Blogs, Search and Marketing To Women
This news comes from a just published MediaPost article: "College students rely on search engines more than any other media–including magazines, newspapers, and television ads–according to a new study by Yahoo! Search Marketing." For the research, 486 students were surveyed, with 12 individuals undergoing more in-depth interviews.
So – what comes up when you do a search for any given thing? Lots more paid placements than ever used to, for one, and some of the usual bigger names, perhaps, but also – a few blog posts. In an early September 2005 Wall Street Journal Online article, Vauhini Vara, wrote about blog-focused search engines – like Technorati – but mentioned how blogs can actually rank pretty highly in the big general search engines as well.
We all know by now that Web crawlers find results based on relevance, using the search engine’s own formulas, and then what gets displayed is also somewhat affected by how popular a particular site/blog post is. And, as Vara reminds us, "The process means that the big sites don’t always deliver the freshest Web search results." In his WSJ Online piece, he wrote about a quick test he did the day after MTV’s annual Video Music Awards show:
"…the first result in a Google search for ‘video music awards’ was the official MTV Web site. The second result was a blog entry about gadgets toted by celebrities at last year’s show."
An old blog post was the second unpaid result. Hmmm.
The Yahoo! research also found that expectant/new parents looked to search engine results more than retail stores, TV ads and newspapers, which were once probably much more relied upon for information from that group. Friends and family, of course, were the first turned to with baby-specific books etc.. also being turned to more frequently than search engines. But still… this seems like something worth paying attention to.
If women at the college age and women in the new/expectant mom segment are in your consumer base, getting on their radar by way of blogs (notice I didn’t say it had to be by writing a blog, specifically) may become an even better bet over time. In August, I wrote about Design Public, a furniture/homegoods retailer that had seen great success connecting with customers via their blog (especially new parents with their Baby Blogapalooza), for one.
But, back to the search engine connection. Blogs are out there and likely becoming a key part of search engine results. So, what does that mean for your marketing to women efforts?
To "do" a blog well, you definitely have to commit and invest the time – and it is still not necessarily a fit for every brand or industry. STILL – you should be monitoring them, if nothing else, and learning from the people who are already writing about your topic. Such an audit could help you gather the following:
- what topics/issues/concerns/trends have the most heat for the sort of woman who is reading the blog?
- what actual words/terms/phrases are used to describe your product or your industry by the women who are writing the blogs or commenting?
- what other products or ad campaigns get mentioned, even in passing?
- and, is there a whole other level of resource/information that remains to be delivered that your brand might serve via a blog?
If women are relying on search engines more, and search engines are paying attention to blogs these days, so should your brand, your marketing team, your PR group and so on.
A related aside: A good friend of mine who does public relations for national women’s footwear and outerwear brands called me recently to see if I could help her identify the blogs she needed to monitor within her specific interest. She pointed out that, from the public relations perspective, there was a real need for blog-novice guidance in understanding, monitoring and participating in blogs (that would be where publicists learn NOT to send releases to blog writers), in addition to keeping up with print, radio and television media.
With that in mind, I checked out the Bacon’s Media Directory site and found that they have a blog that may be helpful on this front. How else do newer-to-blogging business people learn about which of the zillions of blogs they really should read/which ones are actually influencing women? Anyone out there tackled a particular industry by using Technorati, for example, and truly been able to weed out the most relevant blogs in a reasonable amount of time? Send me some examples, if you’ve got them, and I’ll write up another post with any insights. Thanks.
