Digital marketing is a buzz word that has been around for decades. The people who understand the concepts and terminology of digital marketing are in high demand all over the world, especially with small businesses that want to get ahead of their competition. Many companies need someone to manage social media sites on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat while others may need help with SEO or Google Adwords campaigns. These jobs can be really rewarding but also challenging because there is so much information out there about how to do it right.

Now, more than ever before, an effective digital marketing campaign is essential to companies’ success. As technology advances and the demand for improved customer experience rises, companies are compelled to find innovative ways of leveraging content to reach audiences through various channels. While there are several strategies that marketers can use to reach their target customers online, four forms of digital marketing dominate the landscape: search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), email marketing and influencer marketing.

Search engine marketing (SEM) uses paid advertising on web pages or social media sites via a range of possible approaches including keyword-targeted ads, sponsored ad placements at the top or bottom of a page, product listing ads in the right-hand column of a search engine results page (SERP), or social media advertising. SEM is the process of increasing visibility of a company’s website or product on search engines through paid advertising. It is one of the most effective ways to reach potential customers, as people are more likely to click on an ad when they are actively looking for information about a product or service.

(SEM) is one of the most important aspects of online business. While faster search results are great for users, they also mean better exposure for advertisers. This creates a symbiotic relationship between the two, and there’s no denying that one can’t live without the other. Although this was true before Google came along, it has become even truer ever since their dominance in search engine market share began to accelerate at an alarming rate.

Introduction – What is Search Engine Marketing? A simple definition of SEM would be using strategies on how your website gets found by more people when they use search engines like Google (and Bing), Yahoo! (and Firefox), etc. Some people expand that definition to include pay–click (PPC) ad campaigns on these same search engines. Putting an ad directly in the results of a search (or “sponsored” link) is called PPC, and it’s a great way to get your site seen by many more people who are specifically searching for your type of product or service.

You don’t have to be Google or Bing to appear in their listings. You can pay them every time someone clicks on your link to go visit you instead, which is how they earn revenue from ads too. For most businesses however, Google AdWords can become quite expensive over time if not managed well enough. If you’re just starting out with very little capital for this sort of thing then SEO is probably better because it doesn’t require as much initial investment as PPC. If you have a decent amount of money to invest in SEM, then by all means go for PPC as it can produce better results faster.

Let’s also not forget about social media and the viral opportunities that exist there. You can easily place ads on blogs or directories with this same exact approach too from what I’ve observed, so if your brand gets good exposure somewhere online then you may want to capitalize on that as well. In short, the idea is to draw as much traffic as possible towards your website with any combination of these tactics and more which we’ll talk about soon enough.

Now Google is certainly not everyone’s top choice when it comes to searching online (e.g., Firefox users would use Yahoo! instead), so it’s important to remember that SEM should encompass all search engines, not just Google. That being said, optimizing your website for Google will usually result in better rankings on Yahoo! and Bing as well, but you’ll want to test this for yourself to be sure. In any case, SEM is a process that should always be evolving as new strategies and techniques come along.