In the good old days, it was customary to pay for advertising. Print ads would appear in your local newspaper and YellowPages or on park benches and billboards around the city. In the digital age, it’s possible to design a website and put your products online for next to nothing—but ensuring that potential customers can find your business is a little trickier.
Broaden Your Reach
It’s estimated that there are over one billion websites on the Internet, with a new site being registered every second. When customers search for a product or service, how likely are they to actually find your business? Fortunately, you can still pay to broaden your reach through a tool digital marketing specialists refer to as SEM (search engine marketing). First, though, it’s important to learn how to get the most from paid search.
Spend Wisely
Think of the Internet as a very large, very competitive version of your city. Just like in the old days, paid search methods like CPC (cost per click), CPM (cost per impression), and CPA (cost per acquisition) can help draw greater attention to your site by making your business more visible to potential customers. The secret is learning how to spend wisely and not waste money on advertising that doesn’t deliver.
Making Paid Advertising Work For You
We’re often asked how to get the most from paid search. In truth, there is no one-size-fits-all formula—what method of paid advertising you use is dependent on your goals as a business, your budget, and what you already know of your target audience. If you’re confident in your digital presence and marketing strategy, then utilizing one of the major players like Google AdWords is as simple as selecting CPC, CPM, or CPA. Set what you’re willing to spend, enter your keywords, and track your results. Voila!
However, if you haven’t spent time snooping on your competitors, researching optimal keywords, and getting to know your target audience through other forms of digital outreach, you may just be throwing away your money. Paid search functions best as one element of your digital marketing campaign, and if figuring all this out sounds like a huge headache, it may be best to call in an expert.