Yandex Direct or marketplaces? 4 types of businesses that will benefit from contextual advertising

We at MAKO deal with contextual advertising and, without joke, consider this a universal channel for business. But there are exceptions to every rule. In this article we would like to identify four types of businesses that should take a closer look at alternative sales and promotion tools, in particular marketplaces. Spoiler: some types of businesses from our selection can be glanced at in the direction of contextual advertising, but subject to certain conditions, we will also tell you about them.

Before we get started, we suggest an experiment: think of who might not be suitable for contextual advertising? Let's compare the answers at the end of the article.

The idea for this article was born when marketplaces burst into the advertising market and became a real alternative to other promotion channels. It's like in that meme:

“It’s impossible,” said Reason.
“This is reckless,” replied Reason.
“It’s useless,” Pride snapped.
“Try,” whispered Dream.

Only in this case, the marketplaces whispered “Try.” Many people went there and really achieved success. And before that, content marketing, Instagram and other useful advertising tools whispered the same thing. It would seem that all of them are our competitors – after all, contextual advertising whispers in our ears. And why then should we write about others?

Because we first of all think about the success of our customers. And therefore, we will either recommend alternative tools, or tell you under what conditions contextual advertising can work and be profitable. Any business should thrive, and contextual advertising should benefit those who really need it.

So, there are four types that can benefit from contextual advertising. Or maybe you won’t get out (if you listen to our advice).

Type #1: Ambitious Harry

Contextual advertising is one of the most expensive types of promotion. This is a fact. Large businesses have a budget for it, but small and start-up businesses do not always have the budget. Often it makes no sense for Ambitious Harry to run contextual advertising simply for financial reasons.

A classic example is regional business (usually B2B). In your region, due to local competitive advantages, you can create a valuable USP and convey it to the target audience – there is income and success. But the question inevitably arises: “How to grow further?”

Dumping won't work – you certainly won't move the big players. It’s also not possible to scale up “like an adult” and compete with whales head-on, including in contextual advertising. The budget decides, no matter how you look at it. Just imagine how a small regional taxi is trying to fly into Moscow and push Yandex Go – it will be damn difficult.

In principle, it makes sense for the ambitious Harry to enter marketplaces: not only the most popular ones (WB, Ozon, YaM and others), but also regional ones. They have an important advantage – they take into account the specifics of local demand and do not force buyers to wait a long time for orders from a warehouse in Moscow or St. Petersburg.

There are also B2B marketplaces targeting specific niches. For example, G.F.C. specializes in HORECA, and Jerk – on road machinery and construction equipment for business.

The most important thing is that marketplaces have low-cost or even free promotion methods. Yes, you have to pay a commission for sales, but in conditions of a limited budget it is often more profitable than guaranteed to give money for attracting leads through contextual advertising.

Although contextual advertising can become profitable if you can figure out how to qualitatively differentiate yourself from the mastodons of the market. Above we gave an abstract example of a regional taxi in Moscow, and below on the card is a real example of a regional taxi that figured out how to differentiate itself from large services and was able to bite off its piece of the market.

For those who want to move big players

Recommended channel: Try to find a marketplace that suits you with the right target audience – and pay a commission on real sales, not on contextual advertising. Pay attention to regional and (if this is your case) niche B2B marketplaces.

What can I do to make contextual advertising work?

Type #2: Innovative Illy

Here we are talking specifically about services, usually from the IT and digital spheres. Let's go point by point:

• high check – transactions in this segment usually amount to millions of rubles;

• low demand – the services of such companies are aimed at a highly specialized audience, as a rule, these are technological B2B services for technological companies;

• a large selection cycle is when specialists interested in it choose a service, and completely different people buy it, for example, from the purchasing department.

In short, this chapter is about those services with complex names that ordinary people have never even heard of. As a rule, no one looks for them in advertisements or on marketplaces – knowledgeable people already know companies that provide such services. And if they don’t know, then they get to know them at thematic conferences, workshops, exhibitions and other similar events.

The so-called “boutique” sales model works in this niche. Like in TSUM: a couple of times they sell a coat for a million – and thanks to such rare sales, they recoup costs and make a profit. It is unlikely that the buyer was looking for this coat in Yandex – he just knew where to look for it.

We return from coats to ours rams complex services. As a rule, the few competitors in this niche have the same USP, plus or minus, the approach and technological features are different – you cannot reveal them in contextual advertising even if you try.

Content marketing will work much better: there you can explain and show with specific examples why a potential customer needs to give his millions. And most importantly, through content marketing you can create a niche for yourself or even create a new one. But contextual advertising is still more about already formed demand.

For those who sell something complex and very expensive for B2B

Recommended channel: Download content marketing: corporate blogs, mentions in the media, channels, podcasts, etc. This way you will tell about yourself and even be able to tailor the audience to you.

What can I do to make contextual advertising work?

Type #3: Fashionable Pet

The fate of companies in this segment is unenviable: after certain events, their main sales channel was literally blocked – Instagram, a now banned social network. Expensive clothing brands, designer furniture and other premium goods – many of them were sold there. Business owners asked a reasonable question: where to sell now?

Some went into contextual advertising and were left disappointed. Contextual advertising can be called a folk tool; it is more about working with a wide audience. In Yandex, you cannot show ads only to those who have a craving for Balenciagas.

Let's be honest: when we see two ads about sofas in Yandex, which one do most of us click on?

Even if it’s the latter, it’s probably just for the sake of gawking at the half-million-dollar sofa. And for the advertiser this is a non-target audience and a wasted budget. Someone inattentive will click on the second ad and only in the shopping cart will discover that they are buying an expensive sofa. Again, an inappropriate application, a refusal – nothing good for our Fashionable Pat.

Yes, you can set up geotargeting for Rublevka, premium residential complexes and other hot spots where people actually sit on their couches for 500,000. But this approach works poorly: in any case, in the overall search results we are forced to mix the premium segment and the mass market. In addition, most likely, no advertising agency will agree to work with such a narrow audience. We personally tried it – we didn’t like the results and we don’t do this anymore.

By the way, Yandex has a setting for solvency, but it also works poorly, which has also been proven from personal experience.

More about non-targeted traffic: if we take the fashion segment, there are often advertisements with images of beautiful women – men click, look at the photos and leave. Up to 99% of traffic can be visitors like this.

It would seem that no matter where you look, contextual advertising does not work for premium and fashion. But we won’t leave you without a spoonful of honey!

Influencer marketing is not only available on Instagram. You can find bloggers with overlapping audiences using your marketing department, or you can turn to the services of blogging agencies (Perfluence, Wildjam, GetBlogger and others). One way or another, you can reach specialized bloggers, and if you’re lucky, you can turn one of them into an ambassador of your brand. In any case, this will be more useful than selling your premium product through ads on Yandex.

Well, let's not forget that Instagram still has millions of monthly users. Don’t abandon your account – and your buyer will find you, even despite a lagging VPN.

For those for whom fashion may be professional

Recommended channel: Look for bloggers with the right target audience – on your own or through blogging agencies. And don’t leave your page on the forbidden Instagram!

What can I do to make contextual advertising work?

Type #4: Lean Joe

Companies of this type are united by two features:

• purchases with a low average bill (namely purchases, not goods),

• relatively small product line,

• and unknown brand.

On the one hand, it is good to sell cheap goods for the mass consumer through search engines. On the other hand, such companies usually do not have a sales website to convert traffic from contextual advertising, and do not have a strong brand to generate sales through SEO.

Let's take, for example, the unknown Affordable Cosmetics store and some L'etoile. It would seem that both work in the mass market segment, but L'etoile has a strong brand, audience trust, a visited conversion site, a customized sales funnel, a budget for contextual advertising, and in general a lot of things that it doesn’t have “ Affordable cosmetics.” But “Affordable Cosmetics” has much lower costs and the ability to keep prices lower than L’etoile.

And with such initial data, you can’t think of a better channel than marketplaces. Like Ambitious Harry, Thrifty Joe will pay a moderate commission instead of giving a conventional 1000 rubles for each order with contextual advertising.

It is for such small and medium-sized businesses that marketplaces have made a real revolution: in fact, they have given them the opportunity to promote and sell on a par with chain stores. Now there is no point in struggling with low website conversion – just create a page on the marketplace, the effect in this case will be almost the same.

Yes, no one has canceled the work with customer loyalty: you can catch bad karma on the marketplace and lose your audience. But to prevent this from happening, it is enough to watch the little things: give the buyer a product of the required quality and a more or less wide choice. The site takes on all the hassle of placing an order and delivery. And it will help with promotion.

It’s worth mentioning separately about delivery: due to huge resources, marketplaces reduce delivery time by an average of 2 times compared to online stores. If you have a good product, but the impression of it is spoiled by expensive and/or long delivery, you should definitely go to the marketplace.

It’s also worth saying more about the more or less wide choice. With a small assortment (a couple of dozen items), you don’t even have to bother with a website—a page on the marketplace will suffice. But with a hundred positions or more, it still makes sense to create and promote your website.

In general, having grown to a certain volume, it would be good for a business of this type to promote both on marketplaces and through contextual advertising. Over time, CRM marketing can be connected to increase repeat sales and increase LTV (customer lifetime value).

It is convenient to make the transition from marketplaces to your website and contextual advertising during the peak season, when sales are high. For example, launch a test campaign on Black Friday or before the New Year. Even if sales are in full swing on the marketplace, it still makes sense to test contextual advertising for a small group of the most profitable products.

Now Yandex is trying to set up its interaction with marketplaces: for the past year and a half they have been developing advertising campaigns where the landing page is the company’s page on the marketplace. So you can test ads even without your own website.

For those who take quantity and availability

Recommended channel: Definitely marketplaces. And contextual advertising is an auxiliary tool for expanding your presence in the market.

What can I do to make contextual advertising work?

Let's summarize: briefly about each type

1. Type No. 1: we are a small and medium-sized business that shares a highly competitive niche (usually B2B) with federal-scale giants. There is no point in fighting them head-on, the budgets and capabilities are too different. Therefore, we go around: we look for our audience on suitable marketplaces, take advantage of their advertising opportunities and (highly desirable) come up with a unique feature with which we qualitatively differentiate ourselves from the major players in the market.

2. Type No. 2: we are providers of complex technological B2B services with high receipt, low demand and long selection cycle. In this case, we are actively boosting our presence in the media, blogging on specialized platforms, and traveling with stands at conferences and exhibitions. All this is to show your expertise, convey the value of your services to potential customers and, in fact, help them formulate a need for them. Marketplaces will definitely not help you with this, and contextual advertising can be used in the background – set up a one-time campaign for profile queries in the hope of random leads.

3. Type No. 3: we are sellers of premium goods or a provider of premium services for the most solvent audience. When Instagram was freely available, it was convenient to sell there. In principle, this can be done now, but not with such efficiency. We need to speed up our influencer marketing! We are looking for suitable bloggers on our own or through blogging agencies – here we look at our capabilities. And we test contextual advertising only when there are budgets for such marketing experiments.

4. Type 4: we are sellers of consumer goods with an unknown (yet) name and purchases with a low receipt. Let’s not compete with large retailers and chain stores – we’d rather go to marketplaces, where we’ll occupy our niche and grow without being distracted by things like our own CRM and delivery service. And when there are no longer enough marketplaces, then we’ll allocate a budget for our own cool website and contextual advertising (we’re targeting 200,000 rubles per month).

That's all. Thanks to everyone who read to these lines. Don’t forget to write in the comments which of our types you guessed before reading the article itself – I’m very curious what versions you had.

We wish everyone successful sales – on marketplaces, in corporate blogs, with popular tiktokers and, of course, through contextual advertising 🙂

If you need an increase in calls, order for 0 rub. our in-depth audit of contextual advertising on makodigital.ru

How will this be useful?

• We will find technical errors in campaign settings and segment them by level of danger: minor, significant and critical.

• Let's check the statistics and find the reason for the increase in the cost of circulation and the fall in profits.

• Important! We will recommend positioning, content and development (conversion rate, usability, functionality) for the site.

• We will develop a contextual advertising strategy with new growth points.