By Brad Seraphin
Whether you're looking to hire an SEM expert, or planning to take on the challenge yourself, there is a plethora of advice and best practices to be found online to get you started.
Like with most things related to digital marketing, there are always many way to approach the same topic, and you have to evaluate many factors to pick the approach that is right for you and your company. Still, sometimes it can be hard to know where to start, and sometimes it can be scary to think that you've left some stone unturned, or failed to consider one of the important factors that might affect your decisions. Here are 4 questions to ask yourself so that you can feel more confident in your SEM strategy:
What is your focus?
Attention is limited by time. Focused energy and concentration is required to create the most impact with your limited supply of time and attention. Are you trying to optimize the largest part of your budget by milking your top performing campaigns for your top selling products or services? Sometimes these kinds of small changes to existing engines of growth can improve yield by lowering cost per acquisition.
Or, perhaps are you considering trying to capture additional market share from an underperforming set of campaigns? Are you trying to break new ground by capitalizing on untapped potential by increasing market share with a forgotten or overlooked asset? Either way, understanding your focus in relationship to the many other strategies, techniques and tactics your marketing team is implementing. Without this context, your strategy is in danger trying to tackle everything, being too general, and missing the opportunity to maximize ROI. Once again, what is the context of your priorities? Why do you believe that the area that you have chosen to focus on is the absolute best use of your time?
How reliable is the data informing your choices?
Optimizing SEM can be overwhelming because of the fragmentation of choices marketers are presented with when executing an optimization strategy. Which variables should I toggle? A/B testing is easier than ever, but the temptation to run multi-variant testing on a boot strapped budget can quickly lead to more questions than answers. Given that more and more companies are trending towards data driven decision making, it’s important to verify that your decisions are not being made on intuition, but rather verified and reliable data. It’s never too late to design a scientific experiment to collect a small sample of data to verify what you already suspect. Do the research. Make sure your method is sound and your data is clean.
What are customers saying?
Most executives are aware of the online reviews of their product or service. Hopefully executives are also aware of customer perceptions in forums, chat rooms, and other social media outlets. The executive’s knowledge of customer awareness shapes business and product decisions, but most likely falls short when it comes to understanding evolving education, search, and buying behaviors. There is no substitute for face to face customer research, especially when the research is targeted on helping you understand specific behaviors related to shopping for your product. Interview existing customers about the entire process by which they chose your product. Also, try to talk to your competitors customers to understand how and why they chose this existing alternative.
What are competitors doing?
Any information that you can gain into your competitors SEM strategies can and should help dictate your strategy. What channels are they using? What channels are working for them? What is the size of the budget and how is it allocated? Are they driving traffic at all hours of the day, or do campaigns run during select hours? What is the tone? What is the style? How does it match the target demographic? And, more importantly, what are you doing to surface your unique value proposition in such a way that the comparison favors your company?
