Online Branding Blog – reactorr.com

5 Quick Tips for Online Branding

Targeting – Your advertising should appeal to the demographic where you place your ads. Consistent messaging that conveys your the values of your product or service is key to driving recognition or recall for when they’re in a buying mode. Creating top of mind awareness with consistency and repetition can build equity. It’s surprising how often people will think one ad will suffice for all. This isn’t print. You can rotate different creative and run with your best performers.

Social Media – Engage with your audience. It all sounds easy, but it mostly falls apart in a week or three. While starting with good intentions, other duties call. Most companies don’t have the luxury of hiring a dedicated social media specialist to manage these things, so it usually gets added to the list of tasks an employee needs to do. The best way to manage it is scheduling a block of time at least once or twice a week. Find the medium that suits you, but also look at where your customers are. It’s also recommended to grab your brand name as a username for the bigger sites like youtube, facebook, twitter, flickr, technorati, ning, delicious, yelp, scribd, and others.

Reputation Management – Staying on top of what you rank for and the conversations around your brand allows you to stay a step ahead, and possibly avoid putting out fires later. If you were to google your brand name, do any of the top ten listings have negative impact? Are you monitoring the dialogue around your brand in social media? If you see negative results in the top 10 listings  when searching for your brand, you’ll want to address it before too many customers come across it.

Search Marketing - If you run an affiliate program and pay for leads, you might consider taking over bids on your brand name in Google Adwords. Why pay more for leads if you own the trademark to your brand name? Run your own campaign for those searching your brand to retain control.

Search Engine Optimization – Companies searching for your brand name obviously know of you already, but what about the ones searching for the products or services your offer? These are targeted prospects, often in buying mode. Many companies make the mistake of not including SEO in their marketing strategy. The game has changed, and those that are late will have to work twice as hard to catch up, probably more. Displaying in search engine results for phrases your customers are looking for is an excellent way to build credibility for your brand. Being synonymous with a phrase strengthens that top of mind awareness and would be comparable to branding on steroids. If you’re a customer and searching for a phrase, research shows 42% click the first listing, and 74% of the results clicked are in the top 5 positions. In a recent study, SEO shows to provide the best ROI over all other forms of online marketing.

Online Branding and SEO

Brands are built in decades, not days, but when it comes to online branding they’re far more achievable to create in less time with the inclusion of SEO.

When building your brand online there are several ways to go, or you can include them all. Internet advertising is often the route many will choose to start, yet similar to branding offline, it is both time consuming and expensive.

Social media is another option, but I don’t think this a strategy to rely on entirely. More of something to include with your internet marketing plan in addition to other strategies you might include.

With search engine optimization (SEO), there is really only one downside, and that is that it takes time to develop before seeing results. However, it’s been proven time and again that SEO provides the best ROI in the long term.

With SEO, not only do the links drive potential customers, it also has direct correlation to online branding because as you begin to rank for key phrases that consumers are already searching for, it creations a connection to the brand. This means that a brand can become synonymous with phrases that consumers are looking for, and creates that top of mind awareness when a site is ranking.

By including SEO in your online branding efforts you’re going to push your brand harder, and can achieve the branding holy grail – having keyowrds trigger consumers to think of your brand. This is how strong brands evolve.

By ranking (or owning) a phrase, your brand becomes synonymous with a phrase. In the offline world, it takes marketing and advertising agencies years and years to achieve this. If ever.

Your brand image is more than the logo or identity created. It’s about reputation management, advertising, public relations, and the emotion or thoughts that it conjurs up when mentioned.

SEO could be one of the most powerful tools available to grow, shape, and ultimately reach brand status.

      “The value of identity of course is that so often with it comes purpose.”

- Richard R. Grant

You can define and craft a vision of what your brand stands for through SEO by ranking for terms and phrases which represent your product or service.

Case in point; if you were to search for “buy books”, depending on your location, you’ll probably see Amazon as the first result. In Canada the website Chapters displays first. And considering that 42% of the clicks will go to that first listing in the search results and only 12% to the second result, its clear that the majority will click on that first listing and probably associate it as where they should just go if they wanted to buy books.

It’s important to note that online branding success factors differ from those of offline brands. If you take a look at Interbrands top 100 you’ll notice that many of those such as Google or eBay are unique to the web, or that the internet would have played a large part in their development.

Brands overestimate the extent to which consumer pay attention to branding, but the way it influences their decisions is almost subliminal, and SEO can be a major force.

Pick your battles/keywords wisely and you just might shave a few years off of developing your brand online.

Search Marketing for Small Business

There’s no doubt that it takes a little while for an SEO campaign to get off the ground. Which is why Search Marketing is a great way to get lead generation working for your business. Using Google Adwords, a business can be online and accepting leads in a matter of minutes.

Search marketing is what’s also known as Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing, where you pay only for the ads clicks on, not how often its displayed. This Cost Per Action type of marketing is popular as it allows you to better control your marketing budget.  If you’re new to this type of advertising, you’ll be glad to know that you can cap your daily spend.

It should be noted that while Search Marketing with programs like Google Adwords or similar options can bring in leads fast, the Cost Per Click quickly adds up depending on what business you’re in. Also, the paid search listing typically get 20 percent of the clicks from search results, while the natural search listings tend to get the other 80 percent of the clicks. The thing with the natural listings is SEO can be it take 6 months or more to start ranking due to the cycles of link crawling and indexing. But on the other hand, SEO tends to be a better return long term strategy, despite the initial up front investment.

An interesting introduction to Adwords can be found at NY Times.

Personal Search Revisits

The future of search is personal. I remember hearing that from a Claria guy at Adtech. They had released PersonalWeb (now defunct). You may remember Claria from their previous brand name Gator. They had created what they called a “personalization engine” that served both Web surfers and advertisers.

Then hakia came along, but it was a short lived battle when Powerset, its main competitor, was sold off to Microsoft.

Now there is Jinni, the new video search engine. Jinni has labeled itself as the first “Taste Engine”. This based on algorithms semantic search technology and personal recommendations.

Possibly most  interesting about Jinni is their vision of the future where a search engine becomes personal and results are served based on personalized recommendations. Think how powerful that could be once tapped into social networks.

Ongoing monitoring of social networks like Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc is in the works, with Jinni wanting to be part of the conversation, without actually becoming a social network itself.

SEO Primer

For anyone with an online presence, SEO is not a question of whether you do it, its more of a question of when you begin. Even if you’re just starting out online, its imperative that you begin creating links to your website.

SEO boils down to on-page and off-page optimization. While neither can be covered in a single post, the one thing business owners can do is build links.

There are 2 simple thoughts for off-page optimization as the topic begins to get more complex than you’d initially imagine. The first thing to remember is keep your links relevant. It’s important to stay within your link neighborhood, and the temptation of free or easy links are sometimes hard to resist. Remember that crap links can damage your link profile and usually can’t be undone. The second thing to remember is, when available, link with keywords instead of your URL. And a combination of both is more natural.

Usually you would pick 3 to 5 phrases of 2 or 3 keywords like “SEO Winnipeg” and stick with those if you’re keeping the link building light and in house. Keep at it while monitoring your rank and you should see your site position climb slowly. As all links are not created equal, that’s another discussion. Keep track with a simple spreadsheet containing the phrases and dates last checked, and update it every week or two. And a reminder – keep it relevant.

Online Branding – The Value of SEO

At first glance, it might appear that branding online is strikingly similar to branding in the world of brick and mortars, but while there are many similarities, online branding requires a richer knowledge and skill set. Specifically, online branding requires an in-depth knowledge of search engine ranking and other forms of search marketing.

Online Branding and SEO

Offline, branding involves a myriad of techniques to increase visibility and stay present in the minds of consumers, primarily though repetitive advertising. Ads of every kind increase visibility. If this were to be translated to the internet, you’d build a brand through website and blog advertisements. There is certainly credence to this method, but the online marketplace is more vastly segmented than markets offline and without well placed advertisements and results, you’ll miss your market entirely regardless of how much money you’re throwing into an advertising campaign.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) fills the largest void created when offline branding techniques move online. Instead of constancy of ads, you must now also focus on reaching your specific target audience through popular search terms as well as strategic ads on relevant websites. Internet branding is a combination of techniques, but SEO is essentially the foundation of connecting a company with a term or phrase. Ranking number one for a particular keyword phrase essentially is your brand online. With branding, becominging synonymous with a phrase is a holy grail of sorts, and can be accomplished online.

Using SEO for Internet Branding

SEO builds brand awareness online by targeting specific keyword terms in the search engines. SEO takes time to work, and once effective, it requires constant dedication to stay at the top of the results. Your goal through SEO and online branding is to have consumers search for a phrase representing your brand. When the results appear, your company should be one of the first sites that appear in the search results. If you’re ranked in the top five for your search term that is also your brand, you’re extremely well positioned for both conversions and online reputation management.

PPC ads can replicate these results, but not to the degree of authentic search result listings. Advertisements are not as trusted by visitors as search results, and text links only receive 20% of the clicks on the results page – a far cry from the solid internet presence you’re seeking.

Building an Online Brand by Other Means

PPC is a lesser alternative to SEO, but there are other elements of online branding that can have tremendous results. Foremost of these is social marketing. By taking advantage of the increasingly social nature of the internet, your brand can be easily established and constantly replicated within your market.

Internet marketing is also an option, but with click through rates being a half percent on average, it takes a decent budget and call to action for anyone to click. And with the web being as fragmented as it is, reaching your audience with banner advertising can be challenging.

Search marketing is another element of online branding. Paid positions through banners and search results can contribute strongly to the overall reputation and presence of your company online. Again search terms, target markets and the overlap between keywords and brand will be one of the foremost criteria for positioning yourself properly on websites relevant to your branding efforts.  

How Long Does SEO Take?

This is asked often, so I’m placing the answer here and will refer others to this post in the future.

SEO goes in cycles. Links are built, then they are crawled by SE’s and indexed. But when the Search Engine crawls and indexes content it doesn’t necessarily reoganize its index and find your new rank. With Google, the search engine will update its entire index about every four months. And since Google has well over half the market share we’ll just focus on that one Search Engine for this post.

Let’s suppose that we started a campaign in January, and Google just updated its index. You would be starting at square one. The exceptions being things like the age of the domain, age of existing links, strength and relevance of those existing links, and whether the links were anchor text or simply URL’s.

If your hypothetical website called widgetworldusa dot com only had links pointing at it with the URL, it’s link profile needs work. But if you widget site had anchor text linking to it for phrases you’re pursuing, like “industrial strength widgets”, then you’re off to a good start.

Now about 3 months later you’ve built more  “industrial strength widgets” links, but not all of them were crawled and included in the index yet. So on the first update you can hope for 25-50% of your links to have been picked up. These will go into consideration on the next update that’s another 3 months away.

Now it’s 6 months later and you’re still hard at work on link building. This is the second Google update, with probably half or more of those links in the first update now included. But between update one and two you can again hope for 25-50% of your links to have been picked up.

Factors that generally play into how long does seo take can include the age of your domain, the relevance, the age of the link, the age of the link the domain is on, the age of the domain that the link is on, the authority of the domain your link is on, and much more.

Hopefully this provides a little insight about why SEO takes so long, and why many people offering SEO services usually require a commitment of 6 to 12 months to start a project.

For those wanting instantaneous results, Search Marketing and PPC is probably more suitable. But you should note that it accounts for less than 20% of the clickthroughs for search engine results pages (SERPs) and that the natural listings and SEO boast 80% of the clicks.

The best strategy is a mix of both, with Search Marketing to get you started until your SEO campaign catches up. It’s also worth noting that your cost per customer and SEO ROI will decrease as time goes on. Because SEO provides a long term strategy for increased consumer presence, it has added value as compared to paid search marketing.

Search Marketing for Brands

Search marketing is a great way for brands to gain quick exposure, and if you including contextual advertising you can have a campaign running in 5 or 10 minutes. It’s easy to see its appeal but what advertisers don’t realize is they’re overlooking huge opportunities.

While paid search marketing can be one of the most cost-effective forms of digital marketing, it captures a small portion of the potential customers. When you compare paid listings versus natural listings, the Pay per Click (PPC) ads tend to get a little under 20% of the search traffic. That leaves a whopping 80% left to natural search results.

In a report called ‘Search Attitude’ by UK search agency Tamar, it’s noted that only 5% of Internet users are likely to follow a paid search result over natural listings.

One of the downsides of search engine optimization (SEO) is the time and investment required to get a campaign working. But when you consider the potential SEO ROI it soon becomes obvious.

When you perform keyword research and see the potential that SEO can provide as a sales channel, its obviously worthwhile.

How Much Is Ranking Worth?

While most clients agree that SEO is something they should invest in, there are times when understanding SEO’s worth in terms of dollars and cents are difficult.

Reactorr has created SEO ROI calculator to determine the potential value of ranking between positions one and ten, depending on the value of a sale, and the conversion.

How Can Smart Marketers Include SEO?

Marketing budgets are including the web a lot more these days, but what is there to consider if you want to include SEO in the marketing mix?

• If you’re building a website or planning to build a quick-response PR strategy in place, SEO should be part of the plan from day one.
• By understanding search behaviour and assessing what people are searching for, where they’re searching for it, they will enable brands to reach the biggest potential customer base
• Use SEO to increase the efficiency of other media touchpoints – 80 percent of internet journeys start with a search
• Use SEO to make your Pay Per Click campaigns work harder – take a holistic view of search activity across the board
• Make sure your paid search campaigns are working effectively with your SEO
• Cultivating online brand advocates, and then identify and include them in press and communications schedules. Having your brand advocates synched with your communications will prove invaluable if bad news were to strike