Comment BP buying Google ads (Score 1) 439
BP buying Google ads shows that giants such as BP are beginning to understand how powerful the Internet has become for brand building.
I feel that BP could be much more effective, though. If you search “oil spill” on Google you will see that BP gets only one ad spot on top of that page. They would be paying about £2.74 million per month if everybody looking for that search term would click on their ad.
Google surely will donate the money made from the BP ad to help clean up the gulf region, won’t they
BP could get better results at less cost by occupying more natural search listings for the term ‘oil spill’ and many related terms, quickly establishing themselves as an authority in the field. Over 80% of all information seekers don’t click on ads, they click on ‘natural | organic’ listings. Natural listings are ‘free’, if you don’t count your time AND preserve your brand value at the same time.
There are several ways for BP to search engine optimise for the term ‘oil spill’ and related ones, namely article marketing and online press releases. The most obvious one is video marketing: Video marketing can gain top search engine rankings fast. Just see the two videos on Google’s ‘oil spill’ search results page.
Video can also work very well for brand building and reaches an immense audience. After all YouTube has already become the 2nd largest search engine.
Plus video allows you to market to the two second largest search engines at the same time!
This at a fraction of a fraction of what BT is spending now since BP has most of the ‘marketing’ material anyway, whereas a Google ‘oil spill’ ad, they need to continue to buy to make an impact.
Additionally social media would allow them to participate in ‘oil spill’ discussions in real time, thus reaching a much more targeted audience and being able to interact right then and there when opinions are formed – free.
BP facing even more financial and brand damage won’t help anyone, so besides cleaning up the gulf region I hope they will use the Internet even more to rebuild. I guess the better position BP is in, the more it can and will do.
kind regards,
Karl zu Ortenburg
