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Search engine mar­ket­ing (SEM) is the new fron­tier in adver­tis­ing busi­nesses on an inter­na­tional scale. How­ever the ques­tion remains, “how does it com­pare to tra­di­tional adver­tis­ing?” as pri­mar­ily punted by Madi­son Avenue cre­ative agen­cies. A key to con­sider is the loca­tions of these types of adver­tis­ing forms, which I eluded to in the title of this post today. SEM is a vir­tual adver­tis­ing medium found purely on the Inter­net whereas tra­di­tional adver­tis­ing such as bill­boards, TV adver­tis­ing are pro­mot­ing the busi­nesses in the tra­di­tional brick and mor­tar sense. Online it is all about con­tent and infor­ma­tion and sup­ply­ing that need to the peo­ple who are look­ing for answers. In the real world it is all about loca­tion and he who has the best loca­tion and most adver­tis­ing spend will win the cus­tomer by get­ting feet into their store. How­ever the beauty of SEM is that it allows smaller busi­nesses to com­pete with much larger busi­nesses as he or she who pro­vides the most cred­i­ble infor­ma­tion, cor­rectly opti­mised for search engines, will win the cus­tomers hearts.

Let us look at an example:

Client A who is a seller of elec­tric gen­er­a­tors decides to use search engine adver­tis­ing using organic search engine tech­niques and is able to get on the 1^st page of Google for 6 of his key­words. From this achieve­ment client A is able to gen­er­ate 1000 tar­geted cus­tomers to his web­site. From this he is able to achieve 1% sales con­ver­sion rate and makes a total of 10 gen­er­a­tor sales. Now the true suc­cess of this cam­paign could only be mea­sured by know­ing all the costs incurred to sell these gen­er­a­tors and the price he is charg­ing his own clients. How­ever I would like to make a key point in how this adver­tis­ing cam­paign dif­fers from a tra­di­tional adver­tis­ing cam­paign.

What’s the difference?

In tra­di­tional adver­tis­ing the busi­ness would place mag­a­zine adverts, cre­ate bill­boards, and hand out fly­ers, glossy brochures to sell this gen­er­a­tor. Now one of the dif­fer­ences here is that the cus­tomers would not be tar­geted as in the search engine exam­ple as many peo­ple who received the brochure or saw the bill­board actu­ally did not want to see it. How­ever there would also be a greater audi­ence (mass adver­tis­ing) see­ing these adverts. So let us assume that this adver­tis­ing also gen­er­ated 1000 feet into the gen­er­a­tor store. I can guar­an­tee you that there would be a higher response rate than the 1% that was achieved using the search engines. If there was 1000 peo­ple phys­i­cally com­ing into this fic­ti­tious gen­er­a­tor store. This is sim­ply because of the stick­i­ness fac­tor of being in-store.

Am I say­ing tra­di­tional adver­tis­ing is better?

Not nec­es­sar­ily. Yes if you were able to get 1000 peo­ple into your phys­i­cal store a much higher per­cent­age should buy your prod­ucts, due to the stick­i­ness fac­tor of the store (com­peti­tor might be across town, good sales­man etc). How­ever the ques­tion to be asked about the tra­di­tional adver­tis­ing medium is how much money had to be spent on the adver­tis­ing to get those 1000 prospects in the 1^st place. More than likely it would have been much more than a search engine mar­ket­ing cam­paign. Using online mar­ket­ing tech­niques like SEM means that we can track every dol­lar spent and deter­mine the best strat­egy for the best ROI. This is one of the biggest dif­fer­ences as busi­nesses can now be con­fi­dent in a form of adver­tis­ing where they can mea­sure results. If a cam­paign is not work­ing, weak­nesses can be iden­ti­fied and fixed. This is the beauty of online mar­ket­ing and why we are so pas­sion­ate about it. Do we rec­om­mend can­ning tra­di­tional adver­tis­ing? Absolutely not, how­ever if you are not increas­ing your adver­tis­ing spend on search and inter­net mar­ket­ing, now would be a good time to con­sider doing so. There are mil­lions of peo­ple just search­ing to do busi­ness with you. Do you have any com­ments about this arti­cle, feel free to com­ment below.

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