Every marketer at some stage has heard about the term “growth marketing”. In simpler terms, growth marketing deals with the strategies that build a path for directing and engaging visitors to your online business. This is done with the help of search engine optimization that determines the success of growth marketing, which is to attain loyal customers and turn them into a lead for conversion.
Speaking of growth marketing, it is the most underrated marketing strategy and known as SEM (search engine marketing) on the web that deals with the growth and development of online businesses often based on paid ads and search query. Apart from driving the audience to make a buying decision on various platforms and devices, search engine marketing provides your overall business with exacting results that last for a long-term.
With the importance of SEM in deliberation, here are some tips to help you out in shaping the SEM strategies and improving your growth marketing campaign:
- Offer Value to the Customers in Their Decision-Making
The only thing that remains constant in the world of online marketing is the ever-changing behavior of your target audience. Tracking their evolving behavior requires you to develop and make some amendments to your growth marketing plans as well. A recently conducted research has formulated the five different stages that all customers share in their decision-making journey. They are:
- Initiation: Obtaining background information of the business and its offerings along with the buying landscape. This initiates the research part where customers start digging into a business to check the reliability.
- Research: This part makes them a more informed researcher where they begin delving into buying guides, look for recommendations, and specific products that will meet their needs.
- Compare: Thanks to the digital world, customers now have the ability to compare different products meeting their requirements. The comparison stage is based on reading reviews and going through ratings, cost, and features.
- Transaction: This is where SEO comes into play. SEM allows the customers to find, research, and compare products. When you are able to make yourself visible in the search engine rankings, customers are just one step away from making the final decision. The penultimate stage of customer’s decision-making journey is the transaction, where he or she seeks a platform for buying and checks the availability of the product along with suitable pricing and promotions.
- Experience: The final stage deals with offering quality customer service that drives the customer to make future purchases.
- Align SEM Strategies with Your Business Goals
Search engine marketing has the potential to influence and help you measure your brand objectives. Therefore, it is important to make sure that your business goals are aligned with your SEM strategy. Some of the common objectives include:
- Brand Awareness and Recognition: This requires you to conduct a deep-rooted research where you have to put efforts in your brand, non-brand and competitors’ keywords. Users generally begin their quest for information with non-brand searches. This is the reason why most of the brand ad-clicks consist of a non-brand keyword or phrase in it.
- Engage New Customers: This again makes it imperative for your business to be exposed to the search engine, as consumers rely on search for making a buying decision. SEM assists with all the stages of the decision-making journey.
- Generate Conversions: Search easily outperforms other marketing platforms, owing to its higher ability in driving conversions.
- Cross-border Marketing: Probably, the biggest benefit of aligning SEM with your business campaign is that you get to create and enter new markets. It helps you in getting more phone calls, driving foot traffic, and boosting ad clicks.
- Extend Your Marketing Channel
Owing to the constant application of search, it no longer falls under the category of a product; it is much more of a behavior now. People avail search at any time and just anywhere, making it their trustworthy companion for finding information. If you are able to comprehend the user intent behind their searches, you can easily drive them to your business by monitoring the path of their purchase journey. On the whole, SEM allows you to expand your marketing funnel and integrates contrasting marketing endeavors.
- Target Your Audience Carefully
Time and geography no longer determine user engagement, as brands need to give their target audience something attractive for increasing the user engagement and lead conversions. You have to avail features like audience targeting and reach out to distinct searchers. For this, you have to create an effective buyer persona that includes these attributes:
- Behavioral: This deals with acknowledging the consumer interests by going through their past behaviors on the search. Moreover, analyzing the previous behavioral patterns will give you an insight into their likelihood to make a buying decision. Evaluate their engagement across websites and the type of content they read and share the most.
- Demographic: Buying preferences depend on the type of products you put up for sale and other elementary factors, however, things like age, location, and gender somehow influence the user engagement. So, look out for the right demographic while targeting your audience.
- Contextual: Search is a tool that is utilized by customers at any point in time depending on the circumstance. If you are able to evaluate the situation and create content accordingly, you will be building an effective SEM campaign for your business.
- Invest in Paid SEM Strategy
Nothing will boost the likelihood of your SEM success than combining your organic search efforts with a paid SEM campaign. You can customize your bidding tactics and solidify your keyword coverage for developing paid search and social ads. Users are more likely to click on these ads and paid searches.
- Allocate the Budget Properly
This requires you to examine the paid click share across different platforms and search query that each SEM option displays within your niche. Not only this allows your brand to get a high exposure on the web, but it also offers you the satisfaction of getting your paid ads converted into clicks.
Conclusion
Adhere to the aforementioned practices for ensuring the success of your SEM integration into growth marketing. These steps will help you in maximizing the profit of your paid search campaigns and other SEM efforts.
