Paid search marketing: fine for some, but not always everyone
Overall spending on paid search marketing is climbing higher into the billions of dollars – but it’s not always the most effective online marketing vehicle for every e-retailer’s strategy. In the company’s earlier days, Carrot Ink, an online retailer of inkjet and laser toner cartridges, found more of a return on pop-under advertising in the online editions of top business media, John Howard, co-founder and CEO, tells InternetRetailer.com.
Howard started the business several years ago when a web search under “inkjet cartridges” might yield half a dozen results; today, those results could number in the hundreds. To distinguish itself from the crowd, the company did not lower its prices in response to new competition online but instead went from selling generic products to selling its own branded product, positioning itself as a high-end, high quality, top provider of customer service that aimed at a high demographic. Howard says the typical Carrot Ink customer is male, over the age of 45, and likely has more than four years of college and an annual income of more than $100,000
Howard says paid search works for some marketers, but notes, “The PPC market can be a very price-competitive market, and often, I lose in that environment. The way I succeeded was not to fight for customers in the same place everybody else was fighting for them.” Under that strategy, ads selected in top business publications worked better than search did to build sales, he says. Those outlets “hit our demographic, and there was no competition there," he adds. “Those people click, they look, they decide the site and the product look good, and they buy. They’re done.”
Howard says that Carrot Ink, No. 336 in the Internet Retailer Top 400 Guide to Retail Web Sites, doesn’t run those pop-unders now, and has considered other approaches to the price-sensitive PPC marketplace. With annual sales in the $10 million to $12 million range, it could lower prices and sell more, but with the resulting lower margins, would make about the same profit at more effort, Howard believes. “We’ve thought about how coming up with a second brand and being competitive in the PPC space would work, but we haven’t yet exhausted all the opportunities with our high-margin brand,” he says.
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