Online provides many conveniences for consumers and businesses. For the consumer, it is getting huge amounts of information at the click of a keystroke. For businesses, the benefits are not always as simply stated as for consumers.
Unfortunately, businesses have a lot more to be fretful about, such as how much information to place on one’s website, what type of information, how transparent should one be, how to stay relevant to the consumer, and how to ensure one’s brand visibility. The list could literally go on and on.
Consumers use an assortment of sites and even paid ads to assist them in gaining information about products and services. This pretty much holds true regardless of the industry. Search tools can assist in maintaining brand visibility.
Traditional search engines are a good fit for consumers when they search for all-encompassing information. Paid search ads have been a staple, in addition to acquiring key words. This type of search allows the consumers to seek out specific information. Another mechanism to consider is native advertising (those ads placed organically in editorial content). Native placements allow a business to capture a desired consumer set within editorial they already enjoy consuming.
When to use or how to use these methods depends upon the target one is actively deploying messages. Knowing the consumer and their behavior helps reveal the when and the how.
Using these tools can keep your brand visible. Better yet, online campaigns can be tracked as well. Therefore, it affords businesses a means to attribute ROI and decide where to optimize spending for future campaigns. As technology continues to improve businesses’ ability to track ROI and integrate proprietary data, performance metrics are evolving rapidly as well. In the very near future, those metrics will catch up with consumer behavior.
Adele Lassere is a marketing/advertising consultant with 20+ years experience, freelance writer and author of “Elements of Buying” (self-help advertising guide), available at Amazon.com. Adele was listed as Black Enterprise’s 2011 Top Execs in Marketing & Advertising and Black Enterprise’s 2013 Top Women Executives in Advertising & Marketing. Contact: [email protected]
