Or: why search marketing is one of the best ways to reach customers ever invented

Just think about how traditional advertising works for a second. It’s a scatter-gun approach: you place an advert in a magazine, on television or on a billboard, in the hopes that out of the thousands of people who see it, a certain number might remember it. And, out of those few who remember it, a certain number might actually act upon it.

The simple fact is that this approach no longer works (if it ever did). Think about how advertising is becoming more ubiquitous and intrusive than ever, as they try to get more and more eyeballs in front of adverts, as people become more and more blind to them… that’s an industry becoming more and more desperate to cling onto life. When advertisers are unable to show a direct return on investment, terms such as “brand awareness” are thrown around. A better description might be “Emperor’s new clothes.”

Search is different

Search is fundamentally a marketing activity, not advertising. Marketing differs from advertising in that instead of trying to grab the attention of as many people as possible and hoping that some are in your target market, you are selecting people who already have a high chance of being interested in your product or service and, ideally, starting a conversation with them.

Search marketing goes one step further: the people you are targeting areself selecting – as long as you’re doing it right. This is incredibly powerful. You are effectively putting your message in front of people who have already put their hand up and said that they’re interested. Being sat in front of a computer or having a mobile device in their hand, they also have means of payment (or at least contacting you) literally at their fingertips.

Doing it right is relatively simple as well. You just need to choose keywords that are relevant to your business (easy) and commercially driven (a bit trickier, but still not hard).

Sounds too good to be true?

It isn’t – at least not in principle. Of course, the devil is in the details, and actually gaining that high qualified search traffic (whether throughSEO or PPC) is a difficult process, even if the basic principles are simple enough. Even picking the right keywords to target is slightly more complicated than it sounds. That’s why, for most organisations, it makes sense to hire a web marketing agency rather than trying to sweat it yourself!

Call us on 0800 644 0196 or email [email protected] to discuss how we can help you.