Branding: Big Opportunity, Low Cost

When you run a PPC campaign, how do you decide whether to use Google Adwords, or Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft AdCenter or, erm….Findology?

How do you decide whether to push you campaign into content networks, such as Adsense, or Facebook?

The simple answer is you should be everywhere your customers reside, so long as the ROI is positive. The Balkanisation of the web is ongoing & won’t be complete until every single person becomes a demographic.

You have to be everywhere.

And people need to remember who you are.

Why Building Brand Is The New Rock N Roll

PPC is often geared around direct sales, so doesn’t take into account brand metrics. However, PPC offers brand building opportunities that are still fabulously cheap.

The world is changing fast. To build a brand, you used to need to spend a fortune on TV, radio and newspaper advertising. There was no other way. As Gary Vaynerchuk – owner of the Wine Library – says, the gatekeepers of those channels were a handful of 70 year old guys who run the world. But they’ll be retiring soon. Or dead.

These days, you can build a brand for next to nothing. You can publish on media channels, like YouTube, for nothing. Yet the reach of these channels is huge.

Everyone can now have a brand. A brand can exist in every micro-niche. Pick your niche, no matter how small, and become the biggest brand in that niche.

Why should you focus on brand?

Brand related searches are hugely lucrative. People use brand names as starting points for their searches. Once you own the brand name, you don’t need to do as much search marketing to get traffic. People will find you directly.

Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, is on record as saying brand would be used as a means to clean up the internet cesspool:

Brands, he said, are the way to rise above the cesspool, and of course he is right. The corollary is that advertising via Google and its brethren is an essential way to build and sustain a brand

So, when a visitor clicks through to your site, they should always take something away with them. That “thing” could be a brand association.

Evaluate your landing pages. Do they convey a brand image, and is it easy for people to relate that brand image to your keyword niche?

It doesn’t cost much to gain this benefit. It’s a simple positioning exercise – ask “what niche am I top in?”.

Next, create a brand that is consistent with that niche, and the service you offer. Pick a strong, memorable name. Buy the .com, .net and .org, or regional variants. Own the word. Get a graphic designer to create a logo and identity, and use it consistently across all your media advertising. Become that brand. Let it flow through everything you do.

For many small internet niches, that’s all you need to do to build a brand. So long as you get in front of your audience wherever they reside, they’ll have one more opportunity to remember your brand name. Once they start searching on your brand name, you win. This lowers your advertising cost over time. You can also prevent others from advertising against your brand name, especially in PPC. This make your position more defensible.

Compare this approach with focusing solely on direct sales. You’ve paid for the click, you may still lose the sale, and yet the visitor takes nothing away with them. Your site is just another anonymous site which they’ll quickly forget.

Even a break even PPC campaign can be a big winner if you include the value of data along with the latent impact of exposure, branding & links.

Brand is now something for everyone. The benefits are huge, and it can cost next to nothing to build.