Types of digital marketing 3

Welcome to Talk 6, Types of Digital Marketing 3. I'm Raj Sachdev, author of Digital Marketing with McGraw Hill.

Today, we're going to talk about some more types of digital marketing, and that's going to include search engine marketing and digital advertising and how they can strategically be used.

Let's get started with search engine marketing, also known as SEM in the industry. SEM is a faster way to get to the top of a search engine, but you're paying to advertise. As opposed to engaging in SEO, which we talked about earlier, which is an unpaid approach in digital marketing to get seen in the natural or organic search results. The difference here is your website may be displayed in search engines, and when consumers click on those search results, there is no charge to you when they end up on your website through that approach. But SEM is a paid method. In other words, search engines will charge you to display ads on search results, and that is search engine marketing. This may be in the form of search ads, it may be display ads, video ads, and various types of campaigns that may be deployed using search engines and associated websites and techniques that will allow your ad to be shown. One of the main methods or approaches that are used to bill advertisers is called Pay Per Click or PPC. PPC is a bidding method whereby anytime someone clicks on your ad, you'll be charged a specific price that is determined based on various factors. One myth here is that if you decide to pay, your ad will be shown on a search engine. That is not always true. The ad must also be relevant. In other words, search engines using their algorithms may compare your ad and its content to the website that it's linking to; in other words, your website. If it finds a mismatch between these, it may not consider the ad to be relevant to that website. So relevance is one of the key factors. Plus, this PPC is a bidding system often. Advertisers are bidding for their ad to be shown, and if clicked on, then they will be charged, let's say, the bidding amount. Advertisers will then need to create a relevant ad, which hopefully will get a high ad ranking by the search engines and therefore be displayed. Once clicked on or if clicked on, then the charge to the advertiser will be based on the maximum amount of money that the advertiser said they are willing to bid. The amount may not be that maximum amount that they actually get charged, but that will be the max amount that the advertiser is willing to pay. So search engines will determine the price based upon various factors, including the demand for that specific keyword or key phrase that was utilized to target that advertising too. Advertising on Google can be done through the Google Ads platform. That will allow advertisers to be shown often at the top of the search engine results page, and that search engine results page is often called a SERP. So S-E-R-P, that is the page that we see as consumers when we're searching on a search engine such as Google. So the Google Ads platform will allow you to create ads and, if relevant and targeted to relevant keywords and the appropriate maximum cost per click is adopted by the advertiser, then these are some of the key factors that search engines will consider. Likewise, Microsoft Advertising offers search ads on the Bing search engine, and Yahoo will offer advertising on the Yahoo search engine. However, nowadays we're talking about various different types of services that Google, Yahoo, and Bing offer, and so advertising might be able to be done across different types of platforms, traditionally seen most often on their search platforms. The good thing about search advertising or search engine marketing, SEM, is that it can be done by large and small businesses alike. Some of this advertising may be targeted locally so that ads are relevant to the local audience and small businesses do not need to advertise nationally, for example.