Starting a new business is easy. Keeping it afloat is a different story. Statistics report that less than half of the startups in OECD countries pass the five-year mark. To sail in the sea of fierce competition, economic depression, enigmatic consumer behavior and fleeting trends, one of the key factors of success is having the right marketing strategy.
First you need a cost-efficient strategy that’s viable with a limited budget — so online is the place you should go if you’re looking for high ROI and the ability to target and measure every dollar carefully. Second, you cannot expect your customers to find you – you need to go where you customers are.
Finding your way on the web
The web has leveled the playing field for businesses of all sizes — to reach millions of customers you no longer need a shop with expensive rent in the right part of the mall/shopping street. You can go online to reach these same customers for as little as a few dollars a day.
Many people are already familiar with search advertising. For example, if you’re selling weight-loss products, you can have your ad appear on the search results page when people search for terms related to diets, weight-loss, exercise, etc. But online advertising isn’t just about search.
Many of the people spending time online are simply surfing the web, skimming through news articles or browsing through their favorite football fan community sites. Think of how you spend time on the web. Do you consistently search query after query or do you mostly browse the web for content that grabs your attention? Unless you’re doing heavy duty research for your thesis, time spent browsing will outweigh that spent searching.
So what should you do to reach these people?
Step #1: Target those customers who are browsing rather than searching.
This sounds like a big challenge. It is — sort of. There are many websites out there, but how could you possible reach your thousands or millions of potential customers across thousands or millions of websites where they’re spending their time?
The answer is content advertising. The general idea behind content advertising is to show an ad next to the content people are reading on various websites. For example, your ad for muscle pumping products could appear when a young athlete is browsing a page on an amateur bodybuilding site. Think of it as a chameleon blending into the surrounding colors. The content of the ads will naturally blend in with the content of the page, creating an unobtrusive ad that many web surfers welcome because it is relevant to what they’re interested in at that moment.
Online ad networks can help you distribute your ads to these many sites cost effectively. Services like Google AdSense can automatically serve ads that are relevant to the content on the page. These systems work by analyzing the content on the page real-time, determining what the pages are about, and then finding the relevant ad in its inventory to display to the user. You as an advertiser don’t have to do any of the work to find the sites and serve the ads.
Step #2: Research who exactly you want to reach and where they tend to spend time.
Ad networks are a great help, but you can’t just randomly throw out your bait and hope that it’ll grab the attention of the right kind of fishes. You have to know a little bit more about your fishes and where your fishes like to swim. It’s a good idea to do some first-hand research.
If your target customers are white-collar working men in their mid-30s with an above-average income, find out what sort of Internet usage behaviors are particular to this group.
Do you want to initiate a buzz among users on popular online communities? You might want to first take a look at some of the sites to see whether the majority of community goers actually have the financial capacity to purchase your products.
You can easily get your hands on the latest site traffic ranking and visitor demographic information through your local research agency.
There are also free tools like Google Ad Planner (www.google.com/adplanner) available to help. You can enter demographics and sites associated with your target audience into Ad Planner and the tool will return information about sites that your audience is likely to visit. Then you can drill down into those sites to get even more detail about their particular demographics (age, income, education, gender) and what other sites those people tend to visit.
Step #3: Show up in front of your customers exactly where and when you want to.
Now that you know who you want to speak to and have an idea where you can find and talk to them, you’re ready to set up a content advertising campaign. You’ll want to choose to work with a network of sites that reaches your target customer. It’s not uncommon for businesses work with multiple networks depending on how small or big of a niche they want to reach.
Google AdSense, for example, has the world’s largest network of publishers ranging from large online news sites to small niche community sites where hundreds of millions of users of all demographics visit every month.
In closing, let’s summarize:
– Consider online advertising if you want a measurable, targeted, cost-effective way to find new customers.
– Content advertising enables you to reach potential customers with a targeted, relevant message no matter where they are on the web.
– Drill down into specific categories and characteristics of potential customers so you plan your advertising campaign wisely
– Choose an ad network(s) that will help you reach the customer segments that are right for you
