Let’s be very clear about one thing: we are not branders.  We understand the importance of branding and can help further its efforts in really effective, affordable ways.  It’s just not what we do, plus we’re more hardwired towards defined outcomes we can measure in analytics such as increased leads, sales, or site interaction.

Increase Your Brand Awareness

Search engine marketing has several practical applications for branding.  Paid search marketing in particular offers some cost effective solutions as you can get additional views on both searches and Web sites through remnant banner ad purchases.  Because you can advertise on a pay per click basis, you can end up getting a ton of additional, relevant exposure in the markets you care about (geographic, vertical, or otherwise) at no additional charge.  You have to be careful so as not to hurt your Quality Scores, which will then make it more difficult to get in auctions and make clicks more expensive, but the additional reach for, say, an extra $100 can be phenomenal.

In addition to paid search, search engine optimization and social media offer plenty more opportunities for great exposure with little to no hard (e.g. non-management) costs.  In some instances, bought ads on social media sites like LinkedIn or facebook may be appropriate to supplement your organic campaigns.

How to Measure Your Branding Efforts

While measurement may not be as cut and dry as it is in a direct internet marketing campaign for lead gen or on-site purchases, that doesn’t mean you’re stuck.  Here are a few great ways to determine how well your online branding campaigns are working

  • Use Analytics.  Make sure you have a decent analytics program set up on your Web site and actually use it.  Beyond setting up goals to track views of select pages, time on site, and pages per visit,  you will also want to view traffic from specific sources and geographic regions if that’s important to your company. One source you’ll want to see an increase of is direct traffic, which indicate primarily that a person directly typed in your site’s url into the address bar or visited via a bookmark.  When people see your company name and url in ads more often, direct traffic should increase.
  • Increased Branded Search.  In addition to direct traffic increasing, you should also see traffic coming from branded search increase.  Branded search refers to searches on variations of your company name, trademarked products, and executive names.  If you’re a large enough company, you can track the increases not just in your site analytics, but also through Google Trends.
  • Net Promoter Scores.  Traditional means of measuring branding, such as through net promoter scores still apply.  You can even do some basic versions of measuring favorability by running simple surveys on your site; just keep in mind that results will be skewed to just people that visit, so it’s not a perfect way to measurement overall market sentiment.

Bottom line: you  need to track your campaigns to gauge their effectiveness.  Branding doesn’t need to create instant sales, but you need to know it’s working.

Learn How You Can Increase Brand Awareness with Search

To learn how to get your brand in front of more eyeballs and increase name recognition, Web traffic, and branded search, call us at 800.979.3177 or click here. Ask how you can get free traffic during any campaign run.