It’s your job as a CMO to ensure that your company’s message reaches the right audience. To do that, you’ll need a comprehensive approach to search marketing, encompassing the twin streams of SEO and SEM. By uniting these disciplines into an integrative approach, you can increase visibility and credibility for your brand, drive more traffic to your website, and ultimately generate more leads and sales. Find out more in this post from Clarity Digital.
Why CMOs Should Invest in Search Marketing (SEO and SEM)
Ultimately, your job as Chief Marketing Officer is to ensure that your company’s message reaches the right audience. This obviously involves search engines, which represent the primary vehicle by which consumers seek information about products, services, and brands. A successful search marketing strategy encompasses two primary streams: Organic search results, obtained through search engine optimization (SEM) as well as paid placement via search engine marketing (SEM).
SEO: Why Organic Search Matters
So how can you integrate these two disciplines? Let’s start by unpacking SEO, which is all about optimizing your website and its contents to ensure they rank higher on the search engine results page (SERP) for relevant keywords. This is done via developing a fully functional website that’s technically sound, offers a great user experience, loads quickly, and boasts helpful, engaging content.
SEO is pivotal, not least because it represents a “free” option for reaching search engine users. Additionally, SEO helps you convey your authority and your relevance, enabling you to win the trust of search engine users.
SEM: The Power of Paid Search
The flipside of the coin is SEM, which we can define as the process of buying advertising space on search engine results pages. The most common form of SEM is pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, where you bid on specific keywords and pay each time someone clicks on your ad.
While SEM includes more costs than SEO, it makes up for it by allowing you to laser-focus on a target audience and direct highly qualified traffic to your website.
Integrated Search Marketing: Bringing Two Streams Together
When you deploy these two disciplines in tandem, it’s known as integrative search marketing. Or, to put it another way, integrated search marketing is all about combining paid and organic tactics to establish a comprehensive online presence for your business or brand.
Search marketing is essential for any CMO, for the simple reason that it accomplishes what every CMO needs most: To reach the right audience and drive meaningful results. The specific benefits of this integrative approach include:
- You can reach customers at all stages of the consumer journey or sales funnel.
- You can build a general brand awareness while also spending most of your resources to target the buyers you need the most.
- You can occupy prime real estate across the entire search engine results page, both the organic section and the paid ads section.
- Together, SEO and SEM help you drive qualified traffic to your website and then convert that traffic into actual sales.
Get Started with Search Marketing
As a CMO, it’s important to ensure that your company’s marketing efforts are connecting with your target buyers. Simply put, search marketing is one of the most effective ways to do this. By investing in SEO and SEM, you can increase visibility and credibility for your brand, drive more traffic to your website, and ultimately generate more leads and sales.
Ready to learn more about the advantages of search marketing? Schedule a consultation with Clarity Digital at your convenience.
