How can you balance your SEM budget between broad and narrow audience segments?

Balance your SEM budget between broad and narrow audience segments effectively with these 9 keys: Prioritize Goals: Align budget allocation with specific campaign objectives. Audience Segmentation: Divide budget based on audience priority. Historical Data: Review past performance to inform budget decisions. Keyword Intent: Allocate more budget to keywords with high intent. Testing Phases: Gradually increase budget for proven segments. Regular Monitoring: Continuously assess segment performance. Adjustment Flexibility: Be prepared to reallocate budget based on real-time data. Performance Benchmarks: Set benchmarks for each segment to gauge success. Expert Consultation: Seek professional guidance for optimal budget distribution.

With regards to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) knowing the different audiences you'd like to target helps you focus the right message to the right audience. For instance, managing a water softening specialists budget in Google and Bing, people with search intent for water softeners does extremely well and is rather broad, in that it can be anyone. How we've limited the audience a bit, and also does well for this specific campaign, is to also build out the right locations. Someone not initially searching for water softeners, but lives in an area where there's hard water, they may know there's a problem, but don't know there's a solution. Limiting the audience to a location, makes it so we're talking to the right people.

When managing your SEM, having different personas built out to target, with their specific problems at the ready to help, will help you limit the amount of money one needs to spend on an entire campaign. A portion of our job every day is to help manage your budget effectively. If I can get the same amount of leads, by limiting the audiences we target too, and continue to create opportunities for your team to sell, well that's a win! Having audiences helps you limit who you're talking too, what you're saying, and helps to ask the right question to get people to take those actions we like, filling out a form or calling you for new business.

Look, not all audiences are built alike, sorry to say it, a good rule to consider is that if you're building a broad audience based on search habits and intent, we find a lot of our clicks come from that build. But consider this, getting a message to person who doesn't quite know they have a problem, you can solve, will turn more business your way, for less money, long term. And you build awareness in a crowded field. If you find a narrow segment of people that you can help fix their issues, before they know what that is, it's a deep ocean of available clients, and you know who they are because you help them every day. Think of some of your best clients, before they knew you, they didn't know it could be this way! Successful with your help.

We all love that sound of the cash register ringing, but marketing can be a four letter word. If it is for you, that's unfortunate. Finding the right balance between potential low hanging fruit, and people that aren't looking just yet, who aren't considering what they're dealing with as an issue, is a tough; regardless of your industry. There can be balance, there must be balance, it's probably something you don't want to hear. Spend money in marketing your business. There are many good people out there that can help you find the right audience. Work with someone you trust, that can help you articulate who you need to talk too, and help with the messaging you'll put in front of people. Make sure it's good, and make sure you're ready.

Using the free tools that Google/Bing give you to monitor every angle of the data is a great start to measuring success. Start by looking at your current traffic before these combos of audiences you'll be targeting. Did traffic increase, are more people talking about you, have you gotten more form fills since starting marketing to these audiences? Use the data to your advantage, and you can even load it back into the system to create look alike audiences from your new clients. Where the machine will then start looking for similarities you can't quite choose as an interest, or keyword. The machine will help, if you let it and you set it up appropriately.

Make sure your foundations are set, if it's been a while since you've looked at your site, or the landing pages you're going to be sending people to take an action, make sure it looks nice, loads quickly and people can take that action. Don't set up a marketing campaign and then lead it to a 404 (oops!) even marketing people don't catch that sometimes. Test it, then test it again, make sure it makes sense. You don't want to spend money on a campaign, all so it goes down the drain and you don't have new leads. That's a hard conversation after you've spent the month's budget on your SEM campaign and hours building an audience!