Search engine marketing (SEM) is a rapidly growing industry in the advertising world. It’s changing the paradigm for many businesses in how they invest in advertising and driving customer engagement. There are many pay-per-click (PPC) venues out there to invest you money in, but the big player on the block is obviously Google. Google drives over 90% of it’s revenue from its search engine marketing platform Google AdWords, making search engine marketing a multi-billion dollar industry a month. If billions of dollars are being invested in SEM, wouldn’t it be a reasonable assumption that this might be a good avenue to invest your advertising dollar in? There are a couple types of campaigns that SEM really works well for:

1. Lead Generation

Lead generation campaigns focus on driving leads through your website and capturing user information/data that you can than reuse to remarket to your new potential customers. This could be done be capturing their email, having them download a redeemable coupon or following you on your social media channel(s).

2. Transactional Campaign

This refers to anyone who has a good/service that they offer for sale online and in which a customer can purchase through their website. This is your e-commerce store or affiliate marketing page that drives sales and revenues by the click of a button.

3. Branding Campaigns

Being constantly in-front of your customers/potential customers is a good thing. No, it’s a great thing! You want your customers or potential customers to have you in the forefront of their minds when they are making a buying decision. Because if you are there and your competition is not, guess who they will buy from? Search engine marketing can be a great way to keep your brand image out in front of your audience.

There are many other great benefits and use cases for investing your ad dollars in SEM, but these are a few that really stand out and scream “we need to be investing online!”