Google Ad Grant "LIMBER Up" System Part 5: Event Promotion

Part V: “E” Is For Event Promotion.

(In case you missed it: Part I: L Is For List-Building and Part II: I Is For Interns and Part III: M Is For Merchandise and Part IV: B Is For Branding).

Merchandise may be the most overlooked opportunity in the Ad Grants world, but event promotion has to be a close second. Let me tell you a story.

One of our cancer-charity clients was plugging along without much new content or direction in their AdWords account for a couple of months. Cancer charities are notoriously tough to manage, because there are so, so many of them, and they all bid on the same keywords, and when 2,000 cancer charities are bidding on the same cancer-related keywords for a mere four ad positions, most of them come up empty. So I click over to the website just to check out what’s going on with the organization, and lo and behold, what do I find? A very famous rock musician – one of my personal favorites, actually – was doing a benefit concert for my client. IN THREE DAYS.

Man! Talk about a missed opportunity! We could’ve been using the Google Ad Grants account to advertise that show for MONTHS to generate awareness of the show, to sell tickets, to get good publicity for both the artist and the charity, etc. But we never got the chance, because the client never told us about the show. When I mentioned it to the executive director, she just said, “Gosh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know we were allowed to advertise that.”

Yes, you are! If you’re holding events that benefit your organization, you’re absolutely allowed to use the Ad Grants account to advertise them.

And every Ad Grants advertising manager loves special events. LOVES them. They introduce an entirely new set of eligible keywords that we can now bid on in order to drive traffic to the website. And not just any traffic – NEW traffic, new people who have probably never heard of the charity and certainly haven’t been to the website. 

Let’s say the band I mentioned above for the cancer charity event was Metallica (it totally wasn’t Metallica, but let's say it was anyway). If Metallica is now playing a charity concert in Los Angeles for my cancer organization, and my cancer organization has a page on its website devoted to the event, I can now bid on thousands of new and relevant terms in my Ad Grants account, such as:

• Metallica shows
• Rock concerts
• Live music
• Los Angeles music
• Things to do in Los Angeles

… and hundreds of similar variants. Now, would I ever bid on “Metallica” if I were a for-profit advertiser? Absolutely not, not even if I was selling Metallica concert tickets (The word “Metallica” doesn’t signal any particular intent on the searcher’s part, so even if I were selling concert tickets, there’s no way this keyword would be profitable for me).

But I can do it with an Ad Grants account, because it’s Google’s money I’m spending, not mine.

Now, the skeptic might say, “Well, that’s kind of an underhanded way to get traffic to the charity’s website; none of those keywords have anything to do with curing cancer.” 

And to that I’d say, you’re out of your mind. 

Metallica doesn’t have anything to do with cancer, either, but like EVERY SINGLE OTHER FUNDRAISER IN THE HISTORY OF FUNDRAISERS, the event is designed to use one popular thing (in this case, Metallica) in order to attract attention and awareness to another less-popular thing that needs more support (in this case, cancer research). Would you criticize a nonprofit for hanging flyers, placing a magazine ad or running a radio spot to a mass audience of mostly-uninterested people in the hopes of catching the interest of a few? Of course you wouldn’t. So it’s absurd to make the criticism of using Ad Grants in the same fashion.

Another example: One of our clients, a crisis-counseling organization, was hosting a very large and very fancy chocolate festival as a fundraiser one spring. Dozens of local chefs, restaurateurs and confectioners were signed up and were all bringing truckloads of gourmet chocolate desserts, and if you bought a $20 ticket, you were free to partake all evening long.

It was pretty incredible. Writing about it still makes me hungry to this day.

Back at the agency, we pounced on the opportunity the moment we learned of it. We bid on every chocolate-related keyword we could find. Every dessert-related keyword we could find. If it was a noun and it contained refined sugar, we probably bid on it.

Our rationale was simple: If someone in the area is searching for a “chocolate cake recipe,” they are very likely to be interested in my nonprofit’s chocolate festival. It’s not exactly a stretch to think so. Now, replace “chocolate cake recipe” with any of 10,000 other sweets-related phrases, and you’ve got an Ad Grants account running at full capacity, sending thousands of people to the website and eventually hundreds to what turned out to be a very successful event for our client.

It’s probably becoming clear, then, that events are a great usage of your Ad Grant money. But what you may not realize is how this practice can help inform what events you plan in the future for maximum impact to your organization. If you know what keywords people in your area frequently search for, you can realize some great piggybacking opportunities off those keywords by holding events associated with them. 

I used to live in Rapid City, South Dakota. One of the main venues for outdoor fun in the spring, summer and even into the fall is something called Main Street Square. It’s one square block in the middle of town that has boutique shopping, restaurants, an ice-skating rink when it’s cold and fountains when it’s warm, an amphitheatre for families to come watch movies and plays, etc. Everyone who lives there knows where Main Street Square is, and especially during the warm months, you can be certain that a lot of local people will be Googling “Main Street Square” to find out what events are happening there. 

In addition to that, there's a block party near Main Street Square every Thursday night in the summertime called Summer Nights (the name may not be creative, but it’s still a good time). There’s a concert by a different band every week, which leads to a lot of people searching for “Summer Nights” throughout the entire season.

Now, let’s say you’re a nonprofit organization in my town, and you have the option of holding some type of fundraising event at Main Street Square or another, lesser-known (and most important, less-often-searched) venue. I’m sure there are pros and cons to each, but if you have a Google Ad Grant, a significant pro for Main Street Square would be the volume of people searching for “Main Street Square” all summer, people whose searches I can piggyback onto and get major exposure for my event that otherwise I wouldn’t get. I can write a Google ad that says:

Main Street Square

Bring The Kids & Face-Paint With

Us July 4th At Main Street Square!

This is great for me, for several reasons:

1. Everyone who searches for “Main Street Square” – for whatever reason – is going to see my ad, getting me a ton of free exposure for my event. Remember, the clicks may be free, but exposure is doubly free. I don’t even use any of my free Google ad credit when someone looks at my ad; I spend it only when they click. 
2. A lot of these people – not a majority by any means, but some – will click through to my site and learn more about the event and my organization.
3. This ad will rank better than most for the keyword “Main Street Square,” because I was able to squeeze the keyword into both the headline and the body of the ad. Google likes and rewards that. 

And notice how, in my ad text, I’m not asking for a donation or even mentioning the name of my charity at all. I’m just telling people about a fun upcoming event at a place they’re already searching for. If I’d elected to have my event in the basement of an old church or something, I wouldn’t be able to capture all these eyeballs.

Now, back to the Summer Nights example. We can apply the same principle here, but our “intervention” into the search results is even sneakier, because Summer Nights is a pretty tightly controlled block party, and it’s unlikely that you’d even be able, let alone allowed, to hold a charity event right in the middle of it. But if one of my clients is holding an event anywhere near Summer Nights, guess what keyword I’m bidding on? That’s right: Summer Nights.

That’s where my event is (close enough for me, anyway), and the Summer Nights merry-makers are the exact crowd I’d like to reach. If I’m having my fundraiser on the next block over from the Summer Nights shindig, I’ll happily write an ad that says:

Headed To Summer Nights?

Bring Two Cans Of Food & Support

Helping Hands Homeless Shelter.

Again, will every Summer Nights searcher bring some food? Nope. But plenty of them will click my ad to see what it’s all about. And they’ll see what it’s about immediately, by the way, because I’ll make sure the ad takes them straight to a page talking about my food-donation fundraiser. Not my home page, not my donate page, a page that talks specifically about the event I’m trying to bring people to.

Will the ability to capture low-hanging Google search traffic always make the difference in the events you choose to hold and the locations you use to hold them? Probably not every time, but it’s always something to keep in mind, because it can make a huge difference in the turnout and success of your events.