How do we use online advertising effectively for a niche product?

The great thing about online advertising is that you CAN go very niche and there is no need for a scatter-gun approach. It just might take a little more investigation and planning at the beginning. The great thing about online advertising and a niche product is that you can get very cost-effective with your ad spend.

I can see two key ways that you could gain value from online advertising.

Firstly, advertising on identified websites.

With the information you know about your audience/ users, you can locate some websites that are likely to be attracting them. This might be an intuitive guess, or you may ask them a bit about their online media habits within a survey or audience research. If you are fortunate enough to have access to Hitwise statistics, you can really start to understand what other sites your web users are visiting. If you can have open discussions with the managers of the sites you have identified, you can get a clearer idea of the match with your target audiences.

It may be that these particular sites don’t “sell” online advertising in a formal way.  But you can get creative with partnerships and reciprocal linking arrangements. Offering them content such as “local artist of the month” with branding and a link to your site that you exchange for a feature on your site. Or paying for an advertorial or contextual link that sits within their site as a “recommendation” or “related link”.

This is where a bit of solid research and lateral thinking first up, in order to build a target list of sites, is well worth your effort.

Your second opportunity is SEM (Search Engine Marketing) such as Google Adwords

You can target the precise search terms that you expect your target audience will be searching on, and deliver relevant ads in the “sponsored links” at the top and right of the search results pages to drive people to your site. If you choose a “pay per click” model, you are only paying for the visitors that actually land on your site (it is your job to encourage them to go further into your site once they land). You can also place a ceiling on daily ad spend – it’s an ideal way to dip your toe in the water of online advertising within a set budget.

Stephen, I take your point that with an organisation like SOUNZ, a lot of existing users already have specialised knowledge and awareness, and it is hard to identify which other phrases people might be searching on to reach your site.

I often suggest to people that they ask themselves "which question is my website (or an individual page within my website) the answer to?" Sometimes that can get us into new ways of thinking about potential web visitors who could find our website useful, but have no idea that we as an organisation existed.

In your case it may be that a particular composer's work is well-suited to being film music. So you might try to capture people searching for film music, but who would never have considered or known about SOUNZ. Therefore you could run Adwords on the search phrases "NZ music for film" or "composers for film" or "local music for landscape documentary" or.....

Vicki Allpress Hill Connecting audiences to the arts va@vickiallpress.com