Promotion of a new store: what to choose, contextual advertising or SEO?

A brand, a business plan, goods brought in bulk from China in stock, trained operators politely answering calls - all this is needed to open an online store. All this, but not only. After all, it is important that people find out about you, come and make a purchase.

It seems that a good option for increasing brand and store awareness is SEO promotion. You order promotion from an SEO specialist, he draws up a content plan, makes content, forms a link mass, optimizes the site, and so on ad infinitum until your online store is on the first page of the search or at least in the TOP 100.

But SEO is never fast. Firstly, it will take a lot of time to choose a promotion strategy, and the algorithms of Yandex and Google are constantly changing. Secondly, search engines generally rank young sites poorly, preferring those that are already older than a year.

In addition, 80% of new companies close in the first year of their existence. Either it turns out that the market does not need a product, or that one can be bought from competitors, or the businessman panics and violates the correct sequence of actions. In general, there can be many reasons, but the result is one and deplorable. This is confirmed even by Forbes statistics. And is SEO promotion necessary for a company that does not yet know how it will adapt to the market?

No, this is advertising. Regular contextual advertising that allows users to recognize your brand and start interacting with it. Properly configured contextual advertising is the key to first sales, even if your online store opened just yesterday.

Why your online store needs contextual advertising

This is why contextual advertising is better than other channels for promoting a new business in the e-commerce environment:

1. You will be able to set up the target audience, focusing on the marketing research conducted before the launch.
2. Contextual advertising will help determine the most effective sales strategy. You can even set it up on a landing page if the site is still under development, or on a page with a product in an online store catalog. By changing offers, it will be possible to track user interest, and this will take much less time than in the case of SEO promotion.
3. You will be able to track the user's behavior on the page where he came from the ad unit. Whether the person is interested in what areas he explored, what he clicked. The more actions performed on the page, the more interesting your offer is for the user. And this is a good signal for business.
4. An advertising campaign can involve several channels at once, which will increase its effectiveness.
5. You will be able to identify those ads that work most often, track the source of traffic and adjust the portrait of your target audience based on the information received.
6. The brand will “light up” on the network and become more recognizable. By the way, it is known that users most often choose the top ads from ad units, and do not go down the search line. Just do not forget that the brand name must be present in the ad, and it must be personally yours, your company, and not borrowed.
7. You can select a region and show ads only to residents of your city or even district. Interest in ads with a geographic location is 2-3 times higher than in “impersonal” ones.

Conversions won't happen right away

Keep in mind that the lack of early conversions is not an indication of the failure of the campaign or its ineffectiveness. PPC specialists will need some time to optimize ads and conduct the necessary tests. And remember, the more complex and expensive the product, the lower the conversion rate will be even with perfectly “slick” ads.

The popularity of the brand in general and the store in particular will grow during the period of promotion. Even if you were not interested at all before the launch of the advertisement, then during the period of the ads the interest will be very pronounced. If your company really provides a quality service and sells a good product, then even after the advertising period, the interest of users will remain, although it will slightly decrease.

And do not forget that it is contextual advertising that will bring you not only the first buyers, but also the first subscribers. You will be able to use the collected base of loyal customers for subsequent sales. And do not forget that any advertising campaign is limited in time. After it ends, you will need to do an analysis. Perhaps, based on it, you will need to adjust your sales strategy.

The only restriction against launching contextual advertising may be the fear of blockers. But there are two good news here. Firstly, ads have become “smarter” and are not blocked so massively, but still get to the user. Secondly, AdBlock and others like it have long become commercial platforms themselves and also sell and order advertising. Therefore, the popularity of blockers is gradually decreasing, and you can be sure that they will not have a drastic impact on your business.