Get Your Company Noticed Online

I think that it is safe to say that most people know what Google is. The brand is an online juggernaut and can be seen on every corner of the web via advertising, embedded search bars, or all of thoseYouTube videos your goofy friend sends to you. Well the company is currently making an effort to educate even more people about their services and business by sponsoring a marketing challenge for students around the globe. The contest exposes students to online advertising by providing them with a $200 credit for Google AdWords. Students then pair with a business and manage a keyword campaign for three weeks. Student groups also submit pre- and post-campaign strategy plans to Google for review.
I'm currently taking a class called Hospitality Web-Based Marketing, and one of my major assignments is to participate in this contest. I find this so interesting and was really excited to start. I naturally gravitated to the things I already knew about... the hospitality industry. I'm currently working on research concerning hotel booking behavior on the web but found out that the hotel business is one of the most hotly contested markets on Google. It's really no surprise. When you type in "hotel" on Google, ads cover the top and sides of the pages. Even on blogs as unknown as this one,Expedia is advertising to any potential traveller in the small ad boxes.
Once I realized that our budget could not compete with the big guns for three weeks (maybe not even a day or two), we had to look elsewhere. My next thought was restaurants. Although when you think of restaurants and the web there isn't much e-commerce that comes to mind. And then it dawned...table reservation companies. Many people know about Open Table but there's no need to conduct marketing for a site that most people visit directly from the address bar. We searched out the lesser known companies and actually settled on Restaurant Reservations. The New York based company expressed a lot of interest in working with us to market their restaurant directory and reservation service to the millions of web users. We are currently in talks with the company and we actually had a conference call with the CIO today to go over some details and goals.
There is so much that individual companies can do to give themselves an online presence and hopefully this project will help to illustrate how the restaurant industry is affected by the web. I'll continue to follow up with information on how to perfect on online marketing campaign using relatively inexpensive tools like the ones provided by Google. I'll also try to give some follow up on this project.
What I'm very interested in also is if any of the readers of this blog would be interested in participating in this contest as well. I'm currently looking for another company to work with and will work with any type of business from almost any industry. The only requirement is that you do not currently use Google AdWords and that the company has less than 100 employees. I really hope to hear from you if your business would be interested.

Also I'd be interested in knowing what kinds of hospitality businesses people search for online besides "hotel, Los Angeles, downtown". Feed me the juicy details and tell if you even look online for companies or whether you rely on trade publications and referrals from peers in the industry. Leave come comments regarding either issue and lets get a conversation going!