Haiku Marketing, LLCThe most cost effective sales channel that any company can take advantage of is to put up a web site and to get qualified visitors coming to that site. One of the most effective ways to get qualified visitors is to get that web site listed in the major search engines. This is a bold statement but when compared to regular media advertising, direct sales, reseller channels, telemarketing, and direct mail campaigns web site promotion via Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is simply more cost effective. When compared to other Internet marketing methods such as banners, spamming and opt-in email Search Engine Marketing is still more effective. 
We can certainly footnote this fact but let's just look at this from its straight facts. When an Internet user/buyer goes to a SE they enter a search word or phrase because right at that point of time they are ready to consider a purchase. NO other media, except the Yellow Pages (a 25 Billion dollar advertising industry) can make this claim. Further, Yellow Pages can't be as timely, doesn't have the depth of a web site, can't be customized for the visitor, and of course if we're talking about an e-commerce site the Yellow Pages can't close a sale. Finally, typical Yellow Pages is limited to only about 2,500 categories. With SEM you can do key phrase research to find hundreds, if not thousands of phrases, that people enter into the search engines to find products and services. According to most research done in this arena states that 70 to 90 percent of all Internet users start to find the information they are looking for by doing a query on a search engine site. 600 millions searches are done on the major Search Engines everyday. You can even determine a relatively actuate number of searches for your products and service that take place on a daily basis using a keyword research services such as Overture or/and WordTracker. It's not just a matter of designing a web site and publishing it to the web its also a matter of having that web site come up as one of the first web sites listed in the SE results. Most research shows that most consumers don't look beyond the first page on the search engine. This statistic drops off after the second page. The ideal circumstance is to have you web page comes up when the search engine results first are shown to the end-user, or as they say in the newspaper business, "above the fold". 
The whole art, craft, and/or science of getting your web site listed as high as possible in a SE is generally given the name Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Search Engine Marketing is itself breaks down into two main methods Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC). The best way to think about PPC and SEO is to compare them to your "basic listing" in the Yellow Pages and PPC as the equivalent to a display ad. The Search Engine industry likes to compare they basic listing to the "editorial" function in a newspaper but this is simply incorrect. |