The Google VP Engineering EMEA Nelson Mattos and his team had earlier that week visited the store of one of our small spenders who had an amazing story of how Wild Fusion used Google marketing platform to transformed her small business forever. This was interesting case study for the Google team and Wild Fusion and basically this is how it goes.
Last year Wild Fusion decided to offer services to SMEs and small spenders who couldn’t afford inventories on the "big sites". We reached out to a few SMEs in Ikoyi and we met Mrs Funke of BabyM store www.babymafrica.com at Dolphin Estate Plaza. She didn’t understand what Google platform could do for her baby store or better still how digital marketing could help her. For months we kept coming back and one day she finally decided to give it a try once our team assured her of money back guarantee.
She could only afford $400 or about N50,000 and with a very simple website of about 4 pages and a feedback form we got to work. On Google search, anyone searching with keywords baby, maternity, pregnancy, baby names, kindergarten, paediatric etc were served with her sponsored ads (inorganic listing) and others could see her display ads based on what sites they were browsing (all ads were geo-targeted to Nigerians ).
Google VP Engineering EMEA Nelson Mattos, Isis(Google Kenya) and Anat (Head of Marketing , Africa) listen to Funke's success story
As a result interested people completed forms on her website and this was auto-emailed to her with the contact details of the visitor. She followed them up and in about a month of the campaign, she had hundreds of enquiries and requests. She emailed, called and followed up these prospective buyers and they came to her little store from different parts of the country to order till she ran out of stock. Last week she told us she had sold out and we should discontinue the campaign as she ran out of stock and some customers had already put down some money for the next set of baby clothes. Of course she didn’t demand any money back.
For those of you who were not at the workshop, you can continue reading and learn how Adwords works.
Google Adwords is an internet advertising system that uses search advertising alongside contextual targeting to place ads beside natural search results and websites on the internet. Ok, so I started out with just Google Adwords and now I have mentioned search advertising and contextual targeting and I’m sure you're wondering hey where’s all this coming from. Just take a break, relax and let me take you through it all.
Now we all know Google is the largest search engine in the world and we all use Google to find information about so many different things. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably used the Google search engine to search for stuff and found information on what you were looking for. One thing that you may or may not have noticed is that beside the Google natural search results are sponsored links that are also related to your search query. The sponsored links appear either on top or to the left of the natural search results and that’s what I’m going to talk about.
Google Vice President EMEA Nelson Mattos listens to Mrs Funke’s story on how Google Adwords transformed her little business
The sponsored links area contains text ads which are basically made up of a catchy headline, a body of text and a display url. Another thing you may be wondering now is why do the ads in the sponsored links show when you search for something and I’ll tell you but before that let me break down a few terms. The words or phrase you type in the Google search box to be searched is called a search query, and keywords make up a search query. When you use Google Adwords to advertise, you select keywords that are relevant to your business and tell Google that if any of the keywords you select are in a users search query, then your ad should be shown in the sponsored links area, basically that’s how it works.
So if you are a travel agency, you might want your ads to show to users who are searching for travel tickets. Now one very good feature of Adwords is that you can geo target. What this means is that if you do business in Nigeria and you cannot offer your services outside Nigeria, Adwords allows you to specify that your ads should only show if your keyword matches a search query of users only from Nigeria, cool isn’t it.
Yeah, I had mentioned earlier that Adwords uses contextual targeting alongside search advertising. With contextual targeting as the name suggests, your ads are placed on websites that have the same context as the keywords you choose. Let me break that down a little bit. Let’s say you sell cars, and you’ve chosen keywords relevant to cars and automobiles. Now when Google looks through you keywords, they will show your ad on a webpage where cars are the central theme thus making your ad more relevant to the user. With contextual targeting, you have a choice of using the text ads mentioned earlier or image ads which can be a combination of texts and images and maybe your company logo. Google also has image ad templates that enable you easily create image ads effortlessly.
Internet advertising is a great way for small and medium businesses to engage customers with the right message at every stage of the buying cycle and unlike traditional advertising doesn’t cost a fortune. So if you want to try it out today you know where to go.
Funke tells her story to the Google team.
No comments:
Post a Comment