On Monday, I spotted a piece of online advertising that initially seemed like a spooky piece of mindreading, but on further consideration was actually just a quick-thinking and out-of-the-box element of an online marketing campaign.
While chatting with our Technical Director Darren about football and beer, he mentioned that his local club from childhood, Rogerstone Rangers, had brought out a new kit sponsored by the Newport-based craft brewer Tiny Rebel.
There is something of a trend at the moment of football clubs agreeing shirt sponsorship deals with cult brands like craft beers and bands. Another example of this is the League of Ireland club Bohemians being sponsored by the Dublin band Fontaines D.C. It makes a lot of sense really, as it’s covering two different markets in which merchandise is popular. Usually, a football shirt will only be bought by a fan of the team in question, but with the name of a popular band or beer on the front, it opens up a whole new market. Indeed, you only have to look at the comments on that Facebook post to see how many people are now suddenly looking at buying a shirt for the little-known Gwent County League club Rogerstone.
As it happens, Darren wasn’t quite correct. The team is Rogerstone AFC, but Rogerstone Rangers is a local junior team with links to the club. In any case, the conversation prompted me to search for “Rogerstone Rangers”. I used the environmental search engine Ecosia, which is powered by Bing, and I was surprised to see what the second paid ad to appear for the search was.
Had the online beer store Beer Hawk been eavesdropping into our conversation about trendy beers? Probably not. More likely is that Beer Hawk had simply been following the news in the beer industry, heard about the deal between Rogerstone AFC and Tiny Rebel, thought about the type of people who might now be searching for Rogerstone-based keywords, and invested in some paid search engine ads.
This is simply reacting to trends in an industry. A look at Google Trends reveals the impact the news had on searches for “Rogerstone AFC”.
The spike you see on the graph is between 1:00pm and 2:00pm on Sunday, which was exactly when Tiny Rebel shared the football club’s post. Beer Hawk’s apparent jumping straight onto this shows how quickly some companies respond to breaking news in their industry and tie it in with their online marketing.
It also shows the value of analysing what your target audience is searching for, and that it may not always be obvious. For help ranking for relevant keywords backed up with research, why not speak to Engage Web?
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