Non-Line Blogging

Hats off to the team at Butlins On-Line.  During the "peak" booking time for wholesome family fun it must have driven them mad to see their site fall over.  But, rather than do nothing at all, they amended the Google Ad copy to drive people to the call centre.  The response time for Google Ads from creation to serving seems to be around 10 - 20 minutes these days and that gives us all fantastic scope to respond to opportunities - good and bad.

Now wouldn't it be even more fun if they could drive people to the Butlins call centre when the Pontins or Center Parcs  sites were down, or is that revelling in other people's misfortune a little too much?

Now and again a search engine results page is lit up for me by a company doing something smart with adwords.  I think it's a given that we all need to know and love Google, and most companies with an established digital presence put search strategy near the top of their list of priorities.  But this tends to be the big, regular search stuff, and teams work on building and maintaining tens of thousands of PPC campaigns.

The speed of delivery of digital marketing offers a new approach to "campaign management".  You need a maverick, free-thinking approach to search marketing, scouring weather forecasts, news headlines and the mass media for "angles" to position your products or services.   Here's what I mean: Google Trends shows a direct correlation between the "Da Vinci code" film launch in July 2006 and searches for Rosslyn Chapel, where some of the scenes were filmed.  You can do the same for "Lyme Regis" and "The French Lieutenant's Woman", or "Alnwick Castle" and "Harry Potter".  We watch, we like, we search. 

Armed with insights like this we can tap into the "zeitgeist" (every blog has to use that word once a month - it's in the contract) and anticipate search demand.

Being of Welsh blood I take an unhealthy interest in how the land of my fathers positions itself in the digital world.  On a recent visit to West Wales the local paper was having a pop at the national tourist board, Visit Wales, for ignoring one of the biggest marketing opportunities to hit Wales since the arrival of the railways. "The Edge of Love" film released next week is set to be this year's blockbuster about the life and loves of Dylan Thomas, and showcase beautiful Welsh countryside, towns and coastline.  Throughout the world fingers will be tapping the "The Edge of Love" into Google to plan their pilgrimage to the beach where Sienna Miller and Keira Knightly frolicked.  So, as the search terms begin to disappear in the top right hand corner of google's graph, where's all the Visit Wales marketing support?

Oh Dear oh Dear.  The PPC search area is as empty as Traeth Gwyn beach in mid-February.  And just in case you wonder what all the fuss will be about, this is a view of New Quay from Traeth Gwyn beach, where Dylan Thomas lived for a few years in the 1940's.

As a thank you for letting me use this photo I will dedicate my own PPC campaign to driving traffic to this bloke's site. 

And just to prove the power of blogging...hats off to Elle for getting a campaign up!

Come on Visit Wales...it's that easy!!!

Yahoo's board, according to Carl Icahn, is "asleep at the wheel" and under pressure to resign en masse because they can't come up with any ideas to out-smart Google.  Meanwhile, Facebook are one of the few sites to knock up something quick and easy we can all play with - Facebook Ads.

I could try and convince you that you can create engagement by dynamically inserting the Facebooker's photo in your ad's...

...but that only happens when you look like a credit crunch model.

With the mischevious tag-line of "Reach your Customers before they start Searching" they have built a wonderful little ad serving suite.  First up you have a super AJAX-enabled count engine that gives on-the-fly segmentations.  They'll help you identify (if you so chose) the 18-30 year old surf dudes living in Aberystwyth.  You then have the option of CPT or CPC and frankly who wouldn't go straight for the performance option?

And that's the clever bit.  Facebook have out-smarted Google with their demographic/behavioural Content network ad serving and put micro-targeting into the hands of every marketer at an acceptable cost.  So, if I'm promoting a clearance sale at my Aberystwyth surf shop I could knock up an ad and keep hitting these Facebookers for free until somebody clicks.  And yes, there are no more than 150 characters to weave your magic but you do get A PICTURE to add to the impact.

I did a tactical, local, seasonal campaign for a client that generated 8,000 impressions and a handful of clicks for a whopping $1.60...about 90 pence all in.  Although the ad's are hardly right up there in the "engagement" world you could always link to a coupon or pop in a unique phone number and measure the non-line impact.  And with so few ad players out there I recon the cost per click will be really competitive compared to CPC display deals on other sites.  Surely too good to be true?

A case of "Reach your Customers on Facebook before somebody else does"