You don’t need to wait months for it to start showing results.

Contact EnvisionSBM today to see how we can help you get your Paid Search Marketing strategy started.