Adding Paid Search To Your Marketing Mix

Adding Paid Search to Your Marketing Mix

Is your marketing strategy reaching its full potential? On the surface your strategy may appear comprehensive including TV commercials, print media and outdoor advertising. Perhaps you have expanded your efforts to include a well designed corporate website. Although the expectations of an online presence were high, the results are less than impressive.

Too often, a corporate website strategy is considered complete once the website is available to the public. With the popularity of search engines such as Yahoo and Google, it’s easy to assume that new customers will find your website by performing simple searches. Unfortunately, that is rarely the case. By comparison, if you opened a new office would you simply hope that customers noticed the sign on your door when passing by? Of course not! You would aggressively market your new venture. Your website needs a similar strategy.

If you need to increase online visibility of your products and services, paid search may be a good choice. With paid search, you begin by selecting keywords that best represent your offerings. When someone enters your keyword as a search, a snippet of text, an image, or a video is displayed at the top of the search results. This media would link back to your website. In most instances you will pay for each time a visitor clicks on the media and links to your site. The advantage to this method is that you are only paying for positive results.

With paid search you are guaranteed excellent placement for the keywords you have selected. This can be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve by other means such as Meta tags. Another benefit is the wealth of marketing data paid search campaigns generate. Not only can this information be used for both business intelligence and CRM purposes but it also can serve as a barometer for the overall success of the marketing campaign. In all, paid search is relatively inexpensive, especially when considering the success rates many research reports are finding. It could prove to be an invaluable tool in your marketing strategy