Your Online Resource Centre
Online Advertising in the Montreal Canada Market
By: Steven Brezina
Montreal business owners need to be twice as efficient in their online advertising campaigns to cover both english and french language markets!
As an online consultancy principal based in Montreal - Roccanet Inc. has had to be very creative to try to meet our clients needs within budgets across the two major languages of Quebec. It is not realistic to think that mid-market size Montreal and Quebec based businesses can simply double their online marketing budgets to accommodate for the two languages.
What is required for any business going after the Montreal markets is Innovation!
Here are some ideas that have worked for our clients - i hope you find them helpful to get you brainstorming!
1. CLEARLY DEFINE YOUR BUSINESS ACTION: Are you literally selling a product through your site? Are you trying to capture lead data or generate a sales phone call? Optimize (SEO) the HTML in your site to attract web traffic based on search keywords and key phrases supporting your DESIRED BUSINESS ACTION. (i.e. plumbers montreal, find ferrari parts in montreal). Make a list of keywords and keyphrases in FRENCH AND ENGLISH.
2. The GOLDEN RULE for primarily French speaking businesses: TRANSLATE YOUR WEBSITE INTO ENGLISH. The size of the North American French speaking ecommerce market is approximately 0.5% of the entire North American ecommerce market. I am continually amazed at the amount of new business i can get my clients just in Ottowa and West Canada alone by translating a good site into english, not to mention US clients. For a few thousand dollars you will get an excellent ROI.
3. RESEARCH your keywords defined in #1. Roccanet has an excellent free keyword research tool modified from walls' tool at seobook to get relevant market data on keywords and keyphrases localized to CANADA - ENGLISH google, yahoo, and overture searches as well as for CANADA - FRENCH google, yahoo, and overture searches.
http://www.roccanet.com/tools/seotools/keyword-suggest-tool-ca-fr.htm
4. RESEARCH the competition. The above tool will give you an idea on how expensive the PPC costs are for a particular keyphrase an a ballpark estimate of the traffic - but you also need to actually type in the keyphrases on the major engines and research what ads show up. KNOW THE ENEMY!
5. START SMALL: Keep a budget of just about 5$ a day for a month and research which ads get clicks and which dont - but more importantly - research which adds actually gernerate your DESIRED BUSINESS ACTION from #1 above. This should allow you to start forumulating a ROI (return on investment) for your advertising campaign.
6. ADJUST and REFACTOR: The great thing about PPC advertising is that you are not charged to change your ads - just for clicks. Take advantage of this and change away to find the ads that WORK!!!! If you are finding that the french ads arent getting you any ROI - drop them. If english ads are too expensive and turns out to be a low ROI - scale back. Remember - your business has so much more potential in ONLINE MARKETING than a lot of traditional media - the research data you will get is a good enough reason to try it.
Article by Steven of http://www.Roccanet.com - ecommerce experts for your business! online advertising, hosting, eBay integration, product brokerage, affiliate programs, internationalization/localization services. http://www.roccanet.com |
