Search Engine Marketing – A primer for the busy executive

One of the hottest topics in marketing today is Search Engine Marketing or SEM for short. What is SEM and why is it so hot? The purpose of this post is to give the busy SMB owner a quick high level guide to the key things he/she needs to understand about SEM.

So what is SEM? Think of SEM as a two-step dance. Step #1 is all about getting found by the people who are searching online for the products or services that you sell. Step #2 is all about converting those people who have found you online into prospects or customers.

Step #1 – Getting Found

So many companies spend their marketing budgets searching for customers – or worse – trying to CREATE customers (think evangelism). It’s a bit like searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack.

SEM turns this problem on its head. At any point in time, SOMEBODY is out there looking to buy what you’re selling! It may be one out 10 or one out of 100, but they’re out there!

And guess where they’re searching? On the Web of course! (Google didn’t morph into a verb – “to google, googling” – by accident!) Over 85% of people now start their search for something – anything – on the Web regardless of whether it’s B2B or B2C, product or service, global or local.

Effective SEM ensures that those people FIND YOU – and ideally find you first – without you actually having to do a whole lot (other than a pretty modest investment SEM of course).


Step #2 – Converting Visitors Into Prospects and/or Customers

Now that you’ve got people visiting your Website because they found you first in their online search, what do you do with them? Sell to them of course!

Sounds trite, but 90% of SMB Websites actually fail to do this. They provide lots and lots of information on the company, its history, the 344 products it sells, the founders childhood development, etc., BUT they don’t make it easy to contact them (think toll-free phone number in big font on the homepage), and they don’t make the “easy sale”.

In our next post, we’ll look more closely at the “easy sale” and why it’s such an integral part of the SEM equation.