Naturally, this is true for the rest of the universe of products and services. Cars and couches may have very little in common, but do you know what is common about them? If someone is considering buying them, they are probably going to search for them online, either to shop or to find a retail outlet to visit to do their shopping. Likewise business cards, bed linens, video game consoles, and almost everything else. We don’t even think about all the items we research on the Internet before we buy them anymore, but there’s a reason that “google” has become a verb.

We’re always searching, and our window to the world is the search engines of the world wide web. Search engines are that yellow brick road that leads to your door, if you let them.

I’ve talked about Search Engine Optimization and the basics of how to make your site more appetizing to search engines. The other half of the puzzle – the way to get more clicks to your site even if it isn’t completely optimized – is Search Engine Marketing.

And so we have the two things I can tell any car dealer (or almost any businessperson) without equivocation, that they should be spending money on. In this day and age, you absolutely must have an optimized and fully realized web site, and you absolutely must have a paid search campaign.  Because your web site is your front door, and the search engine is the street you’re located on.

Now, three quick reasons you should be spending on a paid search campaign:

1. Your site, even at its best, will not be served up for every relevant search term.  To get in front of as many of the right people as possible, you must pay to cover the “gaps” in your optimization strategy.
2. Search engine optimization feeds search engine marketing and vice versa.  The amount you pay for paid search clicks is dependent in part on how relevant the search engine determines your site is to the keywords entered.  Optimizing your site will increase your relevance, and if you “win” the click, your site’s relevance will increase, which will potentially decrease your cost on future clicks.  For more information on relevance, click here.
3. There are often third-party lead “aggregators” out there that collect lead information.  They then sell those leads back to the companies that sell the products that people were searching for.  A pay-per-click or other paid search campaign will typically supersede most third-party aggregators, if your web site is properly optimized.  Click on the screenshot at the right to get an example of just such a page.  In a future post we’ll talk more about why you’re better off developing leads through your own site than signing up for an aggregator service, and how to prove it for yourself.

So now we’ve answered most of the why’s of search engine marketing – it helps optimize your page, grabs searchers you might not otherwise reach based on your page’s relevance, and it gets you in front of competition that is using aggregator services.  So let’s talk a little about how much.

How much to spend on search engine marketing is a very difficult question.  On the one hand, search engine marketing is extremely powerful – it lets you reach people everywhere and anywhere based on what they’re searching for.  You can make your search ads appear globally or in the tiniest sliver of a single ZIP code.  You’ll appear in blogs, related websites and every other conceivable place through Google’s AdSense network and other similar systems.  It’s easy to get overwhelmed and think you can reach the entire world.  But if your site and your business are not equipped to service the entire world, it hardly seems worthwhile to try and do so.

Moreover, your site needs to be prepared to receive new visitors and offer up the things that they are looking for.  So you need appropriate landing pages within your site that address those items.  For instance, if you are a video game retailer, you might have a Wii page, a PlayStation 3 page, and an XBox 360 page that offer games, accessories, et. al., so that in your paid search campaign you might have three different sets of keywords to reach those people.  Because it hardly seems sensible to send someone who searched for “wii controllers” to your home page, where they have to wade through menus to get to the thing they were just searching for, right?

It’s obvious that there’s a lot to consider, and it’s easy to overspend and waste your money if you don’t have an educated eye to help you figure it all out.  I don’t offer pay-per-click management services, because it’s a huge time commitment on its own, and it’s just a part of the bigger picture.  But what I do offer is to help companies find the right partner for paid search marketing – one that knows their industry and concerns, as well as best practices.  I teach the questions you need to ask, the results you need to be asking for, how to interpret them, and how to get the best out of your provider by providing feedback that helps guide them and increase your success.

That’s what it’s all about, right?

Well, to be fair, I’m selling something too.  I sell marketing and search engine optimization services to companies far and wide.  But I won’t promise you a one-stop, be-all end-all solution to your Internet marketing problems.  What I will do is put you on the path to success by giving you a foundation of knowledge and several SEO techniques that will prepare your business to go out into the digital world confidently.

So what about those magic bullets?  How do I avoid getting sold one?

The first thing you need to remember when you’re reviewing any marketing proposal is that you’re being sold something.  No one does anybody any favors, and nobody gives anything away.  If you are paying $25,000, you’re getting $25,000 worth of value or less.  You are NEVER getting more than that, because if they could sell it for more, they would.

Pretty easy, right?  You’d be surprised at how many times I’ve had clients who got distracted by how much “extra” they were getting.  In the back of my head when I read some proposals I actually hear Billy Mays shouting, “But wait!  There’s more!”

The second thing you must remember is that there is no such thing as one-size-fits-all.  Not in gloves, T-shirts or in marketing.  What worked for your competition across the street, or for your buddy in his business is not necessarily what you must be doing.  The key question you have to ask is, “How does this fit my marketing strategy?” 

If you don’t have a marketing strategy, well, that’s another problem.  If it doesn’t fit your marketing strategy, then it’s time to ask yourself another question.  “Do I need to change my strategy?”

Sometimes the answer is yes.  Sometimes no.  How you determine the answer (and whether or not it will be the right answer) has to do with a third factor.

The third thing you must know and understand to make smart marketing decisions is the difference between strategies and tactics.  A strategy is never a tactic, and (this is the more common mistake) a tactic is never a strategy.

What’s the difference?

A strategy is an overall philosophy for how you approach your marketing efforts.  It involves looking at your overarching goals and determining what methods you will use to reach your market, and then applying your approach through a series of tactics.

What are tactics?  Tactics are individual techniques used to achieve your strategic goals.  That sounds circular, so let’s look at it this way:

Let’s say your media buying strategy is to reach the mass market through a combination of network TV (which has a broad reach but is expensive) and cable TV (which is much more fragmented, but offers the ability to build up frequency).  That’s a perfectly valid way to approach the market for many industries, and is the basis of most advertising campaigns.

A tactic you might use in buying your media plan is to split your :30 commercials into :15 “bookends,” which are placed at the beginning and end of a commercial break, so that there’s a better chance TV viewers in this DVR world will see at least one of them.

Let’s move into the digital world for a minute and look at the same three items.  The local newspaper sends your company a proposal for banner ads that will run all across their website (they call that “run of site;” clever, right?).  It sounds pretty good.  The whole site?  Well, let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you know that only about 2% of the population is in the market for your product at a given time.  So, while you have “run of site” on the local newspaper site that “everybody” goes to, what do you really have?  Maybe not much.  It depends on your strategy.  What is the message you would be intending to send in these banner ads?

So right there, we ask those first two questions, “How much am I really getting?” and “Does this fit my strategy?”

The key here is that the answer to the first question is dependent upon your answer to the second question.  And the answer to the second question is dependent upon your understanding of how to make tactical use of the marketing opportunity.

The value of a good marketing or advertising partner is that these questions are second nature to the practiced professional, and the time and cost savings of good advice can be monumental.