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Digital Advertising FAQ’s + Answers

Our advertisers have questions and we have answers, see below for some of the most common asked questions related to advertising online.

TMD Marketing

PPC

What Is Search Engine Marketing (SEM/PPC)?

Search engine marketing, widely known as pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, is a form of paid search advertising. The goal of this type of marketing is to place your company’s ad on the first page of Google search results. This marketing method is a popular digital tactic because it is designed for direct lead generation, it provides numerous opportunities for testing and optimization, and companies of any size can utilize it and run an effective campaign. As consumers turn to online search engines more and more to both research and purchase products and services, search engine marketing can dramatically improve your company’s bottom line.

Immediate opportunities

Ranking organically on Google and the other search engines is a difficult, time-intensive process. Your competitors are also attempting to rank, so organic success is never guaranteed nor permanent. Search engine marketing can be a great option to place your business on the front page of Google in the short-term while you continue to invest in a quality organic search marketing program. PPC ads can be created and put into action very quickly. With the right strategy and implementation, your business has a chance to rank at the top of the page almost immediately.

Campaign management

Google Ads offers a versatile online dashboard for managing search engine marketing campaigns. It provides us the ability to create your ad copy, set a daily budget, and set goals. Google also allows you to choose your target keyword phrases and to select which page of your website users will be directed to once they click on your ad. These tools and options allow us as marketers to help your company by developing PPC campaigns that are highly targeted toward your ideal customers. The goal is to collect data based on the results of your campaigns to make informed decisions for future strategies. 

Search intent

Developing successful PPC ad campaigns that generate results for your business is based on building a strategy around the concept of search intent. Search intent refers to providing the answer or solution that best addresses the issues and problems that your customers are encountering. No matter how well-targeted your PPC ads are, if each component of the ad copy does not specifically speak to the searcher’s intent, it is far less likely that they will click on your ad. 

This means that the ad headlines and description should specifically speak to the user’s problem. The ad copy needs to be engaging and compelling. Because of Google’s character-count limitations, each piece  of copy must be carefully chosen for optimal performance. In addition to the copywriting, you need to be sure to select the best keyword phrases so that your ad shows up at the right times to the right audiences. It’s important to think about what your customers would type into Google, not necessarily how you would speak about your products and services. We think about what problem your customers have and how we can best let them know that we have their solution with our ad copy.

Optimized landing pages with tracking codes are vital for your PPC ads. You should not be using your homepage as a landing page unless you have one single product or service. If your PPC ad promotes a specific product or service, select that product or service’s specific page on your site as the landing page. Doing this will make the searchers experience much more enjoyable.

Why is SEM Important?

Limited barriers to entry

Setting up a search engine marketing campaign and getting it running is relatively easy. Some initial strategic planning will help set your campaign up for success by determining who your audience is, what they are searching for, and how you can help solve their problem. It’s important to note, you don’t have to be a Fortune 500 company to run an impactful search engine marketing campaign, you just need a marketing partner that is experienced and knows what they are doing. 

Fast turnaround time

More often than not, businesses decide to initiate a new marketing program because they are in need of more leads that are better-qualified. For this reason, these businesses typically want these leads to arrive sooner rather than later. Search engine marketing campaigns can be up and running almost immediately. This exceptionally quick turn-around time allows your company to begin receiving leads for your sales team very quickly. If your campaign has been properly set up, these leads should also be good quality. This offers the benefit of faster closing times and more immediate revenue and return on investment for your business. And remember, because you can control the amount of money you invest in your PPC program, your lead volume is dependent only on what you are prepared to budget for the campaign.

Testing & optimization

A further advantage of search engine marketing is the ability to test different ad campaigns and ads within a campaign to see how each performs in relation to the others and to then optimize those ads and campaigns going forward. There are so many options for testing that are virtually endless: headline copy, ad description copy, geographical targeting, demographic targeting, landing pages, etc. Testing is only effective if you know how to read the data and adjust campaigns accordingly in order to get the best results possible. TMD Marketing specializes in not just implementing and managing PPC campaigns but also testing and optimizing them for maximum performance. Continual testing and optimization also help your PPC performance from another perspective. Optimizing your ads to best meet the needs of the searcher’s intent and providing a great user experience, over time Google recognizes this and factors the high quality of your ads into its results. The ultimate result of these efforts is an ever-improving quality and quantity of leads for your business.

How Involved Do I Need To Be With My Marketing Agency?

You will need to be very responsive during the onboarding process. Once we have all of the necessary information from you, we will do our own research, develop a strategy and implement it. After the onboarding process is finished and we have your ads up and running, you shouldn’t have to be very involved at all. We try to be an extension of your business that you don’t have to worry about. Our goal is to work in unison with you and help you grow your business.

How Do I Calculate The ROI Of My Internet Marketing?

During the onboarding process, we try to get access to all of your analytics tools. If you don’t have any, we will set it up for you. Using those tools, we generate reports that have all of the key performance indicators and metrics that you’ll need.

SEO

Why Are Organic Search Rankings Important?

Organic search rankings are important because they’re the best way to capture prospective leads, clients, or customers who might not be familiar with your business. If your business is showing up on the first page of their Google search, that means you’re more likely to get that business based on credibility and the ease of access to the information you’re providing.

Why is SEO important?

Customer connections

Your customers are online, proactively searching for solutions to their problems. If your business is organically ranking at the top of the page when your product or service is searched for, you’re in good shape. It’s not easy to get there, but with time and through well executed SEO strategies, it can be achieved.

Customer conversions

Organic search traffic converts better than any other form of website traffic. While it is true that organic search traffic includes users at all stages of the sales decision-making funnel, a high percentage of these users are ready to make a buying decision. Don’t risk missing out on these high-value prospects because you don’t have a search engine optimization program in place.

Once these people visit your website,  creating quality content, building links, and optimizing for technical SEO, you now have the opportunity to demonstrate your industry knowledge and expertise, build customer rapport, and generate leads and sales. 

Analysis & optimization

Any successful SEO plan needs to track and analyze performance. This helps highlight content areas that need improvement, correlate increases in rankings with increases in revenue, and uncover new keyword opportunities for your website to rank for.

It is important to note that search engine optimization is an ongoing process. Often, businesses think that once their website ranks on the first page of Google, maybe even in the #1 position, that they are done, they can cease their SEO campaign. This is a common, and very costly, mistake to make. SEO is an ongoing process. When your website rises in the rankings, it means that someone else’s site drops–and they will want to regain their position. Your competitors are also working hard to move up in ranking and will quickly pass you by if you stand still. Another factor is the evolving algorithms that search engines use to determine their rankings. They’re continually working to provide users with the best results; a site that ranks well today may not after the next algorithm adjustment.

SEO, executed properly, is one of the most effective digital marketing tactics that you can employ to grow your business. This is why TMD Marketing works tirelessly to stay abreast of the latest trends and best practices to help our clients succeed and grow. Improper search engine optimization efforts can hurt your business, so it is important to work with an agency partner that is an expert in the field of SEO.

How Do I Know If There Is An SEO Opportunity For My Business?

One way that we like to calculate this is to select an applicable keyword for your business that someone ready to make a purchase is likely to use, then look at how many monthly searches that term has. For example, if you run an HVAC repair business in Layton, Utah, you’d look at the monthly searches for a phrase like “air conditioner repair Layton, Utah.” Your prospective agency partner could get this data for you, or you could use an online search tool to find out. Once you know the number of average searches for that term, multiply that number by 12 to get yearly search data, and then multiply that number by your average sale amount. That should give you an idea of the sales you could be pulling in if your business ranked in one of the top spots on Google.

How Important Is A Website To Achieving Better Rankings?

Your website is the most important aspect of SEO. It is, after all, what search engines are looking at. While there’s some SEO work that can be done on almost any website regardless, there are certain SEO heights you’ll only be able to reach with a website designed for SEO success. This goes beyond the content on a page or off-page SEO efforts. Search engine algorithms evaluate your website as a whole, including the structural hierarchies in place, whether the site and hosting are secured, how the website performs in terms of speed and accessibility, whether the design is responsive, and that’s just the beginning. True SEO success has to be rooted in a strategic website build.

Should I Do My Own SEO?

SEO is a lot to take on and that even the slightest misstep or oversight can do lasting damage to your organic search rankings. And a poor ranking can be the difference between attracting new, local clients or driving them into the arms of your competition. For these reasons, we HIGHLY recommend partnering with a reputable SEO agency.

What Factors Can Affect My SEO?

In short? A lot. SEO in general, takes countless variables into consideration when it comes to ranking businesses in the area and it’s up to you to make sure each one of these variables works in your favor and not against it. Your on-page optimization, backlinks, reviews, social media, Google My Business page, and trends in the actions of your site’s visitors can all help—or hurt—your chances at ranking.

Social

Why Is Social Media Important?

Social media marketing is one of the few surefire ways to meet (and find) your customers, whether they’re current or prospective. It provides an unmatched environment in which you can engage with your customers and create authentic, personalized user experiences with your brand. By providing high-quality content that is relevant to your customers, in a format that is approachable and welcoming, you have a unique opportunity to integrate your brand into your customers’ daily lives.

Build Meaningful Connections

Today’s consumers do not like to have advertising forced upon them; rather they prefer to mutually engage with brands they care about. Social media platforms are the ideal vehicle to develop this dialogue and relationship. By providing high-quality content that is relevant to your customers, in a format that is approachable and welcoming, you have a unique opportunity to integrate your brand into your customers’ daily lives. They won’t mind seeing your social media posts and ads appear in their feeds so long as the content you are creating is organic, authentic, and contributes to the quality of their lives.

Paid Advertising On Social Media

Back in the early to mid 2010’s, there was little to no need for paid advertising on social media platforms. Organic posts could easily go viral and everything that was posted by pages were shown to everyone that followed them. Fast Forward to now, organic reach is close to 0. Social media platforms have become very pay to play environments. 

Social media marketing is leveraging the many social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, to promote your business. Over the last several years, social media marketing has become an incredibly popular tactic companies use to promote their products and services, and also to engage with their customers on a more personal basis. It’s easy to understand why. Social media offers businesses many benefits, among them the ability to develop authentic connections with users. But as social media’s popularity with both users and advertisers has increased, so too has the level of quality and sophistication necessary to break through the clutter to truly build meaningful engagement. Therefore it is important that your social media marketing efforts be planned and purposeful so that they help move your business forward in meaningful, measurable ways.

Generate Leads

Beyond building a community of loyal customers, social media marketing is also a fantastic method of generating top of the sales funnel leads. This can happen through paid ads or organically through interactions on your posts or just on your page in general. More often than not, top-of-funnel leads are consumers who are not yet ready to make a buying decision.  But, by providing them good information and excellent customer service, they will remember their interaction with you and often choose you when the time comes. This is called lead nurturing. It is one of the great advantages of incorporating social media marketing into your marketing plan. To further enhance the lead-generation qualities of your social media, specific tactics such as retargeting and generating custom UTM codes can help bring visibility to your social campaigns’ success and help support your sales team’s efforts.

Measurable Success

The ability to track behavior, analyze data, and measure performance are all important considerations. Social media marketing, when implemented correctly, can help your business achieve its larger business goals both directly through qualified lead generation, and indirectly through heightened brand awareness and perception, lead indicators, and engagement with your target audience.

By implementing tracking codes on your website, you can track the activity and behavior that takes place on your website. This information becomes very valuable when it comes time to start using paid advertising. You are able to use custom audiences to retarget people that have visited your website to move them down your sales funnel, or you can even make a lookalike audience based off of the people that have already visited your site. The possibilities are endless.

Can I Do My Own Social Media Marketing?

Sure, you could. Nothing is stopping you. But the over/under of whether or not it’s worthwhile to do so depends on a few different variables. This isn’t really a question of whether or not you can, it’s more of a question of whether or not you should. You have to ask yourself.. Is it worth your time to do your own social media marketing and take time away from running your business? or will it be more effective to hire a team of professionals that can get you great results and you won’t have to worry about it? 

It’s easier to do when you have a dedicated team with specific focuses, and it’s likely cheaper than hiring one person internally who has the capacity and skills necessary to create that content on their own.

What is Customer-Focused Content?

Effective social media content begins by focusing on who your audience is. This is true of most marketing tactics of course, but it is especially true in social media. Social media platforms provide a sense of community where people go to unwind and catch up with friends and family, escape from the daily grind, and relax and have fun. 

The best way to accomplish the goal of connecting with your customers is to create content that peaks their interests and resonates with them . Whether words, photos, or videos, make sure that every piece of content is geared toward positively impacting your customers. Your content needs to be interesting, relevant, and appropriate to the specific social media platforms on which you are posting.

Your focus on incredible content should be true for both your organic and paid social media efforts. Organic posts are those pieces of content that are added directly to your company’s social media pages. Organic content will be seen only by a small percentage of  those people who have elected to follow your social platforms. Paid social content, on the other hand, is content that has been created to proactively reach out to people who are not currently following your business on social media, but have been identified as possessing the right demographic, psychographic, and lifestyle characteristics of your best customers. These targeted advertising messages can be used to both encourage new fans and followers, and to grow brand image and awareness.

What is Identifying Measurable Goals?

Each social media campaign should have a clear goal and desired end result. While some campaigns could just be to gain awareness and measure likes, comments and shares, others could be paid campaigns that measure leads and website form submissions. Utilize each social media platform’s built-in performance measurement tools, in conjunction with Google Analytics and other tools to make sure that your social media marketing is actually helping you achieve your goals.

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