In 2008, North American advertisers spent $13.5 billion on SEM (search engine marketing). The largest SEM vendors are Google AdWords, Yahoo, and MSN/Bing. SEM was growing much faster than traditional advertising and even other channels of online marketing.
SEM allows you the ability to qualify your potential customers based on many different criteria, you can use keywords that define a specific vertical of your business that you want to be more aggressive in, you can use geographic locators or radius’s just to pull customers from certain areas of town, you can choose specific engines to further refine the demographic you are looking for.
SEM is active engagement; it allows business to capture the right customer when that customer is ready to buy. The business only pays when the customer has been qualified based on the parameters set up in the SEM campaign structure, and then the potential customer clicks on the advertisement and is delivered to the business’s website.
This is the point where it gets interesting; the potential customer has landed on the business website, now what? Most business and SEM companies just hope that the customer makes a call, a purchase, sends and email, or fills out a form. The “Patient Pending Technology” that ReachLocal implements, removes all the guess work from this equation. We are able to track every customer action that takes place after the “click.”
The ReachLocal technology builds an active database on what keywords the potential customer typed into the search engine and what the potential customer did when they landed on the business website (phone calls, emails, online transactions, form submissions). As the database gets enough data to make decisions on what keywords result in a “condonable action” the system will enhance its keyword selection allowing the business to get a better ROI as the campaign runs.
This technology completely removes the “guess and check” and lowers the financial burden from running a SEM program. It’s normally a few months down the road that ROI’s peek and the business is able to see the major advantages of allowing a SEM company to run it for them.
Choosing a company is a very important part of ensuring that your SEM campaign runs well. Often time’s today business allows a “Yellow Pages” company or a “Boutique” to run a SEM campaign for them with un-measurable or marginal results, often times receiving “A bucket of clicks”. The proof is really in the reporting. Being able to see exactly what every dollar does with clear concise reporting allows the business to measure return on investment.
ReachLocal reporting will allow the business to see data on a level unheard of by any other traditional media, with a ReachLocal program, quantity & quality are where the rubber meets the road.
Please call me directly at 720.427.3707 with any questions, or if you would like a free, no obligation consultation of how SEM can positively affect your business.