Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, is one of the most effective ways to increase your visibility and presence on search engines like Google and Bing. Through successful digital strategies, your business can gain advantages in exposure, brand recognition, and—best of all—profitable conversions.
2022 has already seen certain changes in focus and direction for SEM. As you prepare to launch your next digital marketing strategies, keep in mind these adapting trends:
1. Switch to Automated Bidding for Google and Bing
On each search engine platform, your keyword bidding strategy helps determine the success of your ad campaign. Bidding efforts affect your campaign’s reach and how well your audience will see and interact with your brand online. Win the bid, and you’ll find your ad at the top of the search results.
Manual vs. Automated Bidding
There are two approaches to a bidding strategy: manual and automated (sometimes referred to as Smart Bidding).
Manual
Manual bidding requires you to set your own bids and manage your strategy through platforms like Google Ads and Bing. Your ads manager has total control over the bid and will create a strategy based on all the different factors of the bid like past keyword performance, cost-per-click (CPC), current ad position, and more.
Manual bidding requires total involvement from the manager in charge of the account. They are required to stay on top of each bid, analyzing positions and performance in order to maximize outcomes. There are certain instances where manual bidding benefits a campaign, but on the whole, it’s a less effective management option.
Automated
Automated bidding takes the work off your team member(s) by giving the algorithm total bidding control. It automates the process to bring you the biggest ROI. No matter the size of your campaign, automated bidding puts in the hard work for you, maximizing your ad budget and minimizing guesswork or blind spots that can appear in the manual bidding process.
While automated bidding frees up your team, it still provides you with the best outcomes in ad positions, conversion rates, and brand exposure.
Maximize Conversions through Automated Bidding
You want tangible results from your paid ads campaign. Ad measurements like clicks, conversions, and impressions help you achieve your goals.
If your company wants to generate leads, you’ll want your ad strategy to focus on increasing the conversion rate of people clicking your ad and following up with some sort of action. This might involve them completing a purchase, making a call to your company, or submitting a form.
Maximizing conversions is a strategy available within automated bidding to prioritize conversions over other metrics like clicks and impressions when your campaign goal is to increase leads.
Partner with M&R’s In-House Digital Experts to Maximize Your Bidding Strategies! Call Us: 478-621-4491
2. Emphasize the Human Element of Your Brand’s Voice
Your brand’s voice shapes how consumers perceive your products, services, and company as a whole. Gone are the days when businesses were expected to maintain an impersonal voice. Detached tones and lofty language are things of the past.
Whether you provide B2B or B2C services, consumers now want to see and feel the humanity of your company and the people who run it. Human2Human marketing (H2H) is using natural language online and humanizing your business as you continue to adapt to all the AI-related aspects of today’s digital landscape.
Natural Language Benefits Voice Searches
An H2H approach also puts your company in a better position to appear on search engines as more people transition to voice searches. From smartphones to virtual assistants, people are searching the internet vocally. It’s common to ask Siri, Alexa, or Google a question out loud and receive the answer you’re looking for.
And voice searches are only getting more popular. According to Oberlo, over 70% of people would rather utilize the microphone for a search than type out their query. By writing more conversational language and incorporating more commonly spoken keywords and phrases in your ad text and landing page content, you’ll increase your chances of securing a higher position on the search engines.
Becoming Conversational in the Digital Age
How can you satisfy people’s desire for more authenticity from your company? Talk like a real person.
Your online ads and social media messaging should sound as if they were spoken by someone who exists in the world alongside your consumers. Language that is too robotic, academic, or perfect is often a turnoff. People want to engage with professional content that sounds fluid, familiar, and easy to understand.
Find the human tone that best represents your brand and begin shaping your content around it. Not only will you develop a recognizable voice for your audience, but you’ll also appeal to users looking for a company they can trust.
Ready to Take Your Company’s Voice to the Next Level? Our Agency Is All In to Help Elevate Your Brand. Call Us: 478-621-4491
3. Consider Mobile-First Marketing
As mentioned earlier, smartphones have changed the way we use the internet. In fact, BroadbandSearch shared that 56% of worldwide traffic to the internet came from mobile users in 2021. That is a 4% increase from 2020 and a 12% increase from 2016. Mobile searches continue to trend upward and are showing no signs of decline anytime soon.
To cater best to mobile users, it’s important to start developing a mobile-first mentality around your PPC ads, websites, and other online marketing efforts.
Optimize for Mobile with Responsive Web Designs
Whether it’s a website, landing page, or email, your designs should be responsive. By creating a responsive design, you’ll utilize one layout across all devices so that the layout will respond to the size of each device.
A responsive design presents your content to mobile users in a way that best fits their phone screen. This helps optimize their experience with your brand and encourages conversions.
Become Mobile-Friendly Across the Board
Along with responsive websites, you also want to create a mobile-friendly approach to content, structure, and flow of your digital ads. Mobile users want info fast, so make sure pages load quickly. Strive to create content that’s engaging but to the point. By optimizing the overall user experience (UX), you’ll keep your audience on the path toward conversion.
Take Charge of Your Digital Presence! Talk to Our Experts Today
Our in-house digital experts, copywriters, and web developers follow the trends to create successful strategies and designs for your business. If you’d like to get started on improving your position in the digital market, give us a call at 478-621-4491.