Growth marketing and growth hacking are terms that are often used loosely. There are even specific job titles and functions dedicated to “growth hacking.” However, what exactly does growth marketing mean?
In simple terms, growth marketing involves identifying and attracting the right customers to your business. These are the individuals who are most likely to make a purchase from your brand. Whether they are at the beginning or end of the customer journey.
So, what is the key to successful growth marketing in today’s world? Three words: search engine marketing (SEM).
SEM should not be confused with just pay-per-click (PPC) advertising or search engine optimization (SEO). SEM has consistently shown its effectiveness in delivering positive outcomes.
Search Engine Marketing is not a short-term endeavor; it is an ongoing strategy aimed at attracting more qualified customers and achieving conversions in the long run.
Outlined below are best practices that will help you succeed in SEM within today’s market.
Harmonize Your Campaign Objectives with Business Goals
The impact of search on your business goals is huge, and it’s also a fantastic tool to measure those goals. It is crucial to align your SEM strategy with your campaign objectives.
Here are some key considerations to align your SEM strategy with specific objectives:
Brand Awareness and Perception: Competitive bidding on non-brand, brand, and competitors’ keywords helps improve brand awareness and perception. Non-brand searches are critical to any customer journey: 69% of brand ad clicks are influenced by non-brand search queries. After seeing a brand ad on either a generic search query or competitor-branded query, searchers are 30% more likely to conduct a branded search.
Acquiring new customers: Consumers use search heavily to gather information and make informed purchase decisions. SEM can effectively support every stage of the decision-making process in order to attract and win over new customers.
Drive sales: Search is a powerful driver of conversions, and for this reason, it is at the top of conversion rates on various devices. Through SEM optimization, you can successfully drive sales and meet your revenue targets.
Penetrating new markets: Since search is ubiquitous, you are able to activate a cross-border marketing strategy. Tools like Location Extensions help you drive foot traffic in-store, while Call Extensions drive more phone calls. In turn, Sitelink Extensions will enable the option for more clicks to ads that help you find newer markets or larger audiences.
It becomes effective in reaching your goals when you understand the impact of search on different business objectives and align your SEM strategy to those perspectives.
Provide Meaningful Value Throughout the Decision Journey
In order to keep up with the changing behavior of your diverse customer base. It is crucial to adapt your growth marketing plan accordingly. But who exactly are the customers behind those numerous clicks?
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Through research conducted by Microsoft Ads. We gain valuable insights into the some distinct stages of purchase intent that all customers commonly experience:
Awareness: At this stage, customers gather background information and familiarize themselves with the buying landscape to become more informed researchers.
Consideration: Customers enter the consideration stage where they explore buying guides, recommendations, and products that meet their basic criteria. They compare a few products that fulfil their requirements, considering factors such as ratings, reviews, features, and cost.
Conversion: Once customers have identified their desired product, they shift to the conversion stage. Here, they search for where to make the purchase, examine pricing and promotions, availability, and local stores, and ultimately make a purchase.
Maintain: Customers who have already established a relationship with a particular brand may come across other products or services provided by that brand in different areas. This stage focuses on maintaining their engagement and loyalty.
Expand: Satisfied customers become advocates for your business by leaving reviews, engaging in word-of-mouth recommendations to peers, and more. These individuals then re-enter the awareness stage as they explore new products or services.
Understanding these distinct stages of purchase intent enables you to tailor your growth marketing strategies to effectively engage and convert customers throughout their buying journey.
Broaden the Reach of Your Marketing Funnel
Search today is no longer a product but an omnipresent behavior that surrounds us wherever we go. We search on desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones for information and answers no matter where we are.
Understanding how people search along the different stages of their purchase journey gives one the ability to effectively engage this shifting audience to connect them to your brand.
It’s also become such a powerful source of insights that it can exert influence at each stage of the buying process: awareness, consideration, conversion, maintenance, and growth.
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In addition, SEM plays a crucial role in reinforcing your conversion funnel and bringing together diverse marketing activities. It acts as a unifying force, aligning your efforts and ensuring a cohesive approach to driving conversions.
By recognizing the behavioral shift and significance of search, and leveraging SEM effectively. You can tap into its insights, engage with customers at various stages, and strengthen your overall marketing strategy.
Elevate Your Audience Targeting to a Higher Level
Engaging the customer at the right time and place is not enough to force them to buy. You have to adopt some ways of audience targeting in order to reach an even larger audience.
Here’s a two-step process you can use to implement audience targeting and maximize your engagement:
Step 1: Create very detailed buyer personas based on the following:
- Behavioral: Consume past behaviors to derive valuable insights about consumer interests and their tendency to make purchases. Activities should be analyzed across websites, searches, and content to understand user behavior better.
- Demographic: Age, gender, and location might be basic, but these are crucial factors that have a great bearing on buying preferences.
- Contextual: People search all the time. Analyze where, when, and how they are searching, and you’ll have a treasure chest of information to build more powerful ad campaigns.
Step 2: Choose keywords matching the key stages and states of mind for your customers:
- Awareness: “What is” and “Benefits of” kind of keywords will help you at this stage.
- Consideration: Include keywords such as “Buying guide” and “Models” that can help in consideration by customers.
- Conversion: Add keywords such as “Where” and “Coupon” to help facilitate conversions by providing information that is relevant to them.
- Maintain: Allow keywords such as “Support” and “Experience” to help meet the needs of your customers and keep them engaged.
- Experience: Use keywords such as “Reviews” in improving the customer experience and creating trust.
You will be able to engage your potential customers and drive conversions by using audience targeting in conjunction with a keyword strategy that aligns with the different stages of the customer journey.
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Elevate Your Other Investments Through Paid Search
Maximize the effectiveness of your search efforts by integrating organic search with a paid search engine marketing (SEM) strategy.
Here are some key considerations for optimizing your search campaigns:
Search and Social: Customers who click on your paid search and social ads are more likely to make a purchase and spend more. Strengthen your keyword coverage to increase impressions, and customize your bidding strategy specifically for commercial-focused pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.
Search and TV: Following the airing of a commercial, there is a notable spike in search volume that lasts for several days. According to a Digital study, search volume increased by over 30% compared to days and times when a commercial was not aired. Capitalize on this surge in search interest by aligning your search strategy with your TV advertising campaigns.
Search and Display: Running search and display campaigns simultaneously allows you to evaluate which channel delivers the best results. Investis Digital suggests that both channels can contribute value, and by monitoring their performance, you can make informed decisions to optimize your marketing efforts.
Search and other channels: When Microsoft Ads is the sole advertising channel in the customer’s purchase path, the average order value of purchases is 27% higher compared to purchases that do not involve Microsoft Ads. Furthermore, Microsoft Ads can generate value when combined with other marketing channels, enhancing the overall impact of your campaigns.
By combining organic search with a paid SEM strategy and strategically integrating it with other marketing channels, you can optimize your search campaigns, increase conversions, and maximize the value generated by your advertising efforts. Hire a Microsoft Ads expert for a quick result and noticeable conversion today.
Secure and Dominate Your Share of the Paid Search Budget Battle
In the ongoing competition for a portion of your marketing budget, search engine marketing (SEM) must prove its value and demonstrate a strong connection to business benefits.
To effectively advocate for SEM, it is crucial to present compelling hard data that connects the dots between SEM and its positive impact on your business.
Here are three essential elements for your budget share battle plan:
Comprehensive Metrics: Utilize a range of metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to showcase the tangible outcomes and return on investment (ROI) generated by your SEM campaigns. This can include metrics such as click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates, cost per acquisition (CPA), and revenue generated. By presenting a comprehensive set of metrics, you can demonstrate the effectiveness of SEM in driving results.
Attribution Analysis: Implement an attribution model that accurately measures and attributes the impact of SEM across the customer journey. This allows you to connect SEM activities to various touchpoints and interactions, providing a clearer understanding of how SEM contributes to conversions and overall business success. Highlighting the specific touchpoints where SEM plays a pivotal role will strengthen your case for budget allocation.
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Competitive Insights: Provide insights on how your competitors are leveraging SEM and the potential risks of reducing or neglecting your own SEM efforts. Showcase data on the market share and visibility that can be gained through SEM, emphasizing the importance of maintaining a competitive presence in search engine results.
By presenting a data-driven battle plan that encompasses comprehensive metrics, attribution analysis, and competitive insights. You can make a compelling case for allocating a share of your marketing budget to SEM. This approach will help demonstrate the value and business benefits that SEM brings to your organization.
Conclusion
SEM is the backbone of the modern marketing mix and a key component of growth marketing strategies.
The ever-increasing availability of channels and multi-device use per customer means that the customer journey has become increasingly fragmented. This creates the huge challenge of delivering the right message to the right customer, at the right time, and on the right device.
Moreover, measuring SEM effectiveness has become increasingly difficult due to a myriad of limitations that have resulted from user privacy concerns.
In driving effective growth marketing, investing all your marketing resources solely in one search ad network no longer suffices. Expansion of your addressable market and growth can come into being only with the inclusion of other channels into your marketing mix.
By following best practices outlined here, you’ll get the most reach, impact, and value from your paid search campaigns and assure bottom-line results.
This will provide you with the tools and insights needed to secure the marketing resources and budgets necessary to drive your marketing efforts.
Would you like to read more about effective SEM best practices-related articles? If so, we invite you to take a look at our other tech topics before you leave!
