From baby names to cardiac surgery, from prams for your kid to buying a Lexus, everything is being ‘Googled’ to learn more, to compare and to decide.

And information is being ‘Googled’ just about the time when the consumer is ready to take the plunge.

It’s probably the best time to get your advertising out because the information is actually being sought.

Search Engine Marketing effectively addresses these consumers exactly at the time they make their intent public, create a meaningful conversation and make them buy. SEM is like a lighthouse. Like ships that gravitate towards the lighthouse to dock, SEM gets consumers to gravitate to our brands and dock.

The point one might ask is ‘Do people actually click on these ads?’

The answer is simple. Google is getting richer by the day. How do you think they are managing it? Especially since it is very clear that search alone does not have a revenue model. Search Marketing is growing at a scorching pace and is expected to overtake traditional advertising in a few years.

How do we practice SEM?

We asked a few fundamental questions when we started.

Isn’t vocabulary unique for different people? Don’t people use different search terms for the same thing? What about miss-spelt terms?

How do we keep our costs low? And returns high?

What kind of ads do we write? Does this work like traditional advertising?

And much more.

We realized that we need to keep learning and innovating just to stay step ahead of the consumer.

This has helped to create several differentiators. The combined might of these is a winning formula that will deliver leads, interactions, visitors, brand building, awareness creation and more, at an unmatched ROI.

Targeted Network Topology:

The big portals are the biggest aggregators of traffic, quite like the largest newspapers or the biggest TV networks.

The top six or seven portals roughly account for bulk of the visitors. And this is true across the world. But these portals are exactly what they set out to be. The gates to smaller and more interesting places on the net.

This observation also led to a powerful insight – while people visit top portals everyday, they spend the most time at smaller portals where interests are more sharply defined and at forums and blogs where they chat or discuss their interests with community members. That’s the true power of the internet. It allows people with unique interests to come together and form communities where they end up spending most, if not all their time. It is now a well-established fact that people have a set routine of sites or activities they pursue on the net. They may never navigate through a general interest portal again.

That’s why we go smaller, deeper and wider. This strategy gives us the opportunity to cut costs, increase chances of interaction and consequently, the ROI for the marketer.

Target Words

Every search on the internet is different. So is every search term. So how does one keep track of each of the search terms? More importantly, how do we cast our search terms net far and wide?

First, lets answer the elementary question. Why do we need to go wide on search terms?

To begin with, obvious words are what everybody is bidding on. So the cost of these words is very high.

To illustrate: The cost per click on the search term ‘mobile phone’ is approx. Rs. 20. Let’s say we get a one percent click through and 5 percent conversion from these clicks, then the cost per lead/conversion works out to Rs. 400. If the average price of the mobile phone is Rs.6000, why would a marketer want to spend almost 8 percent on just generating leads that do not culminate in purchase?

Therefore we need to find words that are less evident but equally relevant. This is simply the long tail theory. Go wide on words and focused on the creative.

To do this, we have created a keyword generation tool called ‘Target Words’. This efficient tool generates thousands of similar keywords for every search term, including mis-spelt words in any language.

When we’ve generated key words and identified web properties, what’s next? Crafting the advertising.

Unlike print or TV, where visuals and aesthetics play a big role, the consumer is looking for precise, relevant information. It isn’t that aesthetics don’t matter, but people skim over various parts of a page. What catches them is a single word or a promise that makes sense. Since the web is not a linear medium like a newspaper, people tend to flit about web pages and alight only on the ones that grab their attention.

Again, some ads work better than others. While we may never know this on the offline medium, we can track this closely in the online medium. We know which ads are generating response and which ones aren’t. It’s about the most brutal assessment you can make of the creative process. Keep the ones that work and discard the ones that don’t. So we find that a particular ad works better, we simply do a lot more along the same lines. Once again, increasing ROI.

With over 20 years of experience in the advertising business and having worked on some of the largest brands, our creative team is experienced to leverage this medium. The same principles apply, what changes is the feedback system that being on the net provides.