Slicing the Local Pie too Thin
I’m seeing an increasing tug of war in the local online advertising space. That’s the balance of targeted advertising and volume of inquiries.
Let me give you a real example.
Bob’s Brake Shoppe in Pepper Pike, Ohio (a pseudonym for an actual customer of ours) only works on brakes. We’re running his online ad campaigns, and Bob has an unrealistic expectation of reaching consumers within a 10 mile radius of his shoppe who need their brakes repaired.
As we run the campaigns, we quickly exhaust all brake-related terms in his geography, so we have a dilemma.
Do we expand the search terms to encompass the more general “auto repair” terms, or do we limit ourselves to consumers who are seeking “brakes?”
Well, it starts with the consumer.
If consumers in Pepper Pike who need brake repair would be so precise in their searches, it would be no problem. However, we’re seeing that consumers aren’t that specific in their search.
They start broadly and narrow their search until they find what they want.
One solution is to place ads using the broad keywords of car repair but use ad copy that says “Brake Specialist.” This way, the consumer is more self-selecting BEFORE clicking on the ad.
It’s an ongoing challenge to match search volume and targeted customers. Educating the advertiser is a major chunk of what we do.
The bottom line is that it’s important to spend time interpreting and predicting consumer activity when targeting a local campaign. There seems to be an expectation that you can identify the exact customer online, but that isn’t really the case.
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October 22nd, 2007 at 3:20 pm
this is so true. In school (I studied graphic design) our first step was to always identify our target market… this goes for any marketing activities, how are you supposed to sell something if you don’t know who you are selling to? But this is also the hardest part. I continue to struggle with this, and I tend to err on the general, non specific side of things, but I know that if I could only get better at reading consumer’s minds, I would be more effective in online campaigns…