Relationship between Search and Branding

To understand the relationship between search and branding, we need to start with the person.  Every day, each of us is bombarded by hundreds, if not thousands, of branded impressions across many different media platforms.  This information-saturated environment has produced what many refer to as Herbert Simon’s Attention Economy where “the value of most information has collapsed to zero.  The only scarce resource is attention.”

It is extremely challenging, and costly to build a strong brand in the minds of people struggling to quickly identify and attend only to that which is most important at the moment.  The challenge is even greater for prospective customers who’ve never purchased your type of product or service before, or those that buy from a competing vendor.  Do you think a business buyer will remember your phone number or web site URL unless they have an urgent need for it at the moment?  Not a chance.  What about your brand names?  Highly unlikely.  The 10 technical differences between your product and the leading competitor?  Nope.  Examples of truly breakthrough B2B branding campaigns are few and far between, and becoming more rare by the day.

In this information-overloaded haze, what people WILL recall are vague impressions:  “I saw a product at a trade show about six months ago that might meet our needs, but I can’t remember who made it.  I’ll find out and get back to you.“  OR  “I remember reading a case study that speaks to our exact situation.  Let me  go dig it up.”

So, what do they do?  They go online and search.

To say that people are outsourcing their brains to search isn’t that far fetched.  General search engines and sites serve a critical role by helping people reconnect fragments of ideas, names or brand elements- entered as keywords- back to the original source.

From this perspective, search marketing and brand marketing are truly dependent upon one another.  Brand marketing focuses on building brand equity through increased brand awareness, loyalty, perceived quality and brand associations.  However, in a time-crunched attention-starved business environment, B2B companies are not going to create breakthrough brands with clever print ad campaigns, great PR, the latest social media tool or snazzy banner ads alone.  Effective brand initiatives will create narrow, fragmented and semi-branded impressions.  When corporate prospects go online, as more than 85% of business buyers do at some point in the purchase process, it’s up to search marketing to reconnect those impressions to the original solution source.

3 core ways search marketing interacts with brand initiatives:

1. Brand initiatives provide key inputs for search marketing campaigns: Giving search marketers a “seat at the table” during the earliest stages of large scale B2B brand campaign development is in the best interests of both search marketers and their brand marketing peers.  The primary focus should be to align the brand campaign tactics with the search marketing program.  For example:  brand position–> keywords;  campaign strategy–> keyword strategy / SEO strategy / PPC bidding strategy / media buy strategy;  budget–> PPC and SEO budgets;  media plan–> PPC plan for general search sites / vertical search sites / SEO targets / campaign calendars and timelines;  creative–> PPC titles / ad copy / landing page titles / landing page meta descriptions / landing page copy;  tracking and reporting–> PPC impressions / clicks & CTR / PPC driven actions / SEO keywords ranking reports / SEO-driven actions.     A word of caution, though:  don’t get derailed over keywords.  Brand marketers are going to research and recommend keywords/phrases they feel best describe the intended branded experience.  Search marketers are going to research and recommend keywords/phrases they feel it is possible to rank most highly in organic or paid search.  The only way to resolve the conflict between these two perspectives is through a give-and-take series of discussions.  Ultimately, your brand (and what terms are used) is in the minds of your customers and prospects… not what you (or the marketing experts) think you are.
2. Search marketing delivers an impactful, branded experience: To a brand marketer, there’s nothing particularly compelling or sexy about the ability to ‘build brand’ in organic or paid search listings.  However, it is a mistake for brand marketers to focus on the creative limitations of search marketing relative to other media and ignore the power of search to connect brand messages with an extremely well targeted audience thousands or millions of times per month.  Quite honestly, most search marketers don’t truly appreciate the branding potential of SERP (Search Engine Results Page) branding as well.
3. Search marketing impressions, CTR and conversion rates are affected by brand campaigns: An increasing number of studies demonstrate that branding initiatives generate search activity, and that aligning search marketing with broader branding initiatives is likely to deliver both superior results over search alone and important metrics for measuring brand campaign impact.  The best evidence comes from studies linking online display ad exposures to search activity and conversions.

The connection between display ad impressions and search marketing impact suggests that search marketing results provide a window into the performance of brand campaigns or any other large-scale marketing effort a company undertakes.  By closely coordinating brand campaigns with search marketing programs, brand campaign impact should be visible in paid search impressions, paid search conversion rate and average organic search rank for the following:

• Generic terms–  good for a relatively fast read on brand campaign performance, particularly for products, services, brands and target audiences which are less familiar to the target brand campaign audience.
• Branded terms–  a much more precise measure of brand campaign impact but may take longer to see and there may not be an appreciable impact in branded term searches for brands with which the target audience is less familiar.

The one point to drill home is the fact that brand building and search marketing are inextricably linked, and both brand marketers and their search marketing comrades are best served by working together to drive better overall marketing ROI.

Tomorrow, top tips applicable to both parties as they work together to build B2B brands with search marketing.