Importance of SEM in the digital marketing strategy :

Inbound Marketing has become one of the favorite pillars of marketers and one of the reasons is because it allows us to attract potential customers in a more "natural" way than traditional marketing.

But sometimes misconceptions arise about what online marketing encompasses, such as thinking that ads are obsolete on the Internet, and the reality is that not all campaigns do not "interrupt" the user. 

On the contrary, pop-up ads or banners, even YouTube ads or those that celebrities post on their Instagram, manage to sneak into our daily lives without our permission. It is in this area that we can place outbound marketing and, of course, SEM marketing.

Ads (even skippable ones) can be annoying, but they are necessary. Especially when on the Internet there is a wide sea of ​​information and sites with which we are competing to obtain the attention of the user and the search engines. 

Yes, we want leads or prospects to find us, but how are they going to do it if there are thousands of people talking about the same thing as you?

What is SEM?

We could say that SEM or Search Engine Marketing has 2 meanings: 

First of all, this term is used to refer exclusively to the strategies and campaigns that are carried out with the search engine advertising platforms, such as Google Ads, Bing Ads, etc. There are even those who could summarize it "like SEO but with payments".

But in the most general sense, SEM can refer to any type of marketing effort that is applied to optimizing search engine visibility, whether to increase traffic or authority.

In SEO what we do is optimize everything possible (content, pages, URLs) so that users find us when they perform an "organic" search.

On the other hand, in SEM advertising campaigns are created with PPC (pay per click) , either to appear first in the results and increase traffic to the site, to appear on other sites through banners, or even to show products on the web pages. user searches.

 In the world of the Internet, there are thousands of people and you trying to position content, using SEM strategies gives your content a boost.

Advantages and disadvantages of SEM

Incorporating strategies for SEM positioning, taking advantage of the tools at your disposal, has its cost but also its reward.

Advantages

The importance of SEM, and why it cannot be discarded from a strategy without premeditating, lies in the advantages it can offer a company. Benefits such as:

• Immediate results: When an SEM campaign is established, optimized, and segmented for the keywords and target that you need, then you can obtain almost immediate results.
• You define your investment from the beginning: Before starting your ad campaign, you can choose the amount of investment that will be allocated and will be spent, within a certain period of time. As part of this advantage, it is possible to make small investments and even what you are willing to invest in each click.
• Segmentation: From the moment the parameters of an ad campaign are defined, a very specific segmentation of the target that you want to cover can be made, spending the budget only on the public that interests you.
• Possibility of conversions: By offering the visibility of your ads, you have a high probability of receiving leads who are really interested in what you are offering.
• Constant monitoring: The various advertising platforms have modalities to be able to monitor the results of each campaign in real-time, in this way you can see the entry of leads, how much the impressions and clicks are costing, as well as make any changes. to optimize results.

Disadvantages

• Interrupts the user : One of the attractions of digital marketing is the attraction strategies where the user's attention is naturally called. However, with SEM, banners or other more traditional types of advertising are used, which can be annoying in the user experience. It can even be affected if people use some software to block this kind of advertising.
• High competition : This kind of strategy has gained great popularity, so it is not surprising that a large number of companies fight for the same opportunities to appear in the results of certain keywords. As a result, the bids become higher and the competition more expensive.
• The investment defines the possible results : Investments in SEM are scalable, but just as it can be something positive, it can be decisive in a field with high competition.
• You need a constant investment : Just as the investment can define your exposure capacity, it also determines the time. An SEM campaign stops producing results the moment you stop paying for it. Therefore, this strategy is not always as profitable in the long run.

Why do we need the SEM?

What we want with SEM is to speed up the exposure and reach process by investing in Pay Per Click (PPC) strategies or social media campaigns like FacebookAds .

And it is this very thing, of having to pay, that keeps many from including SEM as part of their digital marketing and inbound marketing strategies. That and that the word payment is used as an antonym for Internet marketing.

As we stated from the beginning, there is no marketing channel that does not cost . Regardless of how "easy" or "free" it looks (like having social media strategies), we have to be aware that many of the digital platforms where we do internet marketing are designed to make this process easier for those who pay .

For example, Facebook is one of the tools that has become an essential part of the strategies for marketers, if you are not on Facebook it is like not existing for an entire sector of the population.

Unfortunately , having many followers is not synonymous with guaranteed visibility . To illustrate, did you know that only 10 percent of your followers see your content? In other words, if you have 10,000 followers on Facebook, only a thousand see your posts.

Also, of those thousand people, how likely are they to become your customers or leads? Sure, they follow your page and most likely are interested in your product, but what if they already bought from you and aren't thinking of doing so in the near future? What about the rest of the users who are interested in buying but don't like you? locate?

That is why SEM marketing and other paid strategies are important and relevant. They help us reach the right people almost immediately . And it is for the same reason that they should also be thought of as part of our inbound marketing efforts and not as one more extra.

 SEM goes hand in hand with SEO, especially in pay-per-click strategies such as Google AdWords.

How can we implement SEM in our digital marketing strategies?

One of the clearest examples of SEM is Google AdWords since what we are looking for is to appear as the first option in the results pages. Imagine that you start your party planning business and create your blog website. It is very likely that there are already millions of similar businesses that have been making content or being present on the network for longer. The chances of you appearing as the first option are very limited.

Although a content marketing and SEO strategy can provide great long-term benefits, this is a process that takes time and work to build.

This is where AdWords comes in, when paying for ads what you are doing is guaranteeing certain visibility to the person who searches for the keywords with which you want to position yourself . Giving an example, if your goal at the moment is to do weddings, when a person searches for weddings your ad can be activated. However, this also has its trick, this is where all our SEO knowledge comes in.

We have already told you about the differences between SEO and SEM , we have told you how organic positioning is achieved, so you should already have an idea of ​​the type of optimizations we are talking about (and if not, this is your moment).

When making an advertisement in Google AdWords we enter a kind of auction . Obviously, just as there are thousands of pages on the Internet fighting for the first places, there are people interested in making their ads the most visible. 

Even companies like Amazon and Walmart use AdWords, especially when it's the season of certain sales like Christmas or video game or console launches that attract a large number of people interested in searching for the same product. This way they can become the first site to be visited and get a conversion or sale.

In order for our ad to appear in the first place, we need our bid or the offer we make to be the best possible . This is why our ads have to have the right keywords and be as attractive as possible.

 

With the SEM we can get to appear on the organic results of a search, and thus have the opportunity to be the first thing in the eyes of interested people.

Although SEM gives us short-term visibility and gives us that "push" we need to make our content visible, it cannot be seen as a substitute for digital marketing strategies.

First, because as we have already explained to you, the investment you make when implementing content strategies is much cheaper in the long term and serves us better against Google's search engine bots; In the long term, it is easier for us to position ourselves without the need to pay. 

The key to search engine marketing is not to put aside SEM strategies and use them properly, for example when we want to generate more leads or we are launching a campaign for a new product or service, and even for seasons such as Black Friday or Cyber ​​Monday.