July, 2019

What is SEM? Let’s figure it out!

Search Engine Marketing in translation from English means search engine marketing. Abbreviated SEM is a set of measures aimed at increasing the position of a site in search engines using paid advertising. On the Google search engine, advertisers place bids on keywords that users can enter when searching for specific products or services. This gives the advertiser the ability to show their ads alongside the organic search results for those search terms. Using SEM in your marketing campaign is a quick way to drive traffic to your website and, in the long run, increase your organic search engine rankings. The most famous and used paid SEM search tool is Google Ads.

The main task that SEM solves:

1. Attracting potential buyers who are interested in your product.

2. Increase in the percentage of sales. 

3. Increase brand/company awareness and popularity and improve reputation. The more you catch the client’s eye, the better the client will remember you.

Marketers agreed that the ideal SEM formula includes two essential ingredients: search engine optimization (SEO) and contextual advertising (SEA). Another important component of search marketing is VSM (Video Search Marketing), which is contextual video advertising that is used on video hosting sites.

What is SEO?

SEO is a set of measures aimed at optimizing a website for search engines. Literally, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. The goal of SEO is to increase the relevance of pages and organic rankings. Getting a site into the TOP-10 for targeted queries significantly increases the number of orders, and with this, the company’s profit. If the site takes the first position in organic search results, you get the bulk of targeted visitors for a search query.

SEO-optimization includes:

•  tracking current algorithms for ranking search engines; 
• analysis of the current state of the niche, to plan the correct strategy for promoting your resource;
•  technical audit of the site (work that allows you to identify and remove software and technical faults of the site);
•  compilation of a semantic core (a list of keywords by which the site will be promoted); 
• carrying out work on the internal optimization of the site (optimization of meta tags, images, headers, content, improvement of the site structure, setting up internal linking and much more);
• carrying out work on external website optimization (building up the link mass to your resource);
•  analysis of user behavior on landing pages and on the site as a whole;
•  installation of analytics to track the results of the above actions and timely adjust the work plan.

Compared to SEO, SEM has the following differences: using SEM, the company pays Google for traffic and clicks, and SEO gets high rankings in the search engine for free, with the most relevant content for a keyword search query. SEO optimization increases the chances that when searching for a query of interest, a potential client will see your site in the search engine. And SEM works with predetermined queries. Therefore, the website will then collect ready-to-buy customers. Each promotion method, be it SEM or SEO, has its own characteristics. Website optimization for search engines is relevant for any field of activity, but it is worth considering that a lot of time can pass before the first profit is received. However, the first positions won in the search engine ranking give long-term results for little money, compared to SEM. On the other hand, SEM gives first sales results from the first day of advertising launch. It is important to take into account that not all products can be advertised, and if you turn off advertising or do not renew it, site traffic will drop sharply. 

For the most effective development of your business in an online marketing strategy, it is important to apply SEM and SEO in combination. But in addition to such methods of promoting web resources, there is a method called SMO, which is more aimed at keeping the user on the site. 

SMO (Social Media Optimization) is one of the modern methods of website promotion by optimizing the resource for social networks. In general, social media site optimization means optimizing the website and its content in a format that will encourage more users to use and share links to the website through social media.

Content marketing is a popular tool for attracting and communicating with customers. Young brands believe that content marketing is about publishing articles on a company’s blog and optimizing a site in search results, but that’s not all.

What is content marketing, how to implement it in a business, and why not all brands use such an “effective” tool – in our article.

What is called content marketing?

Content marketing is a tool for attracting new customers and communicating with them through the distribution of useful content.

This is not a mindless posting of publicly available material. Content marketing works when you create unique and expert content for your business niche. In practice, it looks like this: a user searches for information on the Internet, gets on the material of your blog, uses it to solve “pains”, subscribes to the newsletter, begins to trust the brand, and becomes a client. With the right implementation of content marketing in your business, you will get:

• additional audience;
• brand promotion;
• user trust;
• attracting traffic to the site;
• increasing sales.

How should the content be prepared?

Content marketing does not dictate the rules for submitting useful material. It can be distributed in any format: write cool cases, articles, and news, draw infographics, publish reports and polls, record podcasts and video tutorials. The main thing is that clients receive useful material.

Content can be divided into news, useful (for business development), and entertainment.

Stages of introducing a content strategy into a business

The content strategy includes all the nuances about materials, dates, and sites for publications for a certain period (most often a month).

Target audience analysis

If you do not know for whom the content is useful (and whether it is useful at all), do not proceed to the next steps. Determine who your client is, what resources he uses, what “pains” you solve with the help of content. It is advisable to analyze competitors in your niche.

Content plan creation

A content plan is a document in which all the details are described: when there will be publications, on what topics, in what format, on what sites. If you are writing SEO copy, include key phrases in your content plan for preparing each topic. The content plan allows you to avoid chaos in the preparation and posting of materials.

Content marketing is the systematic distribution of materials. Often, young brands believe that content marketing is not fruitful and useless. The secret is that the method of attracting customers through useful materials does not work immediately: traffic on the site and sales begin to grow in at least 5 months, and if you publish unnecessary content, it will not bring results at all.

How to choose themes for your content plan

You can identify topics of interest to users using Google Trends. You can also analyze major search queries using one of the SEO services.

Let’s look at the example of the Serpstat service:

1. We write a key phrase on the site (for example, “building a sales department”).
2. Choose a country and a search engine (Ukraine, Google.com), click “Search”.
3. We get an analysis of the frequency of requests by clusters.

Now you know which keywords are the most popular in your niche. Based on this data, create topics for writing articles, recording podcasts, video tutorials, or how-tos. For example, if the highest-frequency query is “building a sales department from scratch”, you can write a detailed step-by-step instruction “How to build an effective sales department from scratch”.

Selection of specialists

The first two points can be done independently, but further, without a team of specialists, it will be difficult. Imagine that you are staging a play: you need to distribute roles for all the actors, evaluate their preparation and the picture as a whole.

A marketer, editor, designer, and SMM specialist take a mandatory part in creating a content plan. Each of them is responsible for the quality of the final result: the marketer analyzes and selects ideas for publications, the editor controls the quality and expertise of the copywriter’s texts, the designer works on the visual component of the posts (creates diagrams, infographics, banners), the same specialist chooses the publication time, seeding methods content and interaction with the audience.

It is better to involve copywriters who know the topic: they will write material faster and better than those who will understand the topic from scratch. If you plan to publish frequently, you can involve several authors to speed up the processes.

The systematic posting

Content marketing is not a trivial posting of articles on a website. We recommend publishing content on your website, social networks, and other external resources (even on a paid basis), and creating email newsletters.

Organics do not provide a large reach of posts, so use targeted ads to promote your content, otherwise, it will go unnoticed.

Posting should not be chaotic, but systematic. You can use the auto-posting services to make this easier.

How to check the effectiveness of your content strategy?

Some people think that the effectiveness of a content strategy is foolish to measure because it is not a quantitative but a qualitative tool. You can still measure the effectiveness using metrics of reach, user activity, the number of article views, traffic to the site, and sales.

Use data from Google Analytics and Facebook ad cabinets. Most organic views and interactions will be in the first 2-3 days, and then everything depends on the work of the targetologist and the SMM manager (seeding materials in different communities). Pay attention to social metrics – likes, reposts, comments.

Why content marketing doesn’t work? 

The reasons are different. The first is the misuse of content marketing. If you need sales, registrations, and customer contacts – use landing pages, contextual and targeted advertising.

The second reason is the chaotic “throwing” of content into the network. Content marketing does not bring results quickly: you will have to systematically share content and not receive feedback for a long time. Therefore, all brands know about content marketing, but do not use it to promote their business.

Advertising in digital is a tool for achieving important business goals. Today we’ll talk about the main stages of transforming business tasks into KPIs for advertising campaigns.

 Stage 1

Define a goal in business development. For example: “Increase sales by 10%”, “Increase market share”, “Increase revenue by 30% next year”, “Sell 1000 units of a product online”.

Stage 2

Outline the ways to achieve the goal of analyzing the competitive environment and identifying its weaknesses.

Stage 3

Set, work out marketing and communication tasks as part of the company’s development strategy. For example: “Increasing product knowledge by delivering a new key message to the consumer”, “Increasing brand awareness”, “We want to be perceived as“ a drink for parties ”,“ Our product is considered equal to competitors before it is purchased ”.

Stage 4

Determine the channels in which to convey the message to the target audience: website, social networks, display advertising, search advertising, SEO, and others.

Stage 5

Set tasks for each selected digital channel. For example: “Tell about the brand at the consideration stage”, “Immerse the user in the atmosphere of the“ party ”even before the purchase” or “Orient the user in the category”. Tactical media goals, in this case, will be, for example, “Building coverage of 60% of the target audience at a frequency of 5+.”

Stage 6

Filling out the brief and preparing a media plan.

Understanding the goals in each of these stages is necessary to get the expected results from an advertising campaign. All stages are interconnected, so it is important to go step by step from the first to the last, in order to avoid the irrational use of the advertising budget.

We know how to launch an effective advertising campaign that will help you achieve your business goals. Our team thoroughly analyzes the needs of each client and argues for the selected set of tools to achieve the set goals.

The rapid growth in the number of Internet entrepreneurs and competition contributes to the increasing demand for various Internet marketing tools. But there are ways that have remained relevant for many years – email newsletters for an online store or other sites. It will become a real panacea during a crisis and a decrease in user activity. Let’s consider in what situations email marketing services are needed, as well as the main advantages of this method.

What problems does email marketing solve?

It is important to understand that the effectiveness of mailings will be maximized not with short-term, but long-term use. The use of this method of promotion will be relevant in the following cases:

• mailing personalization – communicating directly with a potential client;
• a reminder of a company, brand, product, or service;
• organization of email newsletters to stimulate repeat 
• purchases;providing feedback – solves the problem of communication with the client;
• developing a subscriber base for a blog or YouTube channel;
• database segmentation – you can contact interested users personally;
• Analysis of the results obtained to adjust the activity.

This all makes email marketing for businesses the most effective solution. Plus, it is not only the most effective but also the cheapest way to attract customers and increase sales. At the same time, human resources are saved, since the mailing is usually carried out automatically.

This method of promotion will be especially relevant for services and educational institutions, bloggers and opinion leaders, online stores and marketplaces, B2B companies.

What are the benefits of email marketing?

Email marketing is increasingly chosen for online stores because of the benefits this marketing tool provides:

• Minimum time spent. Once sent, a well-written email will produce results. It is important that the letter solves the set goals – it increases the overall growth of sales, increases the number of clicks on the site, or ensures a high percentage of the letter opening. On average, the number of sales increases up to 10%.

• Minimum cost. Depending on the size of your mailing base, email marketing may actually cost nothing – the cost is paltry compared to other marketing tools. The price is especially reduced if you save on the designer and copywriter, using templates.

• The simplicity of the way. The process of implementing email marketing is as simple as possible. It is only important to adhere to some rules, for example, send letters only to voluntarily subscribed users. Also, the mailing should be regular, thematic, competent, and polite.

The important thing is to just make sure that your email newsletter doesn’t turn into standard spam that won’t even be opened. To achieve maximum efficiency, the mailing should be carried out by professionals, taking into account all the rules and regulations. Only such letters are guaranteed to be open, solving the assigned tasks.

The main reference point is the needs of the client. On this foundation, email newsletters are built.