Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category

Now and again I try out adwords, mainly to advertise the listings sites or rather to advertise for owners to list on them.

It’s been ages since I spruced up the campaigns so I thought I’d have a shot at it again today.

One thing to remember is that you only want relevant clicks on your ads. How many times have we all come across an adsense ad that was on a site that seemed totally inappropriate to the content? That’s because the person placing that advert hadn’t thought enough about exactly what keywords they should be aiming to use and probably thinks that it’s great that they’re getting loads of page impressions but they’re getting very few clicks.

In fact, the best approach is to have very tightly defined keywords, get very few page impressions but get very high click through because your advert is displayed where it should be. Not an easy task for sure, but one way to tackle the problem is to consider all the factors that go into placing your advert and why someone would click it.

Consider an example: a self-catering property in Brittany, France.

1. The language. If your ad is in English then you need to select that as an adwords option.

2. What country? OK, our property is in France, and the advert is in English but there are a lot of English readers out there so we could list the UK, Ireland, France as a first cut but it’s probably also worthwhile adding in all the countries bordering France. In practice the use of English will exclude non-English speakers but you could add the rest of the richer European countries on the basis that English speakers in them might want to go on holiday in France.

3. What keywords? This is where many people fall down. Yes, your property is in France but you don’t want people clicking on your ad if they’re looking for a place in Provence so you need to include Brittany as one of the keywords. This isn’t quite so easy though as it means that you need to add phrases like “gite brittany france”, “france brittany gite”, and so on. It’s best to include the keywords in quotes as this will limit the irrelevant page impressions and clicks but note that you need to put in all possible variations.

4. What about the ad? This needs to say what you’re offering. Now, that might sound silly but many ads don’t or rather attract irrelevant clicks because they aren’t clear about what they’re offering. Remember that the people seeing your ad won’t know what keywords triggered it so you’ll need to say something like “Brittany gite with pool”. The ad needs to be readable too which often isn’t easy as there isn’t much room for the text.

5. Where should it go? Whilst you could just go to your homepage, it’s best to run up a special adwords page that follows through with the sale information. Not only will a more direct sales page be more effective but you’ll also see more clearly in your stats which clicks came via adwords.

6. What about the budget? This is a difficult one. For example, there are a lot of gites advertising using adwords so the more general phrases have high bids. Remember too that you generally need 100 clicks to make a sale so if you’re charging $1000 a week then paying $1 a click means that 10% of your income will go in adwords costs. Also, no matter how careful you’ve been, you may get heaps of irrelevant clicks through some oversight so you should always test a new ad with a low budget.

Finally, don’t forget that the longer the phrase you use, the lower you need to bid. Long phrases mean low numbers of page impressions but higher click-through from them and lower costs for you. What you don’t want is lots of irrelevant clicks as that just costs you money.

If you’re ever leafing through blogs that do sponsored posts there seem to be two basic styles that people use when writing them.

First, there are those which are pure advertising. They have written exactly what the advertiser has asked for and nothing else. Commonly in these you’ll get extensive repetition of phrases along the lines “you must visit this site”, “you really must visit this site”, “this is a great site to visit”. You might think that nobody would do that but that’s taken from a real-life example where those phrases were used in the first, and only, short paragraph about the product. It’s quite clear that the writers of those know next to nothing about the product and they’re a shining example of why google felt it necessary to knock a wide range of blogs down to PR0: they add nothing to the information available on the Internet.

The other type are quite different. Yes, they have the links that the advertisers asked for but they use those merely as starting points to write about the topic. Frequently, you’ll find that these posts are much longer than the length which the advertiser asked for. They don’t scream out “buy this” and often don’t even mention the advertiser by name. In fact, they’re often hardly distinguishable from a normal post on the blog which is really how it should be I think although perhaps some would argue that these are very much subliminal advertising and would prefer not to find at the end of a post that they’d been reading an advert. I don’t agree with that point of view basically because this style of sponsored post tends to be an advert only in name and, by and large, they’re normal posts except that they have a link in them that ordinarily wouldn’t be there.

What’s very common too is that the first style tends to be associated with absolutely dreadful spelling and grammar whilst the second type read more like an article for want of a better word.

Ironically, the first type are more commonly what advertisers want yet the second type are much more effective in providing the in-context links that they actually need. Just as in real-life, people often ask for what they want rather than what they need!

One confusing aspect of an e-mail marketing campaign is that whilst there’s almost always a big hit in takeup just after you send out the e-mails, it can be months before you see the full effect.

You might think that you can assume that the majority of your sales will come in that initial hit or within a few days of your e-mail but that depends a lot on the business that you’re in.

For example, we’re primarily e-mailing private owners of holiday accommodation and, in most cases, this isn’t their primary occupation. Therefore, if we send our marketing e-mails out Monday to Thursday we normally expect to get a lower immediate response than if we send them out Friday evening through to Sunday. However, that’s not always the case as our highest response ever was from an e-mail sent out on a Tuesday evening.

The season is also a factor so in our case if we send out the signup e-mails from June to August, we get get lower responses than if we send them out September through to February simply because the owners are just too busy to do much in the way of marketing whilst they’re in the peak season for guests.

Even the time of day can make a difference. This one is harder to call but generally your best bet is probably around 10am or 7pm on the principle that a workd-based target audience will have cleared up their overnight e-mails by 10am therefore yours will be on the top of the pile and likewise for a homebased audience at 7pm.

Whenever you do it though, don’t forget that many people file their e-mail for action later. In our own case, we often get a response from e-mail sent months earlier and, usually, would expect to get around 50% of the total response after quite a significant delay.

Whenever we send out a newsletter to our B&B people, we always get a number of e-mails returned with errors.

Now, in some cases it’s because the owners have sold up and moved on but in surprisingly high number of cases it’s because they’ve changed their e-mail address and not told us. In fact, when you do a search for them there’s usually a considerable number of places that they’ve been advertising with yet which still hold the old address.

It’s just crazy to throw away advertising like that and yet people do it.

OK, sometimes they are forced into a change when they change ISP (although, quite why they don’t use their own domain name for their e-mail escapes me) and, after all, who remembers everywhere that they’re advertising? Fair enough, except that they don’t need to remember all the time: just searching for their old e-mail will turn up a reasonable fraction of their advertising in most cases.

What they should do, of course, is to keep a list of everywhere that they’re advertising so that they can change the e-mails and other details if need be.

Many people move to France to live their dream and why not? If your dream is to live in some idyllic spot in France, who’s to say that you can’t?

Unfortunately, for every one that succeeds in living out their dream of a life in France, there’s another who falls by the wayside and ends up returning to the UK.

For some, it’s the case that the dream was never backed up by practical activities. Most common amongst those is the lack of preparation in terms of knuckling down and learning to speak French. I don’t blame those who arrive here not speaking any French or at best just a little because you can do something about it when you get here and besides sometimes the opportunity to move comes when you’re least prepared for it and you just have to jump or lose your dream.

Some come unstuck in not getting down to the practical business of living in France. Many fall in this camp I suspect. If you’re not at retirement age then you’re likely to need a job and, no, running a gite business usually doesn’t count as the income just isn’t enough on it’s own. B&B can be made to work but generally even that needs a supplementary income.

Finally, there are those who do nearly everything right and it just doesn’t work or doesn’t work well enough. For them it is truly sad I think. They genuinely want to live in France, have what seems a viable form of work and integrate with the local society yet it just doesn’t work out and they end up having to leave as the dream slips out of their fingers. At least for the others they can point to something specific that they didn’t do and could potentially fix it and live out their dream.

If you do fall into one of those first couple of categories, why not try to fix the problem and live out your dream?