For small businesses, there are far fewer marketing opportunities presented, due to the costliness of the advertising methods that the world’s bigger businesses use. Facebook has done a lot in the way of providing an affordable marketing source for these smaller businesses, but most small business owners and small business marketers are equally interested in display marketing as they are in social marketing, for both bring them the results that they desire. In display advertising, it is a well-known fact that Google has provided the world of marketing with some of the most popular and most successful tools that can be found on the web. Some time ago, Google created their own social network, allowing small businesses to access both social marketing tools and display marketing tools under the same company umbrella. Now, Google has released an addition to their marketing tools with Google Plus that should have small businesses excited.
According to a posting on the Google Plus page of Christian Oestlien, a Google Project Management member, small businesses can now use AdWords to promote their own pages on Google Plus. Of course we all know that Google Plus is not necessarily the most popular social network among marketers, but it does have a significant amount of traffic, and business pages. Therefore, there will be a lot of small businesses that will tap into the new “AdWords Express” feature.
From Oestlien’s post, one can gain a short explanation of the new feature:
– They can attract new customers and followers with ads that run across Google (on Search and Maps, for instance), and across the web (on the Google Display Network)
– And of course, we only show these promotions when they’re appropriate—not overwhelming people with random ads when they’re trying to spend time with friends
Page promotion with AdWords Express is initially available to local businesses in the U.S., but we’re rolling it out more broadly in the weeks and months ahead. Eligible businesses will see an “Advertise” link on their Google+ page.
The weird thing is that even though most will say that the best place to target people and try to get them to visit your social page is actually one the social page itself, Google’s AdWords Express offers nothing in the way of better advertisement of Google Plus pages on the respective page. So, from AdWords express, marketers do not really gain much in the way of social marketing tactics, but they gain a connection between having a Google Plus presence and the great offerings of AdWords.
Marketing Land gives us a very good breakdown of just how this service works, in order to make it clearer for everyone interested.
The 10,000-foot view of this announcement reads like this:
- You give your money to Google to handle online advertising
- Google spends your money across their network
- Instead of driving traffic to your site, the new announcement ”offers” businesses the ability to let Google drive traffic to a Google property
- The goal is to “attract new followers and customers” but Google can’t show ads within the social network itself.
- Nor can active Google+ users be targeted
