Gone are the days when placing an ad in a trade directory or local charity ad book are the best way to promote your brand to your potential customers.
Whether you are using PPC (pay per click) or display ads on a search engine, sponsored posts on LinkedIn or Facebook or sponsored Tweets on Twitter, the opportunity for targeted search to include and exclude large swaths of people exists like never before.
I’m going to give you three examples of ways to use these tools to refine your message and keywords to increase the likelihood that the audience you will be reaching are the ones you want to be your customers.
1) Choosing your audience by geography.
All of the major search engines and social networks allow for ads to use targeted search and deliver within ‘x’ miles of a particular location, whether city name or ZIP code. If you want to limit your campaigns to target companies who are located at a certain airport or seaport or metropolitan area, you can set these parameters during the course of establishing a campaign. We have a client in house right now for whom we’re promoting classes they give around the United States and we are running the campaigns for a period of time in a geographic radius around the class location for approximately two months in advance of each event. As the event gets closer and the likelihood of someone traveling diminishes, we narrow that radius down to the immediate city where it could be a day trip for someone as opposed to needing a flight or a multi-hour car ride in each direction to attend.
2) Choosing your audience by keywords.
Do you offer services to perishables, pharmaceutical, hazardous materials or project shippers? Got a new drawback process you want to promote? How about that new RFID warehouse tracking product? By using keywords and categories, you can target your search to include words like “warehouse” or “manufacturing” or “dangerous goods” and exclude things like “real estate”, “hazardous waste disposal” or “international relocations”. If you’re going to spend money to appear in front of a group, pay to be in front of the right group, especially if they are going to click to go to your site which will cost you money.
3) Choosing your audience by job function.
This is more focused on LinkedIn, but if that is where you feel is best to deliver your message, they’re willing to help.
Narrowing by geography, position and industry.
LinkedIn allows you to search by position (C-suite, managers, supervisors, etc.) as well as by geography, endorsements, areas of interest, etc. Usually the narrower your search, the more economical the cost becomes, although this is as much a function as competition for the keywords and audiences as it is the number of people you intend to reach. Some campaigns are priced per click, others per thousand impressions.
Position : Global can help.
We are currently running campaigns for companies and organizations who are use targeted search nationally and globally. These campaigns are focused and direct the audience to specific landing pages on their sites where we have a call to action to achieve our desired goal. Most important is that we can measure these results through Google Analytics to determine the effectiveness of the campaign’s reach as well as the conversion rate.
Ask us how we can design and execute a targeted campaign to promote you to your next client.