Mon 25 Aug 2008
Over the years, marketing and advertising rules and guidelines have undergone a major revamp. Much of this can be attributed to the advent of the electronic media and its mass appeal which in today’s scenario might be having more impact on the masses than the print media. The basic objective of marketing and advertising is to make your product or services visible to the maximum number of potential customers. Similarly, the way a product or service is projected in the eye of the consumer is also equally important. However, let us for the time being concentrate only on the first part, i.e making your product visible to the maximum number of people to enhance business productivity.
To show your product to maximum number of people, you need to know where you will find this large number of people who can be your potential customers. There is a huge potential customer market on the internet waiting to be tapped. Logically many service providers are exploiting different channels, by hook or by crook to catch the attention of these consumers on the internet. Search engines are the most common places where any person in quest for a product or a service is headed.
Again, by sheer logic and past self experiences we know that mostly the customers scan only one or at a maximum of two pages of search results of a search engine. He will visit websites and links on these two pages in which he finds keywords closest to what he is looking for. Thereby it brings business to these websites. So an effective marketing and advertising technique is one which allows your website and links to be on these initial pages so as to catch the eye of the person.
Here let us look at two paths for this destination. One is called Pay Per Click or PPC and the other is called Search Engine Optimization; or SEO. As the name suggests, PPC works on a model wherein a service provider pays to the search engine in order to get preference of display on the search page. The money is paid per click and not in lump sum say for a particular period of time. SEO on the other hand focuses on increasing the traffic on website through the search engine by only natural algorithm results. It involves proper coding, presentation, use of proper keywords in order to attain a higher rank in the search display page. It does not involve any advertising cost to be paid to the search engine.
Pay Per Click has some inherent advantages over Search Engine Optimization, and vice versa. However, there are no clear cut first and second positions, the fact of the matter is that for some organizations PPC might yield better outputs as compared to SEO. Some of the advantages of PPC are enlisted below;
* Pay per click gives you more options. You have complete control pf your advertising. You can determine the exact time of day your ads show. You can determine in what location they show. You decide what keyword search results show your ads. Never before in history could you design your advertising to be so effective so fast.
* Whether you’re researching a new business idea, or you’re just new to online marketing pay per click gets you results fast. These campaigns allow to to see quickly which keywords generate the best traffic. As you find out which keywords work you can increase your ad buy thereby growing your business even faster.
* PPC allows you to time your advertising to seasonal promotions. You can start it on a dime and end the promotion the same way. If a customer is spending his resources to search you out over the holidays or any special occasion your PPC campaign makes sure your website is easily found. You can tailor the message for the season.
* PPC gives you more time to test your offers. By investing more time testing different offers you can learn you customers better. Find out which ads get them to reach into their pockets and pull out those credit cards. Quickly eliminate ads that don’t.
* PPC lets you fail fast. If your ads don’t get clicked on it cost you nothing. It’s easy to gauge customer demand without a huge expenditure of money and time.
So whether to use PPC or SEO is totally a subjective choice depending on many constraints and parameters. Basically it is trade off in which the producer has to decide his optimum level.