Yahoo! Inc. unrolls new program – with an integrated campaign
Search engines are big business – and no wonder. Search is the gateway to the Internet – it’s how consumers and businesses find what they’re looking for and how marketers find the consumers they’re looking for.
An Internet portal using direct mail to market its high-tech services?
With millions of people logging on daily to research or shop for purchases, marketers are more eager than ever to reach these hand-raisers, and they’re willing to pay to have their links posted alongside the search results.
And that’s leading to a fierce battle in Silicon Valley among search providers. Recently, Yahoo! Inc. took the fight to its rivals, rolling out Project Panama, a highly sophisticated, leading-edge search-advertising program that should, if it all goes right, provide advertisers with more relevant placement. This should ensure higher click-through rates and allow the Internet giant to realize more value from its services.
A NEW DIRECTION
Previously, Yahoo!’s search-advertising system was based solely on the amount that advertisers paid for key words, whereas Google’s system also factored in the relevance of the ad. Yahoo! Inc.’s newest iteration aims to make its system more robust and customizable from the search-advertiser’s perspective, and to give advertisers more options when targeting their searches.
At first, advertisers may not notice much of a difference. But both users and advertisers are likely to find that search results are a bit more targeted, more relevant, more useful than they would have been with Yahoo! Inc.’s previous search-advertising structure.
With Project Panama, Yahoo! Inc. will offer advertisers a far more sophisticated and accurate algorithm that will help them predict the order in which Yahoo! Inc. will display search advertisements. That’s important because users tend to pick from among the top sponsored links. Yahoo! Inc. hopes the new system will translate into more click-throughs, more search advertisers, and ultimately more revenue.
Advertisers will still choose the keywords that they want to trigger their ads and the maximum amount they want to pay for each click. The big difference will be more accurate predictions about the number of times that the ads will appear and how many more clicks advertisers might expect for a higher price.
SMALL BIZ, HERE WE COME
A major portion of Yahoo! Inc.’s marketing efforts to tout its new-and-improved system will focus on the oh-so-desirable small business sector. Based on numbers alone, it’s a sector worth pursuing.
To reach those firms, Yahoo! Inc. is using a combination of marketing channels – paid search, online advertising and partnerships with other Internet brands – in order to capture the attention, and ultimately the marketing budgets, of the small business owner.
But an important part of those crucial marketing efforts will be direct mail.
An Internet portal using direct mail to market its high-tech services? While it might seem unusual, it proves that direct mail continues to be relevant in a rapidly evolving digital world.
It would have been foolish for Yahoo! Inc. to ignore direct-marketing channels as it tried to grow its customer base, says Patrizio Spagnoletto, senior director of marketing for Yahoo! Search Marketing. “Direct mail has worked well for us, so for us not to use it would have been a mistake,” he says.
Yahoo! Inc. has been targeting small business owners from its inception, and they have always presented a particular challenge. While marketers typically can purchase lists of potential clients in a certain category – young professionals who own pets, for example – there is no published reliable database of small businesses with Web sites. Without such a list, targeted messaging is nearly impossible.
The first step to reach small business owners interested in augmenting their online presence was to build such a list. Slowly, through proprietary work, Yahoo! Inc. has done just that. And as Yahoo! Inc.’s list has become more refined and segmented, and Yahoo! Inc. has learned more about its customers, the company has fine-tuned its messaging.
“The early campaigns were overly aggressive in their messaging and provided [too much] information,” recalls Spagnoletto. He has since realized that small businesses that are considering paid online search have three major concerns: Is it easy? How much does it cost? And does it work?
