Articles in The 'MoreVisibility blog' Tag

Gain Insight into Your Season

by Sonya Wood

Valentine’s Day is getting closer and many marketers are gearing up for a busy season. During holiday seasons, it is important to determine when people are interested in your products. Using Google Insights for Search can help you determine when interest in your products or services is at its peak throughout the year.

For example, if you sell flowers, you know that the biggest time of the year for your business is Valentines Day. But when should you start ramping up your advertising? According to Google Insights for Search, the peak time for searches related to flowers was February 10-16 in 2008 and February 8-14 last year.

Using this tool can also help you uncover other peak seasons. It appears that the second week of May is also a high volume time for the flower industry. Mother’s Day is probably the result of the increased interest.

Using tools like Insights for Search, as well as analytic platforms, can help marketers plan for seasonality and peak times. Knowing what to expect can help advertisers know when to anticipate an increase in CPCs due to a rise in competition. Planning for marketing initiatives in advance can help allow for a smooth and profitable transition into a busy season.

Business to Business Advertising with LinkedIn

by Sonya Wood

Many of us have used LinkedIn as a way to maintain a professional profile within the social networks. LinkedIn is a great platform to communicate with business professionals and it can also be used to open communications with businesses. By direct communication or joining a group, it is easier than ever to reach important members of any business.

Can businesses use LinkedIn as a way to market to other businesses? LinkedIn DirectAds is an additional channel for business-to-business advertisers to capture qualified visitors. It offers advertisers many targeting options to help qualify the audience. With 7 top level categories, businesses can choose up to 3 of the categories to target, including industry, company size, job function, seniority, age, gender, and geography. LinkedIn is a good option for businesses, because they can target the exact industry, company size and even job function of their potential clients.

Most business to business companies know exactly who they want to target in a company. For example, advertisers may want to specifically reach a marketing manager in an enterprise level company. Creating very custom ad messaging to capture these people can turn them into customers.

LinkedIn DirectAds have no minimum spend requirements and can also be paid via a CPC (cost per click) or CPM (cost per thousand impressions) platform. Similar to Facebook ads, LinkedIn DirectAds can also have images in the body, which helps to brand the message as well as help to gain user attention.

With LinkedIn DirectAds, businesses are able to target qualified decision makers in their industry.

Advertise Online With a Modest Budget

by Sonya Wood

Think you don’t have a large enough marketing budget to advertise online? With most search engine advertising platforms, there is no minimum to get started. Online advertising has very little cost of entry. Now, what can advertisers do to maximize their modest budgets?

With major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing, there are options to set daily budgets. The advertiser has 100% control over what they spend each day. Ad scheduling is another feature that helps advertisers to maximize their budget. By allowing ads to only run during specified hours of the day, marketers can show ads only when they want and not at other times.

Geo-targeting is another tactic to help stretch a smaller budget. By only showing ads to searchers in a specific area, advertisers can limit traffic to their site and conserve their budget for a more qualified audience.

Using negatives will prevent your ads from being displayed when that particular word is searched. This feature will limit clicks from irrelevant searches and help to save marketing dollars. For example, if a company sells men’s jackets, a good negative would be “women’s” so that if someone searches for “women’s jackets”, the ad would not be shown because it is not relevant and the company doesn’t sell that product.

Even with a modest budget, there are many ways to advertise online. By making strategic choices, marketers have the ability to utilize their budget and get great results.