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Search engine mar­ket­ing (SEM) is the new fron­tier in adver­tis­ing and pro­mot­ing busi­nesses Inter­na­tion­ally and here in South Africa. How does this affect tra­di­tional adver­tis­ing? ( This infor­ma­tion was com­plied from a post by Paul Therond )

SEM as an adver­tis­ing medium is found purely on the Inter­net whereas tra­di­tional adver­tis­ing such as bill­boards, TV adver­tis­ing are pro­motes busi­nesses in the tra­di­tional off line sense

Online Mar­ket­ing and pro­mo­tion is all about con­tent and infor­ma­tion and sat­is­fy­ing  that need in peo­ple who are look­ing for answers. Real world Adver­tis­ing it is all about loca­tion and those who have the best loca­tion and biggest adver­tis­ing spend will get the customer’s feet into their store.

How­ever the beauty of SEM is that it allows smaller busi­nesses to com­pete with much larger busi­nesses as he who pro­vides the most cred­i­ble infor­ma­tion cor­rectly opti­mised for search engines will win the cus­tomer. (Feet through his website)

Let us look at an example:

Client A who is a seller of elec­tric gen­er­a­tors decides to use search engine adver­tis­ing using pay per click and organic search engine tech­niques and is able to get on the 1^st page of Google for 6 of his key­words. In order to achieve this client A is able to gen­er­ate 1000 tar­geted cus­tomers for his sales page web­site where he sells the gen­er­a­tor from. From this he is able to achieve a 3% con­ver­sion rate on sales totalling 30 gen­er­a­tors sold.

Now the true suc­cess of this cam­paign could only be mea­sured by know­ing the costs incurred to sell these gen­er­a­tors and the price he is charg­ing his 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, hand out fly­ers, glossy brochures etc to sell his gen­er­a­tor. Now one of the dif­fer­ences is that the cus­tomers would not be tar­geted as in the search engine exam­ple. How­ever there would also be a big­ger audi­ence that this adver­tis­ing media reaches.

“Now think about this, if all this tra­di­tional adver­tis­ing cre­ated 1000 leads for the busi­ness and 1000 peo­ple phys­i­cally came into the gen­er­a­tor shop I can guar­an­tee that there would be a higher response rate than the 3%, because those clients would be phys­i­cally invested in the store and make a pur­chase deci­sion. The only ques­tion is how much would the com­pany have to spend on tra­di­tional adver­tis­ing to gen­er­ate all those leads?” And therein lies the fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence and ques­tion, as using tra­di­tional adver­tis­ing makes it very dif­fi­cult to mea­sure return on adver­tis­ing spend.

“How­ever using online mar­ket­ing tech­niques like SEM means that we can track every dol­lar spent and deter­mine the best strat­egy for the best ROI. How­ever you might be ask­ing why you would get a lower response rate from the search engine adver­tis­ing com­pared to 1000 peo­ple com­ing through the store.”

“The answer is quite sim­ple because on your Inter­net browser there is a but­ton called back which makes it so easy for your poten­tial clients to com­pare you with your com­peti­tors. The per­son with the best propo­si­tion wins! How­ever when you have 1000 cus­tomers com­ing through your store it is a dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tion as the next gen­er­a­tor store, who is your com­peti­tor, could be across town.”

“For the best ROI , I would go with SEM as it is a more cost effec­tive solu­tion than other more tra­di­tional forms of Advertising.”

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