Using Trends for Targeting: "Steel Interest" Study

Niche industries present a tremendous opportunity for targeting "interest trends". Often, you'll find that interest cycles throughout the year in many industries - we usually refer to this as "seasonality".  You can target the seasonality of online interest if you know where to be and when.

Steel Interest

Using some Google trends for the steel industry for example, we can see two distinct peaks for "1018 steel" throughout each year, one in February and one in September. If you wish to minimize your spend to the time of year when the interest is peaking, you can budget for ads in these months.

Additionally, you'll note that there are some very specific (and predictable) geographies. When we are working to get the most from our budget, we're going to want to restrict our activities to where our visitors are as well.

Determine Your Campaign Type

Based on what we know, we can now target our ads by date (Feb and Sept) and by Geo (Texas and California). This will allow you to greatly improve the number of "target" visitors that you would like to see your brand. In many cases, there would be a great opportunity for display advertising and remarketing. This would get your brand in front of the right people and keep it there for the duration of the peak season.

For example, using my remarketing example - you could create a program where you display your ads during these months on display networks within the target geographies (in this case, Texas and California). Once a visitor clicks your display ad, you could add them to your Google Remarketing campaign and continue to appear on many of the sites they visit. This is a very effective way to get more eyes on your brand - and it's relatively inexpensive.

I'm Here

If you are looking for someone to bounce ideas off of, just give me a shout.  I love to talk about industrial marketing and I'm usually available for a quick chat.

Bill Sterzenbach: 937-206-3920