Capturing Small-Cap Investors

AGORACOM leverages Yahoo! Search Marketing to attract both potential investors and new clients

Customer:
AGORACOM is North America's largest investor relations marketing firm for small and micro-cap companies.

Challenge:
AGORACOM's small-cap customers aren't covered by major media, so potential investors must wade through the vastness of the Web to get information.

Solution:
AGORACOM leverages Yahoo! Search Marketing to create highly targeted campaigns to draw potential investors and customers to its site.

Result:
Yahoo! Search Marketing has helped AGORACOM attract a very small but lucrative audience of prospective clients that it could not reach without using outdated and expensive methods such as direct mail.

AGORACOM has a clear mission: Attract investors to its small-cap and micro-cap clients. To that end, the Internet is essential and so is Yahoo! Search Marketing. "Small cap stocks aren't covered by major media," says president George Tsiolis. "Potential investors have to go to the Web to find new companies. Search helps us meet those people head on." AGORACOM (www.agoracom.com) is North America's largest investor relations marketing firm for small and micro-cap companies. Based in Toronto, it is the exclusive provider of "Small-Cap Centers Powered by AGORACOM" to Yahoo! Finance Canada, AOL Finance Canada and every Blackberry device on the planet.

Search marketing enables AGORACOM to target a very small but lucrative audience of prospective clients that it could not reach without using outdated and expensive methods such as direct mail. It also provides the company with an opportunity to attract and increase traffic from individual investors who had not heard of AGORACOM before.

AGORACOM has been using Yahoo! Search Marketing since its Overture days. "When Yahoo! bought Overture it just gave me more confidence," says Tsiolis.

AGORACOM had an excellent understand-ing of search marketing as a concept and was fairly comfortable with it from an analytical and technical point of view, but it was still able to learn quite a bit from working with the Yahoo! Search Marketing team.

"Yahoo! helped us understand the concept of breaking down our search terms into intuitive individual campaigns so we could analyze our results in groups rather than as a whole," says Tsiolis. "In addition, it gave us tips on how to write better ads so we could increase click-through and conversion rates. AGORACOM promotes itself in other ways by sponsoring industry conferences and through strategic print advertising, but search marketing is its largest marketing component, accounting for 90 per cent of its activity, says Tsiolis. "We'll never move away from that. We have never found a more cost-effective way to target our market. While it's in AGORACOM's best interest to use other search engines as well as Yahoo!, Tsiolis says Yahoo! is much stickier because of its value-added content, particularly on sites such as Yahoo! Finance, says Tsiolis. "It just makes sense that this audience of investors will be using Yahoo! to search for small-cap information. As such, AGORACOM is now front and center of a highly targeted audience." As a result of its success with Yahoo! Search Marketing, AGORACOM plans to significantly increase its budget with Yahoo!. In addition, it is going to start offering Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns as a service to its clients. "If they see we have put our money where our mouth is," says Tsiolis, "we know they will feel comfortable using Yahoo! Search Marketing to accomplish their goals."

AGORACOM is now front and center of a highly targeted audience.

© Yahoo! Inc. 2007