Remember your "elevator speech"? The quick, to-the-point explanation of what you do and why it's beneficial? If you can't explain the value of your products/services in a few sentences or less, your customer's attention may go elsewhere.

Now, boil this pitch down to 140 characters and you have your basic search engine text ad. Challenging? Yes. Rewarding? Definitely. People will be interested in your products/services, or they won't. They will let you know with their actions. It's a highly efficient use of your time and resources, and a highly efficient way for customers to find the products/services they're looking for. Everybody wins.

With search engine marketing, you can reach people at the very moments they're looking for your products/services. True, you could reach a wide audience of baseball enthusiasts by advertising in publications like Baseball America. But when they read the issue containing your ad, how do you know if they're in the market for the bats and gloves you're selling? Maybe they bought new equipment right before they picked up that issue. In this case, your ad dollars were wasted on that particular reader. You'll still attract some customers who need new equipment, but you've paid for the other readers, too - the ones who won't become customers. Online, you're only paying to reach the people who specifically click on your ads. Continuing our example: they're looking for bats and gloves and you've met their needs at the precise moment they're looking. Everybody wins.

Boil your message down even further, and you can also reach people on their mobile devices. An iPhone isn't a phone, it's a handheld computer with an Internet browser. This is the new frontier for advertising and marketing - and you can't reach this audience through print or broadcast advertising. If customers show interest in your products/services by clicking on your ads from a home computer, doesn't this interest increase exponentially when they're on the way to the mall, wallet and credit card in hand? OK, this is an extreme simplification of consumer behavior, but I hope you'll agree about the impacts of well-placed online advertising. It's the perfect merger of customer intentions and your products/services. Everybody wins.

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Tags: Search Engine Marketing, text ad, Efficiency, mobile devices, online advertising