Over the previous three days I explained how to choose the right vendors for your inventory, how to create content based on their press kits, and how to curate news articles about them that are published online. Please take a few minutes to read those if you haven't already because today I'm going to wrap up this topic by explaining how you can tie all this together into one large content marketing campaign that includes local advertising and paid online advertising.Assuming you have your content finished being written, your videos are all posted to YouTube, audio recording of interviews are on your site, and photography has been taken, you are now ready to complete the content marketing process. Admittedly you've probably already spent at least 3 months on content gathering and writing, which was simply the important ground work for your actual advertising. Everything you've done up to this point should already be generating new visitors to your website which you can see in your Google Analytics.
On Monday this week when I was explaining the importance of the press kit, I stipulated that the vendor should have finished ads available for you to use in your marketing. You are now going to use these finished ads as source material for your own set of online and offline ads.
Many of the jewelers I work with run newspaper ads and I've been working with a jeweler near my office who's had reasonable success with the community newspaper which is much less expensive than the regional newspaper. If you aren't running ads in your community newspaper you should consider it. The June issue of Editor & Publisher Magazine reported that 75% of readers read most or all of their community paper; this number is up from 73% in 2011. Yet the regional newspapers are losing readership to digital counterparts.
Ask the vendor if they can supply you with a digital version of their finished ad, then reformat it to fit your local paper. Some vendors also have marketing support and they might be able to reformat the ad for you. Don't be afraid to ask them.
The next step is to post your newspaper ad to your store's Facebook page and to your store's Google+ Local page. Both posts should link back to your website. Ideally you should link this to a product catalog page that shows only the vendor's items. If you don't have an online catalog (a foolish thing not to have) then you should link these posts to the designer's bio page or the vendor write-up page. Honestly, since that online shared image will look like your newspaper ad, anyone clicking it will expect to land directly on a catalog for that designer. Any other landing page would be misleading and increase your bounce rate.
I suggest that you run the newspaper ad for a few weeks, during which you also run ads on Facebook and Google AdWords. Facebook makes it easy for you to promote the post that I already suggested, but that's not what you should do. Instead you should go through the full ad creation process so you can select your target audience. Specifically you should select the same city or zip codes that your newspaper ad will cover. This will lower the cost of your ad considerably and it's better overall targeting of the customers who are local to your store.
Facebook give you the ability to upload a small icon for your ad. This should be another reformatted version of the vendor's ad so it will show something useful at that small size. On the other hand the Google banner ads allow for 9 different sizes and each one should be a slight variation of the original ad.
Setting up your Google AdWords online marketing will be much more difficult. You might need to hire an AdWords expert if you are unfamiliar with it because there's a big learning curve involved here. With AdWords you should create text ads and banner ads. Both types of ads will target your catalog page or other landing page if you don't have a catalog. The text ads will run on google.com and the banner ads should be set to run on Google's Display Network. Both types of ads can also be targeted to your local towns just like the Facebook ads.
As you can see, the marketing plan I'm giving you is to run your local offline ads at the same time you are running the targeted local online ads through Facebook and AdWords. A normal online campaign will span several weeks, maybe even a month or more. Depending on your individual success you should consider running the same newspaper ad, or a variation of it, for more than 1 week.
There's an interesting side effect of local print advertising that most jeweler don't realize. When people see an offline ad they tend to search Google to the topic of the ad rather than the name of the store running the ad. Assuming you've already taken the time to set up your website as I explained over the previous three days, the Google search results will include your website. You won't be able to directly track these people and associate them with your paid advertising, but you should notice a slight increase in organic traffic as a result of the paid advertising.
I've come to the conclusion of what turned out to be a 4-part Nugget series on Content Marketing and selecting the right vendor to help you sell. If there's one thing I want you to remember from the last four days it's that you need to build a long term content building plan for every vendor, designer, or product type that you want to promote in your store. It's going to take time to set up, but once it is you can reuse the entire structured plan over and over again as part of your yearly cycle of ads.
