|
Five Lessons Learned At
Search Marketing Expo West 2011
Spring is the season for marketing conferences! Since it’s hard for many managers and owners of small and mid-sized specialty-food companies to make it to every conference, we wanted to share with you the top five lessons we learned from the conferences we attended, including the Search Marketing Expo West, New England Mail Order Association, Multi-Channel Merchant, and the Virginia Specialty Food and Beverage Educational Conference.
Sarah Phillips & Megan King of 5th Food Group recently attended the Search Marketing Expo in San Jose, CA. A wide variety of topics were discussed from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to the latest in Paid Search, Social Marketing, and Mobile Marketing. Below are the top five lessons Sarah learned in the sessions she attended.
Lesson 1: Step outside the box...from the outside looking in!
As you jump into Facebook advertising, you’ll find it’s easy to target your obvious market; your fans, your product keywords, and even your competition. For product keywords, you’ll find nearly 2 million people like chocolate, 13,900 like steaks and 15,720 like fruit baskets. A competitor of Godiva Chocolatier will have a reach of 80,440 and a competitor of Omaha Steaks will have a reach of 22,500.
But, what happens if your product category doesn’t have fans or your competitors aren’t in the social marketplace, what’s your next move? Well, it’s time to get into your consumer’s head and get creative. It’s the perfect time to review the reports you receive from the co-op databases each year.
Find out what the demographics are for your current house file and start searching. For example, over 2 million women between the age of 35 and 50 like cooking and of those, 112,500 are married, and from there 32,680 are college graduates.
Lesson 2: Clashing is GOOD…when you’re advertising on Facebook!
Once you have chosen your target demographic, the next toughest thing about advertising on Facebook is getting noticed. You need to design an ad that stands out against the Facebook blue & gray theme.
When creating or choosing your ad image, use contrasting colors and choose an image that relates to your audience. One image might make more sense for a female audience versus a male audience, or a young audience versus a mature audience. Remember, if you have a finely targeted audience (which you should) you need to be aware of ad blindness. If your audience sees the same ad over and over again, it’ll become part of the background and go unnoticed. Avoid ad blindness by creating a library of ads for rotation.
Bonus tip: When choosing your landing page, if outside the Facebook network, be sure the page has a social feature. You know for a fact your audience is social since they are clicking straight from Facebook. Don’t forget all you learned from search marketing, conversions will improve if the landing page relates to the search or audience. Just adding a simple Share button will be worth it.
Lesson 3: Search without keywords!
Search has come a long way in recent years and even more in recent months. No longer do consumers have to use keywords to find their ideal purchase. The hottest new search topic at the conference was Product Listing Ads (PLAs), not to be confused with Product Extensions (see images below for clarification). Simply put, if you’re not taking advantage of PLAs and the various ad extensions, you’re losing real estate on Google. It’s also been reported that click through rates are higher when you take advantage of these features. Don’t miss out!
On a recent search of “fruit gift baskets”, Harry and David had a total of eight links on page 1; with a sponsor ad (1 link), product extension (5 links), PLA (1 link), and a local search entry (1 link). Important note that the PLA was not triggered because Harry & David bid on “fruit gift baskets”. It was triggered based on information that was provided in their product feed. PLAs are not keyword driven.
So how do you get started? If you haven’t already, the first step is to create a Google Merchant account, upload your product feed, and link it to your Adwords account. Once you’re linked, you can add product extensions and begin implementing PLAs. In a future newsletter, we’ll give you a rundown on the best practices for generating sales with your product listing ads, including taking advantage of the optional Adwords attributes in your product feed.
Product Listing Ad:
Product Extension:
Lesson 4: Look before you leap into mobile marketing!
Everyone is talking about it, or at least the marketers are. A paid search campaign can be created to solely target mobile devices. Mobile apps (especially free) are being created and downloaded daily. QR Codes are showing up in magazines and product packaging. But is it worth your time? Make sure you have taken care of the low hanging fruit before you leap.
We strongly encourage you to look first at your regular website. If it hasn’t been updated in the past three years; then, it might be time for a redesign. If your site is great, is there a mobile-friendly version? It can’t be stressed enough, don’t spend a dollar on mobile marketing until you have a mobile-friendly version of your site. Conversions won’t come if a consumer can’t purchase from their smartphone.
As with any advertising, your landing page has to relate to the audience. For mobile marketing to work, you have to have a great mobile-friendly landing page! If you are ahead of the game, then holiday 2011 might be the season for you to leap. There are numerous ways to take advantage of mobile marketing. We’ll share our top ideas over the next couple of months.
Lesson 5: Bad reviews make you legitimate!
No one likes to have bad things said about their business or products, but if you fight having bad reviews displayed you could be hurting yourself. Numerous presenters agreed that bad reviews can give you a level of legitimacy. In other words, if you only show positive reviews, you could lack authenticity.
Customers don’t expect you to be perfect 100% of the time, but they do expect you to make things right if things do go wrong. It’s better to keep the bad review and address it head on. Respond with a sincere apology and then, take the conversation offline. Never be argumentative; simple advice that is so often forgotten.
This concludes Sarah’s top five lessons from SMX West. Over the course of the next few months, we’ll dive deeper into the topics discussed. We hope this gets your marketing juices flowing and gives you a jumpstart on your future marketing plans.
As you begin planning and working on your holiday 2011 online marketing program, please give us a call if you’d like to discuss implementing any of these five lessons or other ideas to drive more traffic to and sales from your specialty-food website.
Warmest regards,
Tony Cox
President
5th Food Group
ABOUT 5TH FOOD GROUP
5th Food Group helps specialty-food catalogers and Internet marketers grow and make more money by developing, managing and implementing their mail order and online marketing programs.
We are the only catalog/Internet marketing firm that works exclusively in the specialty-food industry.
Helping smaller companies or large companies with small mail-order or online divisions is what we do best.
Visit us online at www.5thFoodGroup.com to download a copy of our free booklet, The Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Catalogers, and for information on our two fully guaranteed introductory programs called QuickStart and JumpStart,
back issues of the FBMIU and other information on our services.
|
5th Food Group