Print Advertising and Reputational Search

FUNNY STORY: From June 2005-March 2009, I was the only recruiter in America to advertise in Internet Retailer magazine.  Online retail is my target market (for now), and Internet Retailer is my industry's flagship trade publication.  Every month my ho-hum little classified ad was in the back, rain or shine, and every month no other recruiter's was.  For 45 months.  Imagine.

I'm not bragging.  I'm not.  I'm just amazed, that's all.

It was like getting away with murder.  And it's not like my marketing strategy was some big, complicated thing:  Every month, IR's invoices would land in my inbox, and every month I'd pay them.  Talk about obvious.  It was like pulling the lever on a slot machine that every so often would pay off in wild excess of my investment.

Just like I had read it would ...

According to John Caples' classic book Tested Advertising Methods, businesses that are serious about growth should think of advertising the way they might think about their rent:  A "given" that should be counted on no matter what the market is doing.

So in 2005 I made the commitment to advertise for better or worse, and things worked out just fine.  Still, I could never tell if that was because Mr. Caples was right or because I was advertising in a competitive vacuum.  Being a cynic at heart, I assumed it was the latter.

Then in April of 2009, a rival recruiter began to advertise right next to me in IR magazine.  I was incensed!  How dare they???  But hey, it's a free country, and I knew things were too good to go on the way they were. The dream was over.  I was drenched from head-to-toe in the icy reality of head-to-head competition.  Or so I thought.

Here's what actually happened:  It seems that when Internet Retailer's readers see two nearly identical classified ads side by side, they Google the companies in BOTH ads -- and whichever company has a more impressive online reputation gets the inbound sales lead!  It was like a hockey face-off between recruiters, and lucky for me -- there's 497 pages of keyword rich content on my website.

In fact, when my competitor's ads started running, my webstats reported an +800% increase in searches for the keywords harry joiner.  What's more, my overall number of inbound calls seemed to increase!  My competitor's ads had a pie-enlarging effect on the market -- not a pie-rearranging effect!

Can you believe that?  I would never have imagined that old-school classified ads would drive readers to Google -- but they CAN and DO.  At least in my case.

Which leads me to this great resource:  Steve Rubel and his colleagues at Edelmen Digital have written an excellent white paper called Search Engine Visibility and PR.

The gist of the paper is that there are two new SEM disciplines emerging:

1. Reputational Search - The idea that any brand can use Google to influence the search results around certain keywords.  That's what happened above.  People wanted to know about my reputation, so they Googled me.  Satisfied in their knowledge, they called me.  Like magic.  Thank you, Mr. Back Link!
2. Social Search - Using social content from blogs, Twitter, and so on to create brand "embassies" (Mr. Rubel's term) where employees work to serve the interests of the community, as well as their company.

According to Mr. Rubel, "[Edelmen is] convinced that search engines for the foreseeable future will have a critical impact on how brands are perceived -- far more so than any single social network site, which tend to come and go."
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Comments

[Harry Joiner]

It's funny: I get reasonable returns and am now of the belief that as long as I run head-to-head ads against other recruiters (where my ads are on the same page as theirs), I should do fine.

Beyond that, I have several fall-back strategies for what do do in the event that my ads cannot appear on the same page as my competitors (for example, if they run full page ads). Due to the high costs of those ads, it's not necessary that I get 100% of the business -- but just enough of their half to make their half-page or full page print ads cost-prohibitive.

I call this "defensive marketing." Is there such a term?

[Josh]

Great article. The intriguing question would now be - how many ads until you hit declining returns?

[Tom Troughton]

What a great story! Fascinating to see how good 'ol pring advertising can make your internet business soar.

[Jim Durbin]

I'm so glad you came out with this - this was one of the coolest stories you were telling me back in the day, and it's had to sit in my vault for years.

The use of print to drive online interaction is one of those simple, yet powerful traffic drivers that social media and internet marketing types miss - they can't imagine integrating their profiles.

The question every marketing executive should ask is, how much do I want to spend, and what should I spend it one, and how do I get the most bang for the buck out of it?

You've shown one great way how.