Mother’s Day is only a few short weeks away and happens to be, in my opinion, a day that all mothers look forward to for the pampering, the gifts and demonstrations of love by her family. With consumer spending for Mother’s Day gifts expected to be $15.73 billion, these last few weeks before the big day are a fantastic opportunity to get your brand noticed, especially online.
According to the National Retail Federation’s 2007 Mother’s Day Consumer Actions and Intentions survey, 20% of consumers are expected to do their Mother’s Day gift shopping online, which is a 3.1% increase from last year. Although the other 80% do their gift buying offline, many still use the internet to research and look for gift ideas. While Mother’s Day shopping and gift research typically begins at the beginning of April, far more consumers make their purchase much closer to the holiday, which occurs on May 13th this year.
By utilizing the internet to spread the word about your product(s) as great gift ideas for mom, your advertising costs will be much less versus commercial and print ads and more likely to spread the word faster due to viral marketing. A few ways to utilize the web to get your products before Mother’s Day gift searchers are:
Press Releases
Advertisements on targeted websites
Advertisements on targeted blogs
Promoting them to blog owners
Online press releases are great for search engine optimization and will quickly get you picked up by the likes of Google and Yahoo when consumers do an online search. Using keywords in the title of your press release is a key factor. Key phrases to use are “Mother’s Day gifts” and “Mother’s Day gift ideas.” Some online press release services are PR NewsWire, Send2Press and PRWeb Direct. You can also use these same press releases to email to blog owners, but make sure to include links to your products (if you have an online site) and pictures as well.
To find higher ranking websites and blogs to advertise or promote your products on, you can type in keywords for your product (beauty, skin care, fashion, etc.) followed by “website” or “blog.” Obviously the first two pages in the search are the most important showing the sites with a higher page rank. For blogs, an efficient way to search is through a Google blog search and Technorati search. Cision, previously known as Bacons, also has a fantastic database of media contacts. It does have a higher cost than other media databases if you are only looking at it for the short term, however for the long term there are many great benefits to using this service.
Advertisements on various websites and blogs are also beneficial and get your products seen consistently. Price varies by site; the more popular the website/blog, the higher the cost, however it can also generate much more traffic to your website that you can monitor than simply placing a print ad that can be glanced at and soon forgotten (also without a concrete way to track if your particular ad created sales volume). For advertising on blogs, my service of choice is BlogAds. You can seek out blogs by keyword, view a brief description of the blog, see their traffic volume, ad price, and a direct link to their website for further research before making a decision if a particular blog is the right fit for your product. BlogAds also gives you the ability to advertise through their “hives” which are groupings of blogs based on a commonality (ie. New York City based blogs, beauty blogs, fashion blogs, review blogs, etc.) Through your ad placement you are able to track how many times your ad has been viewed and how many click throughs have occurred.
Now is the best time to get your brand involved in that final Mother’s Day spending push, so do your research and get moving on getting your brand noticed in the final shopping weeks on honoring mother’s everywhere.
Have a tip to share? Post it in the comments!
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