Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Marketing or SEM is a type of internet marketing which is used to promote websites by enhancing their visibility in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) of search engines. SEM is mainly constituted by general SEO (Search Engine Optimization), Email marketing, Affiliate marketing, Web Analytics, Social Media Optimization (SMO), Pay Per Click, Paid Inclusion and some most up-to-date SEM and SMO techniques.
The name ‘Search Engine Marketing’ can be broken down into three parts namely ‘SEARCH’, ‘SEARCH ENGINE’ and ‘SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING’ which collectively describe the origin of SEM. Firstly it is necessary to understand that why do people perform ’SEARCH’? They do so because they are looking out for something specific on which they want to obtain detailed information. People can perform targeted search for millions of reasons which may include searching for purchasing something, for solving problems and queries, for educational information like results, courses, date sheet, etc., for business information, for knowing latest stock rates as well as for general information and news, product and software information, online games, songs, movies download, etc.
People can then opt for purchasing the targeted products or services for which they performed the search. This leads to conversion of the search into the acquisition of a service or product which follows the process listed below:
- A person’s need propels him to perform search to find out the best option.
- He then sets up his mind to carry out search for the desired product.
- The targeted search is finally performed.
- A person then browses through all the available options and reviews.
- He may decide to purchase the product or service depending on his requirements.
This conversion can be very well explained with a very simple example. Suppose there’s a man who daily boards a bus to reach his office. He spends more than enough on his bus fares each day. For this very reason he decides that he needs a bike. He plans his budgets and starts doing market research on internet instead of visiting each and every bike agency around the city. He then carries out the required search and obtains the list of all the available models, their specifications, reviews, prices, etc. After comparing all the options and making final decision he straightaway goes to that particular agency and purchases that bike. In brief, internet research helped that man to acquire all the desired information regarding bikes at one place without wasting his valuable time and money.
Now the term ‘SEARCH ENGINE’ creeps in which provides the required platform for searching information about anything that is needed. Search Engines are referred to as big storehouses of information which house information from the World Wide Web to their database. This information gets displayed when someone searches for it with the specific Keyword phrases. Some perfect examples of popular search engines are Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. which perform the same function as mentioned above and show results according to the result query.
Finally we need to know that why do we need “SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING”? Different search engines make use of different criteria for storing information from blogs, websites, online press centers, etc. In search engines, the rank of any particular search phrase depends upon the theme, quality, structure, information and many other factors of website. The websites which are effectively optimized and are highly informative, genuine and friendly always end up coming in top results. For maintaining such high standards of websites so that they stand at par in competition, “SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING” is needed.
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a process of sending or distributing emails containing marketing messages. It is a type of direct marketing that uses electronic mails for communicating money making messages to a targeted audience. In the wisest sense, every email sent to the desired customer for a preferred purpose is considered as Email Marketing.
Term Email Marketing can be well defined as:
- Sending emails with the objective of promoting products and services of the company.
- Delivering emails with the intention of attracting new customers or persuading the existing ones to buy something straight away.
- Attaching advertisements to emails that are sent by other companies to attract their customers.
- Distributing emails to promote repeat business, enhance customer reliability and for improving merchant-customer relationship.
An email marketing campaign requires email addresses of potential customers which can be obtained by various methods like using subscription services, relying on referrals from current customers and paying a fixed fee to email brokers. In order to carry out a profitable email marketing campaign, make sure that it always contains relevant information to make the customers endear to that email marketing campaign. Besides this, one should keep the campaign short and simple and it should intrigue the audience, generating a curiosity in them to know more. The subject line should be interesting enough to draw the attention of readers.
Email marketing offers many advantages due to which it has become very popular with companies.
Some of the benefits of Email Marketing are:
- It is very cost effective and saves a lot of time and resources as compared to conventional marketing methods like printed newsletters or direct mail.
- An email is a faster communication method than mailed advertisements as it takes few seconds or minutes to get delivered as compared to several days taken by traditional mails.
- The facility of mailing list enables one to send information to a broad range of potential customers who might be interested in his offerings excluding those who might not be interested.
- One can send interactive emails containing games, graphics, music, videos, quizzes, etc. to the targeted audience to grab their attention.
- Emails offer 24X7 marketing which means that the customers can understand one’s products and services even when he is not in his office.
- Emails facilitate in establishing a special bond with customers as emails are extremely personalized.
- It is quite easy to track the sent emails, obtaining details on how many of them were opened, what was the conversion rate and click through rate, etc. This helps one to assess the success rate of the campaign and increases the scope of improvement.
- While websites use ‘pull’ strategy to divert the web traffic to their site, emails use ‘push’ strategies as the advertisers push the email messages to the targeted audience.
- Emails effectively help in generating the repeat business in an automatic and affordable way.
- Emails are very popular amongst digital marketers and above all email marketing is ‘green’ as it is paper free.
Email marketing has become a very opportunistic and responsive medium today for communicating with prospective customers. It can bring vast benefits to one’s business if the email marketing campaign is executed in a correct way.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliates are the type of resellers that provide costumers to a website. The affiliates either get a prescribed fee for the referral that they provide or a particular percentage of the sale that their referral has provided. Almost all the software affiliate systems are designed on cost per action (CPA) that is affiliates will only be paid for the referrals that actually result in sale rather than getting paid according to the clicks their referrals have got like in CPC(cost per click model).
Affiliate marketing can be described as revenue sharing venture between an online merchant and owner of the website. A website owner places advertisements on his website(s) to either help in selling the merchant’s products or sending the interested costumers to the merchant’s website. All this is done in exchange for a share of profit that products bring up. An affiliate can earn money in numerous ways but in most of the cases he is engaged as a publisher earning a commission when someone follows a link given in his site or blog and then buys the targeted product. Other variations over these cases include instances where an affiliate earns profit for referring a visitor who takes some action like signing up, giving an email address etc.
There are huge advantages of the affiliate marketing like:
1. Affiliate marketing provisions are much like win-win situation for both merchant as well as the affiliate because of pay per action system.
2. Affiliate marketing is one of the excellent ways to earn money while at home.
3. Affiliate arrangements are not so expensive to start up with.
4. No sales experience necessary to start up affiliate arrangement.
5. It is a perfect chance to boost your income and it can be taken as a side business.
Pay Per Click
Pay Per Click (PPC) is one of the most effective internet marketing models used on websites where advertisers pay a particular sum of money to their hosts when their ads get clicked. Some of the major names in the PPC advertising are Miva, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft ADcenter which are the most popular PPC service providers till date. PPC advertising provides a fast method of getting listed in top results of the main search engines offering PPC campaign services.
In PPC advertisement, advertisers bid on keyword phrases that are relevant to their target markets with the help of search engines. Fixed price per click is charged by the content sites instead of using a bidding system. The bidding amount is different for all search engines and varies depending on the level of keyword competition. The advertiser needs to pay the required bidding amount whenever a particular user clicks on his advertisement after looking for the key phrase which an advertiser has bid for. Since the amount of bid greatly affects the search results and their positioning, the advertisers may have to pay more for competitive keywords than US $0.01 which is the minimum bidding amount. The advertisement will be more effective and will more likely be placed in first few pages if the advertisers pay greater bidding amount.
The complete PPC campaign is mainly built on finding the suitable and relevant keywords as well as constantly refining and growing your keyword list. For this purpose many search engines provide offer a keyword search tool for advertisers which helps them to search that keyword which is used to the maximum extent by users. This facilitates an advertiser to expand his business services and business products by getting returns on their investments.
PPC advertising offers many benefits like it:
Facilitates Budgeting: Since different businesses have different budgets, PPC advertising enables advertisers to fix their daily budget to avoid paying extra.
Offers Flexibility Of Campaign: Advertisers can fine-tune a PPC advertising campaign according to their changing requirements. They can always opt for new keywords or refine the old ones in case they are not producing the desired results.
Produces Quick Results: Correct management of PPC campaign leads to generation of considerable results in very short span of time, which can be few minutes even.
Generates Awareness of Brand: PPC advertising plays a vital role in generating brand awareness. Even if people don’t click on your ad, they still remain aware about PPC ads flashing on result pages.
Enables Trackability: Search engines provide the advertisers with PPC interfaces which help to track PPC ads very easily. They can keep a tab on the key phrases being searched, number of clicks on their ads and the status of their products if they are being purchased.
Provides Targeted Advertising: PPC advertising helps to ensure that your PPC campaign is targeting the right king of audience who are genuinely interested in your product. So it provides you with better control over what kind of user traffic gets diverted to your website through the use of selected key phrases.
Today a significant number of advertisers have chosen Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising service for enhancing their business by driving more traffic to their websites. PPC advertising is a considerate advertising program which requires a thorough knowledge and experience in this field. For this reason, it is always recommended to be done by a SEO company having proficiency in PPC.
Search Engine Optimization Industry
SEO industry stands for Search Engine Optimization Industry which deals in optimizing people’s websites for search engines. It is quite evident that millions of people use search engines everyday to look out for desired goods and services. If we go by statistics, it can be clearly observed that around 1,668,870,408 people make use of internet today. Internet has become a first such activity in past 40 years which can keep people away from watching TV. Considering the growing popularity of Internet at such a fast pace, you should think about introducing your businesses online. If you haven’t taken this step yet, then you must do it at the earliest possible. Since so many people browse through internet everyday searching for the preferred products and services, you stand a better chance of expanding your business if it is online.
Once you own a website, you have to give a cutting edge to your competitors to survive in your market as thousands of people own the same business as yours. For this purpose your website should be displayed on top pages of search engine results. In case your website gets stuck on the 20th page of numerous search results, your business would run in loss. This is because visitors tend to check only first few results of particular search in any search engine. No one has enough time to go through the 20th page of results list. In nutshell, your website is yielding no gains for you despite the time and money you have invested in developing your website.
To avoid such a situation and to put up a tough competition to your opponents, it becomes important for you to think about ‘Search Engine Optimization’. What precisely is Search Engine Optimization? It is referred to as an art of using various techniques which help in getting your website listed on top search results of search engines for precise key phrases. This ultimately helps in enhancing the traffic to your website and increasing your profits. SEO process proceeds step by step and the different steps involved are Keywords Research and Analysis, On Page Optimization and Off Page Optimization. To obtain the best results for a successfully optimized site, it is necessary to know different techniques used in each step.
