Canadian brands are pretty slow to adopt social media marketing, but it looks like they can learn something from Swedish furniture giant Ikea. They recently opened a new store in Malmo, Sweden and decided to launch the store with an innovative push to retail using Facebook.
Their online agency (Forsman and Bodenfors) setup a Facebook profile for the store manager, Gordon Gustavsson. They then uploaded hundreds of images of the new IKEA showroom to the Facebook account. The agency then put out word that the first person to tag their name to a product in the pictures, won it. This is a great case of Social media marketing and synergies between online and retail. A ton of people had Ikea furniture showing up in their facebook feeds and profiles as they tagged the images. Pretty crafty indeed!
The YouTube video below showcases their strategy and success:
This week, Google announced it’s takeover of AdMob, a leading mobile display ad technology provider, for $750 million in stock. Thats’s big money for a company that was a start-up in 2006! The acquisition will expand Google’s mobile advertising reach which is currently focused on mobile search ads. It will allow the search giant to expand its reach into the mobile banner and in-application ad space. The image below from ripped from Google’s press release site, shows the breakdown of Google’s mobile advertising offerings and how AdMob will fit in:
As we see in the graphic above, the only pillar of mobile advertising that is missing for Google is SMS based text ads – an area they are bound to enter by leveraging some type of Local Search meets Google Maps mashup that would allow companies to push their service ads to local searchers.
It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes Google to integrate AdMob inventory into their relevancy based content targeting system for ads as well as with their DoubleClick acquisition which allows publishers to buy adspace from publishers on an auction based system.
Have you tried a Google search for Windows 7 recently? Apple is running ad copy targeted at Windows 7 searchers using Google Adwords. They have taken thier head to head Apple vs. Mac strategy and extended it to SEM in a fairly direct manner.
Personally I would go more tongue in cheek to be in line with some of the more agressive Mac Vs. Windows ads that we seen from Apple:
Upgrading to Windows 7 ?
Switch to a Mac and
Save yourself from pain http://www.apple.com/stop-the-pain
Search Engine Marketing and Content Targeting are great ways to target searchers and surfers who are part of your target market but are actively evaluating your competitor’s products . These surfers are often in-market for your class of product and are low hanging fruit that you should be actively targeting with your messages.
Your ad copy should call out your strategic advantages and can also play on the pain points of your competitor’s products. Just remember that in most cases you can bid on your competitors branded terms but Google does not allow you to include those branded terms in your ad copy. Apple may have gotten away with this due to the fact that people are allowed to bid on “Windows” since restricting it would be undue hardship on unrelated businesses such as home window manufacturers and installers.
