Targeting Breaking News Stories Through Search Engine Advertising
Imagine there's a breaking news story. It's big. It's nationwide. It will be the talking point for everyone all week. And it's somehow related to your product. How can you take advantage of that sudden, and temporary, interest in the subject?
It's possible through some Pay-Per-Click (PPC) search engines. Some of the major PPC engines allow you to place advertisements on their sites, that can target thousands of people, within minutes!
Let's say that for some reason there is a very sudden, and perhaps temporary, interest in your product or industry. If you wanted to take advantage of that interest using traditional forms of advertising, you'd find it very difficult. It just takes too long to organize media advertising, posters, mailouts, and so on.
But through some of the major PPC engines, you can log into your account, write a quick 2 line advertisement, set how much you're willing to pay per click, and hit submit. Within minutes, your advertisement can be sitting at the top of the search engines and immediately drawing from the surge in traffic caused by the breaking news story or whatever the reason might be. In the case of Google, they process over 200 million searches per day, so the potential traffic could be huge, depending on the subject.
In order to do this though, you do need to already have an account with the PPC engine concerned. Most of them will take you through an initial sign-up process that can take several days. But once your accepted, you can set up and remove advertising campaigns in real time.
There are some PPC engines, however, that do like to screen and approve all advertisements before making them "live". In these cases you may need to wait a few days before your advertisements appear, but that can still be a lot quicker than other types of advertising.