Temas, motivos y tópicos de la elegía augústea

We broke this objective down into three categories:

1. Social Media 2. Advertising

a. Conventional Advertising b. Unconventional Advertising 3. Conversion

These categories compartmentalize the entire concept of “website advertisements.” Our findings will be discussed in the following sections.

4.5.1 Social Media

We created a list of the most popular social media platforms. The list includes:

1. Facebook 2. Twitter 3. Instagram 4. Pinterest 5. Snapchat

These are the most popular social media platforms used by businesses since the high number of users allows companies to reach a broader audience. For each of these social media platforms, we compared the return on investment in terms of cost, number of users and engagement.

Using these comparisons, we concluded that the best social media platform for promoting the two new websites, as well as the My Armenia Project as a whole, is Instagram. This is partially because the content on Instagram is primarily image based which is perfect for inspiring an audience to travel. Instagram is also a quickly growing social media platform which has almost half as many monthly active users as Facebook. On the other hand, users tend to be more engaged on Instagram than on either Facebook or even Twitter. Another factor which makes Instagram a good fit for our purposes is the hashtags usage. On Instagram, the amount of hashtags used on a post only increases user engagement whereas on Facebook and Twitter, the optimal amount of hashtags is one or two. This makes it easier for the My Armenia project to

Figure 26: How to use hashtags on Twitter and Facebook

4.5.2 Website Advertisements

Next, we developed a list of different advertising methods we could use to promote the My Armenia project. These methods included the most common conventional advertising strategies such as Facebook advertisements and Banner Ads. In total we analyzed the following six platforms:

1. Google Advertisements

2. Facebook and Instagram Advertisements 3. Native Advertisements

4. Banner Advertisements 5. Twitter Advertisements

6. Bing and Yahoo Advertisements

For each of these advertising methods, we looked at the benefits, market reach, cost, and return on investment. We used these factors to determine the two advertising platforms that would be best for promoting the two websites and the My Armenia Project. These were Facebook and Instagram Ads and Google Advertisements.

monthly active users. Facebook ads offer very specific demographic targeting tools which would enable the My Armenia Project to target audiences based on income, interests, and even ethnicity. This way, they can ensure that the audience that is seeing the ad is part of a demographic that would potentially be interested in traveling to Armenia. From a convenience standpoint, since Facebook owns Instagram, the My Armenia Project can also advertise on both platforms from one place.

The next form of advertisement that was determined to be extremely effective was Google AdWords. Google is the largest search engine in the world. The way that Google AdWords works is that the promoted website will come up at the top of the page for keywords that you bid on. A way to make sure that the advertisement is targeted to a relevant audience is by bidding on keywords that people who are interested in traveling to Armenia would be likely to search. These would be keywords and phrases from our second objective, such as “travel armenia” or “top things to do in armenia”.

In addition to conventional advertising platforms, we also researched unconventional advertising methods. This included Guest Blogging as well as advertising the two websites using Quora.

These methods were were created by us by using a combination of brainstorming and thorough analyzing of other big brands and websites.

We concluded that using guest blogging would prove highly valuable for the My Armenia project. There are a myriad of popular travel, wine, and cuisine blogs that the Smithsonian could request to do this from. Since the Smithsonian is a reputable and prestigious organization, most blogs would be willing to let someone affiliated with the Smithsonian write a guest post. Guest blogging is also a very effective backlink building strategy and it increases brand awareness.

Figure 27: Advantages of using guest blogging

4.5.3 Conversions

During our research we concluded that effective advertisements focused on two parts:

1. Getting a potential customer to see and click on an advertisement 2. Converting a casual site visitor into a customer

Our research into social media platforms and conventional and unconventional ads focused on this first part; to get a potential customer to see and click on an advertisement. Understanding this lack of knowledge of the second piece, we made “conversion” a part of this objective as well. Conversion refers to the act of converting a casual visitor into a customer or, in our case, someone interested in traveling to Armenia. Conversions are important because the end goal of the My Armenia project is to increase tourism and that requires that the people visiting the website become inspired to travel to Armenia.

To recommend conversion strategies to our sponsors, we looked at what big brands and companies did. Our research led us to landing pages. Landing pages are any webpages where a user “lands” on a site. A user "lands" when they click links such as an advertisement or social media links.

Figure 28: The 4 Golden Rules of great landing pages.