How to Do Niche Marketing via Google AdWords

Last week, I published an article about marketing to minority audiences. Often ignored by mainstream marketers, they're an increasingly important, increasingly powerful segment of consumers. Not only to big guys like Coke and Microsoft, but also to small businesses like you and me.

One of the most fundamental pieces of advice that I encountered about reaching minorities is to find them where they already are. It does you no good, for instance, to craft an ad for African-American men if you're going to run it in a magazine that targets white women.

Here's the thing, though: Many of the smallest small businesses — including mine — don't have the budgets to run either mainstream or minority ads in newspapers, in magazines or on cable TV. We've got to reach our customers as efficiently and as inexpensively as possible. Often, that means advertising online via search engines and affiliate networks, where customers often are nameless and faceless.

I wondered if it was possible to really target a single group of customers, such as minorities, online — to give anonymous Internet users who are clicking your pay-per-click ads a tangible demographic identity. To find out, I engaged Kim Malone Scott, director of online sales and operations for Google's AdSense.

Here's what Kim told me about using Google AdWords to reach niche customers:

Q: The Internet is a big place, full of lots of people. Is it possible to reach a targeted, niche audience online?

Google's advertising offerings provide advertisers the ability to meet every marketing objective. Although Google's Content Network can reach about 70 percent of all Internet users, it is also possible to target and reach a narrow niche audience by location or demographic.

Q: Why might I want to reach that niche audience to begin with?

One of the first pieces of advice we give to small business advertisers is to know your audience. By taking a good look at the products and services you’re selling and the customers who are buying them, you can translate that knowledge into effective and targeted advertising.

It really goes beyond niche demographics being an attractive advertising target; it’s about niche demographics being the right audience for the goods and services that a business is trying to sell. If a small business determines that a minority is buying the products they sell, then that minority becomes an attractive and important advertising target for that business. Google can help that business reach that particular demographic.

Q: Ok, so niche demographics are obviously an attractive target. Now, how does one reach them with their AdWords campaign?

Google offers its AdWords advertisers that are opted into the Google Content Network the ability to reach niche audiences online with placement targeting. Placement targeting lets advertisers choose individual sites in the Google Content Network where they’d like their ads to appear. When advertisers create a placement-targeted campaign, they can choose the demographic site selection option. This option enables advertisers to find and run their ads on Web sites with the right audience for their AdWords campaigns. Advertisers submit demographic preferences and create a list of sites that they think may be popular with that demographic audience. A feature called the Placement Tool then automatically returns a list of available sites from Google’s Content Network whose audience tends to match the demographic description an advertiser selected. For instance, if an advertiser is selling ethnic beauty products, they may ask the Placement Tool to look for sites that are popular with minority women.

Like using AdWords for search, small business advertisers can spend as little or as much as they would like for placement-targeted campaigns. They can choose either cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) pricing.

Q: If I decide to advertise within Google's Content Network, what common mistakes should I avoid making?

Small business advertisers who create AdWords campaigns, but don’t measure their effectiveness, are making a mistake. After a campaign goes live, advertisers should measure its results regularly. They should keep a close watch on their account statistics, review their Web logs and use conversion tracking software (available for free through some advertising programs). With that data, advertisers should continually review what they’ve set up, keeping in mind that there’s always room for improvement and that the online advertising environment is dynamic. Advertisers shouldn’t be afraid to make changes and try new things.