Search marketing is potent because it is exceedingly well targeted, aiming interested prospects, including many who have the intent to purchase. This makes search marketing more efficient and effective than marketing on social media. Not surprisingly, click through rates (CTR) are highest for search advertising.
Since organic results are free, one may argue, why advertise?
Firstly, high visibility on SERP is of utmost importance. As can be seen for Exhibit 18.2, click-through-rates drop exponentially across ranks. From a theoretical standpoint, the reasons:
Since it is difficult to secure a high rank on SERP, except for long tail keywords that are exclusively well aligned with your web page, marketers need search advertising to improve visibility.
Besides the importance of gaining visibility, marketers may prefer search advertising because their costs can be well controlled. Search service providers offer cost-per-click pricing where advertisers are not charged for impressions. They control how much they pay per click, and set budgets per day.
Accountability through analytics is another advantage associated with digital marketing, including search advertising. Analytics platforms track flow and support an array of metrics to measure results.
Lastly, quite importantly, even those who are confident of securing a high organic rank on SERPs, they may consider advertising to pre-empt competition. Top/high ranking sites sometimes place ads to occupy the ad space, in order to thwart competition.
Note: To find content on MarketingMind type the acronym ‘MM’ followed by your query into the search bar. For example, if you enter ‘mm consumer analytics’ into Chrome’s search bar, relevant pages from MarketingMind will appear in Google’s result pages.
Two-day hands-on coaching on Digital Marketing and Advertising, to train participants in developing and executing effective digital marketing strategies.
Marketing has changed. More so in practical terms, and marketing education is lagging.
The fundamental change lies in the application of analytics and research. Every aspect of the marketing mix can be sensed, tracked and measured.
That does not mean that marketers need to become expert statisticians. We don't need to learn to develop marketing mix models or create perceptual maps. But we should be able to understand and interpret them.
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The Destiny market simulator was developed in response to this challenge. Traversing business years within days, it imparts a concentrated dose of analytics-based strategic marketing experiences.
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