We can't talk about digital marketing without talking about Paid Search. Marketers use a paid search strategy for their websites to be shown on a search engine result page (SERP).? It works by a business paying a search engine platform to display their website. Usually, the rate that is charged is based on the number of clicks your website receives (cost per click) or the number of views (cost per impression).? The most common name for this type of advertising is Pay-Per-Click (PPC).?
If you've ever done a Google search (which I'm sure you have), it's likely that you’ve encountered a few websites with the word “Ad” next to them. Typically they're placed high on the list, and you'll most likely see the keyword or phrase that you searched embedded in the description meta tag. These are paid search results. It's one of the most commonly used forms of digital marketing. This type of marketing is great for businesses trying to build awareness around a new product or service.?
Any business or service can benefit from a PPC strategy, for instance, building awareness for an MBA program:??
- One way is to use PPC ads to target specific keywords that your target audience is searching for. This would be done by finding keywords associated with a Master of Business Administration. These keywords would be terms such as “mbadegree”, “online degrees in business administration”, “mba healthcare”.? All of these terms were pulled from WordStream, a keyword search tool.???
- Tracking online visitors is another great approach to gaining more awareness and applicants for an MBA program. The idea is to target people who have visited the program's webpage before or who have signed up for its email list. At this point the user has already shown interest, we would consider them to be past the awareness stage. This is an opportunity to remarket to them and remind them of the MBA program and display the value proposition.
- To get more precise and use a much more granular approach, a marketer can use the PPC strategy but with a geo-targeting approach. Geo-targeting is the process of determining the geographic location of website visitors and targeting different users based on their location.
- In the previous example, I used webpage tracking as a tactic. Using that same method, we can track the users who visited the webpage's respective geographic locations. IP addresses are the most common method of geo-targeting. We can use the IP addresses to determine a visitor's general location. With this new information about the locations of website visitors, we can now segment our audience by region. Once this is done, we can take the location categories, and use a site such as Google Trends to do a search of the phrase “MBA Program” for every location category. As a result, Google trends will give the phrase popularity for every geographic location along with associated keywords.???
Now that this information is revealed, you can tailor your PPC marketing content based on keywords associated with their respective regions.