Using search engines for your branding

Search engines are the source of numerous sales for many companies. Few are ignorant of the fact that they not only generate online and shop sales, but also positively influence a brand’s fame. This article deals with a new approach which may change many marketer’s internet strategy : branding through search engines. Let us forget about targeted visitors, sales and return on investment (ROI) to concentrate on the influence that search engines have on brand names.

When we look at the figures (213 million searches per day in the U.S. [1]), there can’t be any doubt that this area is favourable to influence internet users. Nevertheless, it is not enough to be listed on search engines to succeed. You must define your campaign’s new objectives (in the case of branding) and rework it to achieve good results.

Concretely, this means not evaluating a campaign by direct results alone. If your goal is to generate sales and you note that a keyword only provides moderate performance for this aim, you could be tempted to withdraw this word from your strategy. However, even if a keyword’s ROI is weak, it’s positioning in the first results can have a positive influence on the brand; making it beneficial to keep the keyword active.

A good example is Sony, who decided to use 20% of its budget on search engines during one of their recent Vaio laptop campaigns. The aim: to create buzz around about a product. All the campaigns directed towards one single page that focused on the product, but did not contain any call to action to facilitate visitor conversion – the direct opposite of traditional landing pages.

The results speak for themselves. Despite five times less investment in the search engine campaigns compared to banner ads and other postings, the search engine campaign produced more than half the clicks to the landing page, and 88% of product sales came from this page. The strategy was therefore the most effective.

In order to integrate search engines in your branding strategy, you must evaluate your campaign first and define the keywords that could be associated with it. The number of keywords will undoubtedly be greater than for a conversion campaign, mainly because ‘unprofitable’ words will be used. A company, for example, carrying out a campaign on the quality of their service could decide to buy words like ‘guarantee’ or ‘repair’.

As for the level of textual publicity, it’s necessary to use catch words that are directly linked to the campaign. Reusing a slogan and words used in banner ads or a traditional campaign is also necessary.

Finally, it is important to remember that such a strategy is not aimed to all budgets. In fact, using a significant number of keywords substantially increases costs.

[1] Comscore, mars 2006,http://searchenginewatch.com/reports/article.php/2156461