Most people think that an immediate ROI is the only reason a business would advertise online. I have seen that there are several reasons that businesses use LocalPages... lets look at a bunch of the reasons:
1. ROI Campaign - These campaign attempt to turn a profit on the sale of a product or service and make up the majority of LocalPages advertising campaigns.
There are so many different types of these campaigns. They can promote products, services, events... They can supplement multi-media campaigns that are running on TV or Radio... ROI campaigns sometimes look to make immediate sales, some measure "lifetime customer value"... but they all look to make profit $ for the business.
Example: LocalPages serves a national frame shop that sells mostly B2B (business-to-business) to galleries, artists, etc. This frame shop's campaign yielded 49 phone calls with roughly a dozen new orders. They had 12 e-mails with inquiries about his products and also... 22 online sales! The business owner says he typically averages $185 per sale and these orders have been averaging $600 to $1000 - and are from new customers! He is confident that he can regularly generate ten times in revenue his ad spend on LocalPages.
ROI: Roughly $20,000 in sales.
2. Branding Campaign - As opposed to campaigns that are directly attempting to create a profit through generating sales, branding campaigns allows a company to differentiate themselves from their competitors and to build brand loyalty with their customers. A small portion of LocalPages advertising campaigns are branding campaigns.
Example: A major U.S. pharmaceutical company (over $20 billion) used LocalPages to manage a campaign promoting a support service for patients with a particular disease and to promote one of their drug lines. Please note, only the clicks were tracked for HIPPA (Health Information Privacy) compliance reasons. The campaign objective was to drive traffic to the site and phone calls to the call center for Q&A. We are awaiting some feedback from the call center (since we did not track calls for HIPAA reasons) but all early signs look very strong! Here is the report:
3. PR Campaign - Public Relations Campaigns are used to get out a positive PR message... often on a company which has gotten some bad press. For example, after Wal-Mart had been targeted negatively in the news on a few different matters in 2004, Wal-Mart set up an online advertising campaign to drive internet traffic to a special site they built. The site focused on positive aspects of the Wal-Mart Corporation including jobs, philanthropic organizations, and economic growth created by the company. Rather than a report, here is an excellent article on the subject... I will try to comb through all of the LocalPages advertiser campaigns for a PR campaign to post here as well.
3. Non-Profit Organization Campaign - Non Profit organizations such as Chambers of Commerce and Breast Cancer Research Organizations run internet advertising campaigns to raise money or get the word out about their organization.
Example: Philadelphia’s Chamber of Commerce ran a campaign to promote living and working in the city. They promote a great site - See the website. Take a look at their report.
4. "I am testing my online strategy" Campaigns - Some companies drive traffic to their site to test certain products. After the campaign the advertiser will change prices, sales info, pictures, or product descriptions and then run another small campaign. Once the strategy and site are focused properly and the reports look strong, the advertiser will run larger campaigns to make a profit.
Example: an online Cajun food retailer ran LocalPages campaigns to determine how many calls, e-mails, and online sales they would get with different pricing and different photos of the products. I will work on getting one of their test campaigns posted. They had excellent results after changing the site layout a bit. The site layout had a big impact on how many sales were made!
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