As we mentioned in the previous blog post, we have launched an aggressive, strategic branding campaign for Gnosis Arts. This has mainly been a combination of PR and AdWords content network advertising - with a small portion of the funds allocated towards old-fashioned search PPC advertising. The campaign has been underway for about 2 weeks. We want to report on the progress of the campaign.
We have 3 different branding campaigns going, corresponding to three of our brands: Microtank, our new weekly news column (http://gnos.tk/microtank); the Gnosis Arts Community Intranet (http://gnosisarts.com/home/Intranet); and our YMR scholarship program, which gives entrepreneurship grants to microbusiness owners (http://gnos.tk/ymrsp)
For Microtank and the Intranet, we chose to run large display ads on the display content network only. These ads are also only running on a CPM basis, not CPC. For the YMR program, we started out the same, but switched to a more traditional text ad format. The YMR campaign is running on the search network only.
We chose the search network for the YMR scholarship because it is the only one of our brands that actually is based on a performance model. Through this program we hope to generate actual scholarship applications via a registration form. Therefore, it seemed to make more sense to choose a CPC model for this one.
The Microtank and Intranet ads are running on an automatic bid, CPM model. We chose this approach for these two brands for a few reasons. One, we wanted to limit the spend on these ads due to budgetary restrictions. Second, we want the ads to be viewed more so than clicked. So, we didn't want to pay for clicks, but rather a guaranteed number of impressions.
Third, our strategy for these two campaigns is more of a mind-share strategy. We want these brands to possess "front of mind" status to our target market. In line with this, we are pruning the sites on which these ads run; we want to target sites that our target market - small PR firms and small marketing firms - frequent. And, we want sites that have loyal, repeat visitors. We want the ads to be shown to the same demographic, over and over, until the brand "seeps in", if you will. We are taking great care in choosing the site psycographics and demographics, of the websites these ads run on.
*Results
Of course, 2 weeks is too early to really make any conclusive decisions. As we're wanting to capture more mind share, we want to measure any increases in brand name mentions in Google searches. We also want to generated new, previously unsearched for, brand name searches. So we are closely monitoring our analytics for this. Ideally, we want to be able to attribute these brand mentions to the brand campaigns.
The YMR campaign has already generated 1 lead. One lead in one week isn't great, but it isn't terrible, either. We've had to wait much longer in other ad campaigns, so we're hopeful. It also demonstrates that there is definitely some demand for this service.
Both Microtank and the Intranet have received 2 or 3 clicks. The impressions they are receiving are steady and relatively predictable. It is still, however, too early to tell, as we have much more site pruning to do. There do appear to be a few more brand-related Google searches that didn't exist previously. So, this is a good sign that brand awareness is happening already.
(For a more in depth discussion on the ideas behind this branding strategy, visit http://gnos.tk/branding)
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