What do you do if the product or service you’re trying to sell is so unique or unprecedented that people don’t know how to search for it?
Search marketing relies on figuring out what a user wants from the words he’s using to look for it, and then serving up ads that fit that want. But if that seeker doesn’t know something even exists out there in the market, he’s highly unlikely to type in a string of search terms that will let you target him effectively for an offer.
“If you can’t target people when they come in through the front door by requesting the information [in a search query], then you have to reach them through the side door,” says Danielle Leitch, executive vice president for client strategy with search marketing firm MoreVisibility. “You have to serve ads up alongside of content that’s contextually relevant to who you are and what you’re offering.”
As an illustration of the sideways approach, Leitch points to a service that gives golf lessons to female executives in the finance industry who want to further their careers and close deals on the links. It’s a great niche, of course—but not one that many people are going to think to look for in search terms of four words or less.
“How does a human resource director of a financial institution even find out that such a service exists, or that he or she should be looking at it to help the company’s women executives build networking and sales skills?” she says.
The advertiser could assemble a list of keywords that describe the golf teaching service and use those to market through pay-per-click ads. But anything less than a pretty full multi-word keyword is going to generate lots of unqualified clicks. On the other hand, fully describing the service might require more words than anyone has ever typed into a query box. The amount of traffic driven to your site through such a complex search term would be negligible.
“If you market to ‘golf lessons’, you’re going to get the guy on the corner who’s looking for a $50 one-hour lesson. But why would anyone be searching for ‘women’s golf lessons/ executive/ networking skills’?”
That’s the type of situation that calls for contextual or behavioral ad channels, Leitch says. Very often such innovative or niche products and services have a clear customer profile in mind—a basic requirement for effective marketing through these ancillary paths. For example, the golf entrepreneur might know enough to target either women finance managers or bank HR executives.
“So you take that a step further and ask, ‘Where are these people online and what are they doing? What sites do they go to regularly?’” she says. The most likely possibilities are human-resource sites and financial Web pages and publications.
With that aim, a marketer can go out and deliver pay-per-click ads alongside relevant content on Web sites that offer an audience with the appropriate demographic.
“In a sense, it’s taking marketing back to basics by trying to get across by association the look, feel, and touch of what you’re trying to sell,” Leitch says. “For a high-end, unique product with a limited client base, that can be tough to do with a keyword—even one comprised of three or four terms.” Better in those cases to serve up the offer alongside relevant content and play up the natural synergy between the Web site and your target prospect.
It’s recently become easier to do this within Google’s AdSense network of publisher sites. It used to be that Google wouldn’t let advertisers specify the sites their ads would appear on, and in fact refused to lift the veil on exactly which publishers belonged to their network.
“The only way you found out where your contextual ad was appearing on Google AdSense was if you went through your server logs after the fact and looked for referring traffic,” Leitch says. “Even then it was concealed if the traffic was being redirected through a Google link; it came though as just ‘Google syndication partner’.”
But Google has grown more forthcoming about its contextual network in recent weeks, and Leitch says marketers on the network now can choose between contextual ads based on their keywords or a site-targeted approach that restricts a campaign to selected Web sites.
Google’s not the only option for contextual advertising. Leitch says MoreVisibility has also had good results placing ads with Quigo, whose AdSonar network has always been transparent to marketers about member sites and demographics.
“Basically, you give them the categories that you fall into as an advertiser, and they provide you with a list of URLs within their network that they feel are a good match for your category,” she says. “Then you can refine that list further into those sites you want your ad to run on.”
After spending some time running ads on the AdSonar network, marketers can then take a look to see which specific sites converted well, optimize the messages for those sites, and restrict their campaigns to those contextual partners where they’re earning the best return on investment.
Advertising on behavioral networks such as Tacoda or AlmondNet can add another layer of targeting to contextual campaigns by serving the ads up based on what users do rather than what they happen to be reading at the moment.
To Leitch, the lessons learned from marketing products or services that can’t be efficiently advertising with a few terms simply underline the fact that search marketing is maturing into something less mechanical than it was in the early days.
“We’ve heard this from a lot of the search engines, and our company is now starting to preach it too: Search is not just keywords and costs per click anymore,” she says. “The industry has evolved into something more. Keywords are still a component of search, and cost-per-click is still a method of payment. But search has gone way beyond that now. Keywords are the foundation—but now you can build on top of that.”
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