Driving a Social Audience
February 12, 2010 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Most brands (particularly food and wine brands) these days have developed or are in the process of developing their social networking strategy. Some will opt for a Facebook Page others will use Twitter, while others will opt to develop their own platform. Irrespective of the platform, how are you driving a relevant audience to your social networking environment?
For some it might feel foreign to drive traffic to a social networking page which you don’t actually own, but these platforms allow you to engage deeper with your audience of consumers. These people are your brand ambassadors. Simply by them adding your brand to their profile is an endorsement of your product. Over 4 million people have added the Coke Cola page to their Facebook profile which is the largest of any brand.
So how can Gourmet Ads build your social networking audience? There are two stages we would recommend as part of the development of any social networking strategy.
- The first is running a wide reaching ad campaign with creative encouraging them to join or follow your page. If budget allows the creative could even draw in the current conversation on the social networking page allowing the audience to engage by default. This initial burst will quickly bump up the numbers which will help from a viral aspect. It gets the ball rolling.
- Prior to the initial burst of activity we would provide a beacon which would need to be installed on your site. This simple Javascript drops a cookies for people that visit your site. Then we would run a longer campaign aimed at only people that have visited your site. The conversation rate for this campaign will be much higher than the initial burst, but will of course be lower in terms of the people because the funnel is smaller.
The key to a successful social networking is the creative, and where possible including a dynamic type aspect will certainly help get the audience engaged with your conversation straight away.
If you’re interested in Gourmet Ads driving traffic to your social networking pages, then Download our Media Kit or Request a Proposal from our team.
Advertising News Sites
September 1, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Before jumping into the day, I usually look over the news feeds from a stack of Advertising sites and blogs. So I thought today I’d share with you a short list of the sites I check out everyday and why. Many of the sites deliver daily newsletters which are also handy as they provide a short digest of the articles of the day.For media buyers and media planners there are some great sites here that should be part of your everyday reading as well.
Many of the advertising news sites also publish content into Twitter, so you might want to follow them on Twitter as well, which is why we’ve included Twitter links for them.
So here is my list of Advertising News Sites which we read everyday;
- Adotas
Editor Ed Barrera serves up daily news on internet advertising and media industry – definitely worth subscribing – @adotas
- Clickz
Clickz publishes news articles and blogs on a wide range of interactive advertising issues – @clickz
- iMedia Connection
Industry leading articles and blogs on a range of interactive marketing issues. They also do events as well throughout the year.
- eMarketer
Provides research and analysis on Digital Marketing and Media – great industry resource. @emarketer
- Adweek
Adweek provides insight and news about all types of advertising including interactive @adweekdotcom
- Marketing Profs
Marketing Profs is a site with a range of marketing issues – also have a great iPhone application as well. @marektingprofs
- B&T Magazine
News about the Australia Ad industry – does include interactive news daily. @bandt
Dont Buy just the Homepage
July 10, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
A few years back if you wanted to advertise on the homepage of a site you’d get great value for your advertising spend because everyone who entered a website went via the homepage. These days, for most websites and blogs the homepage is just another page on the site. Ask any publisher their top content pages, and most will say the homepage barely stays in their top ten content pages.
Why is this the case? Because as the internet becomes much more efficient, users are directed to relevant destinations on websites and not homepages. Think about it yourself when you last did a search for something specific, did you get taken to the homepage or the relevant page in relation to your search term? For the majority of websites this is very much the case with users arriving via a search query in a search engine. Apart from search engine traffic, people are directed to specific pages using all types links on the internet. There’s direct links in advertising, widgets, email newsletters, social bookmarking, viral campaigns, Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds and more.
So how can this affect your media planning and media buying? Well it means that if you’re undertaking a campaign for Over the Page, Sponsorship or Interstitials then instead of buying the homepage you should be buying the first impression on a site. This way you have greater reach, than if you had just bought the homepage. You can make a branding impact initially to everyone that visits a site, then using roadblock advertising or sequential advertising you can capture the click on the 3rd or 4th page impression.
If you’d like to look at how you can better optimize your media buying, then download the Gourmet Ads Media Kit or Request a Proposal from us.
Twitter & Your Site
June 14, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Throughout the world, Twitter is fast becoming popular tool for publishers. Why? Because it allows you to have two way a conversation with your audience. The benefit of having this conversation from a publisher perspective is that not only can you inform your audience about new content, but you can ask their opinion, have a discussion and learn more about what kind of content that would like to see in the future.
Today I’m going to share some of the tools and ideas we use to have this conversation on Twitter and how you can use them to not only grow your followers, but engage with your audience.
Get a Twitter Account
First off if you haven’t got your own Twitter account, then grab yours now. Try to get your website’s name and try not to use underscores or hypens. Make it easy and memorable – ours is @gourmetads
Once your Twitter Page is setup, add a description about your site and the URL. The more descriptive the description the better as the Twitter search engines index this and could be path to having people search for you using one of the search tools twitter has like http://search.twitter.com
Promoting your Twitter Page
Once you’ve got your Twitter start by promoting it. Some ideas could be;
- A Twitter Blog – like this
- A spotlight image linked to your Twitter Page
- Embed your Twitter Feed on to your page
- Add your Twitter link on the contact page
- Add Twitter link to your business card
- Send email to your newsletter database with links to Twitter page
- Advertising your Twitter Page
Publishing Content to your Twitter
Earlier in the Traffic Booster Program we talked about RSS and how syndicating your RSS Feed on the internet can be great for gaining backlinks. Well RSS can be great for syndicating content for to users. Using your RSS / XML feed from your site, you can easily publish your content back into Twitter using Twitter Feed. Simply set and forget. Add your RSS feed URL, the publishing times and how you want the Tweets published and that’s it. Now every time you publish something on your website or blog it will automatically be syndicated to Twitter driving traffic back to your site.
Scheduling Tweets
Like all publishers it’s important to plan your communication. So using an application like Twuffer you can schedule your Tweets into the future. So if you are running a competition on the site, you could schedule say a dozen Tweets over a week to inform your audience of the competition.
There are hundreds of other ways you can use Twitter to drive traffic to your site.
How are you using Twitter ?
Advertising your Twitter Page
May 22, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Twitter is starting to gain a great deal of attention in main stream media in recent times and it reminds me of when Facebook initially started to gain a wider audience base about 2 years ago. At that time it was the early adopters in your network of friends that started to tip their toe in, with many still skeptical of the platform or concerned about privacy. I am seeing that same network of friends
starting to move to Twitter.
I think one of the reasons why we’ve seen a recent growth in Twitter is the use by both celebrities and companies who have already embraced the platform and having an actual two way discussion with fans or uses of their products. Something that till now has been hard for brands to do. Over at my personal site, I’ve created a list of Celebrity Chefs on Twitter.
So how does your brand engage with consumers on Twitter and gain an audience of a few hundred thousand followers overnight?
Gourmet Ads has been on Twitter for a while now (follow us @gourmetads), and we use the platform to talk with advertising agencies, marketing managers, publishers and anyone associated with our business around the globe. We publish regular content into Twitter each day as well as have conversations with clients and publishers regularly. So we have something that our audience actually wants to engage and actively discuss or even just read and observe.
Apart from people simply adding us via Twitter, we’ve grown our audience base through running targeted ads through the Gourmet Ads network. This is something that you can do its very cost effective compared to the some of the wild over thought strategies that you read or hear about. There is no point randomly adding people who are not relevant to your brand. If you are food brand and your product is only in New York State, Gourmet Ads can run a campaign that is targeted towards people that live in New York State who are more likely to engage with your brand than not. If you are winery in Napa Valley with national distribution, then it makes sense to just run your campaign in America.
Your campaign to drive people to your food or wine Twitter page could be done two ways. You could either drive them simply to your page on Twitter. However I believe that’s a very immature way of doing it because you assume that everyone who clicks on the ad will know;
a) what twitter is
b) what they have to do.
I would recommend sending the users to a page on your website and educate them about Twitter. This page could be about why your brand has decided to embrace Twitter and why they can benefit from following your brand online. I saw a boutique beer brand in Australia run a weekly competition only open to people following their brand on Twitter. Very clever.
If you’d like to look at increasing your reach using Twitter, then Gourmet Ads can help build your audience. Request a Proposal from us and we’ll develop a Digital Media Plan that targets your audience and helps drive engagement and conversation with your consumers.
Facebook Advertising vs Gourmet Ads
January 24, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
This week I had a client who was developing his 2009 advertising budget and asked me about advertising on Facebook and if he should allocate budget. He said that the CPM rates are very low and that was his biggest attraction, not so much the platform. I thought it would be important to share our response to him and the path we took to provide a greater media buy for our client.
Facebook, as with most social network advertising has seen extremely low click through rates since the platforms were developed. This was something that Google actually predicted and have seen themselves. There’s evidence to show that people are more likely to click on advertising when they are actively looking for products and services or researching a particular topic such as recipe or a wine review.
The trouble with advertising in social networks is that people are actually socializing online. They are engaged with the content of their friends, learning about what they did or where they are and even chatting with them. Even though the advertising is located in the best real estate of the page it literally doesn’t get seen by the user.
There is no doubt that Facebook has a greater reach than Gourmet Ads. But how targeted is the advertising? I’m not talking about Geo Targeting because I know that Gourmet Ads would deliver the same result, but I am talking about reaching a real foodie or real wine connoisseur. Many of the sites that Gourmet Ads represents attract a specific foodie or wine connoisseur audience naturally. Now compare this to someone putting Food or Wine as an interest in their Facebook profile. Sure the campaign maybe targeted at that keyword but everyone likes Food and Wine!!!!!
So what did we recommend to our client?
- Create his own Facebook user profile and evangelize his product
I felt this was very important, because he can easily communicate to his audience or niche and talk about his product. I also recommended that he establish a Twitter account as well. - Continue to brand advertise at key peak times with Gourmet Ads (Black Friday, Christmas etc)
Our client sells an expensive kitchen product which isn’t an emotional purchase buy. It’s something that you buy once every 10-15 years, so we believe that throughout the years that he run branding campaigns around the product to drive sales at these peak times. - Undertake Behavioral Targeting Advertising
We are currently undertaking some research on what Behavioral Targeting options are available to him and how he can target potential customers. - Become one of our remanent partners
We’ve suggested that he look at totally untargeted, wide reaching advertising campaigns which runs all the time. We’ve offered a low CPM rate with no guarantee on impressions. If the network sells out at a premium his advertising is put on hold.
I guess the final element of having a relationship with Gourmet Ads is that you have a relationship with Gourmet Ads. We’ll work with you directly to make sure your advertising campaign is working. We’ll help optimize it to reach the conversion rates you need to succeed online.
To learn more about Gourmet Ads and how we can optimize your advertising campaigns, download our Media Kit or contact us.
Gourmet Ads on Twitter
October 30, 2008 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Twitter has been named by some as the next huge thing on the internet and it could be. But if you haven’t heard of Twitter, that’s ok. As with most dot com start-ups these days the initial growth is fuelled by Silicon Valley geeks and Tech bloggers. However in past few months, Twitter has started to spread into other industries, with particular growth with food bloggers and advertising professionals.
So what is Twitter? Well Twitter is social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” to your friends or followers. Twitter is great for staying in touch and keeping up with friends no matter where you are or what you’re doing. Your friends simply choose to follow you, then they’ll get updates as you update Twitter.
One of the great features of Twitter is that you don’t have login via your web browser and add your update. You can login via your mobile phone, send an SMS to twitter and it updates. Your “Followers” can receive updates via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, email or through an application, such as Tweetfox which is add-on to my Firefox browser. We also automatically add our RSS feed directly into the Twitter account using Titterfeed.
It’s not just people that are joining Twitter, even companies are jumping on the bandwagon check out AdTorque, Adtech, DigitalMinistry, which are all active on Twitter in the advertising space.
