Tip 1. Ask Yourself-  How Important is Brand Building to My Business?

If you read yesterday’s post, you may think this is a dumb tip… “of course brand building is important to my business!”  Trust us when we say this is a critical question to ask before you start worrying about building your B2B brand with search marketing.

Building a brand through search marketing or any other channel is hard work that requires solid strategic planning, a great product/service, great execution and dogged persistence over time to reap the benefits of strong brand awareness and loyalty.  If you sell a commodity product, the rewards of a strong brand are great but the challenges to differentiate your brand over time are great as well.  If you’re the market leader with a strong, established brand, chances are your search marketing programs are already reaping the benefits with very strong ROI on branded terms and there may be little incremental benefit to be had from further brand building through search marketing.

The main point of this tip is simply to get you to stop and consider how serious you are about building your B2B brand with search marketing.  If you’re serious about it, let’s look at the next tip…

Tip 2. Understand Where Your Brand is Today

How risky is the choice to purchase your product/service? This question is critical to ask yourself because it’s exactly the first question that your prospects think of when presented with your brand.

How strong is our brand presence on general search engines? Are you currently advertising on branded terms on the major general search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing?  If so, what is the average rank of those paid listings?  And, what is your average position in the organic search results?  While both of these answers can vary considerably for a variety of reasons well known to search marketers, it’s important to clearly assess how your branded terms rank today before embarking on projects to improve brand visibility in search results.

How strong is our brand presence on vertical search and directory sites? This area is key for B2B search marketing and yet less experienced search marketers and agencies often overlook it based on a simple misconception… the assumption that because branded searches on general search engines show the highest conversion rates in the most popular web analytics programs (like Google Analytics), business buyers overwhelmingly use general search sites only.  Search marketers making this assumption undermine the performance of their search marketing campaigns by missing a few key data points:

-  Business buying is a process involving multiple types of search and information sites over time.  The use of vertical search and directory sites increases as business buyers get a basic understanding of what they need and look to vertical search and its experts for more product/service details, purchasing advice and a short-list of relevant vendors.

-  50% of business buying involves identifying new vendors and/or purchasing products/services that the person or company has never purchased before.

-  There is a strong bias toward attributing search marketing ROI to general search engines over vertical PPC, display ads, email, etc. built in to the most popular web analytics tools.  Effective online B2B lead generation, and any B2B online branding effort involving search marketing, therefore must include a presence across both general search engines and vertical sites that follow the path prospects are likely to take online in their search for solutions to business challenges.

Tip 3.  Plan Alignment Across Brand Campaigns & Search Marketing

As previously discussed, the fact that brand campaigns will generate search activity and search marketing results improve when backed by a strong brand or brand campaign, means that it is in the best interest of both brand and search marketers to work together from the early stages of any brand marketing initiative if the goal is to get the highest possible ROI.

Search marketers must fully understand the brand campaign.  Once you understand the brand campaign, bring PPC, SEO and social media pros together to address the key question:  How can we get the strongest possible presence for this brand across general search and vertical sites? The answer to this question should be the basis for formulating an effective, and aligned, search marketing strategy.

Tip 4.  Don’t Leave Gaps in Your B2B Search Marketing Plan

Ensuring a very strong presence on general search engines for your top B2B branded terms is essential for attracting both repeat customers and new buyers using general search engines to navigate back to your web site to convert to sales.  Again, this is a “must do” activity for B2B search marketers, but focusing only on top branded terms on general search engines means limiting your exposure to prospects:

• In earlier stages of the buying process, when they’re less aware of the major brands
• Intent on purchasing more commoditized products where there isn’t a strong brand preference
• Moving beyond general search engines to learn about and find solutions to their business challenges on a variety of more targeted vertical sites

Identify the online resources your prospects are likely to encounter, and the paths they’re likely to take, at different stages of the buying process as they look for the types of product/service solutions you offer. Then compare this to both your current search marketing program and your search marketing strategy to support specific brand campaigns.  To maximize ROI and brand impact, make sure your search marketing plans cover the complete path from identifying a need to conversion.

Tip 5.  Measure Brand Campaign Impact on Conversions

Brand marketers are accustom to indirect measures of brand campaign impact but the connection between brand marketing initiatives and search marketing results described above suggests a much more direct route… brand campaigns should impact the following search marketing metrics:

• Paid search impressions, both generic and branded
• Web site visits from branded search terms and closely related generic terms
• Time on site for search-driven visitors, particularly if search drives visitors to a more interesting/interactive experience
• Web site conversions
• Online sales

More direct measures are always preferred over indirect measures, and tying brand campaigns to search marketing results, including conversions, will provide the metrics necessary to continuously optimize marketing programs to build B2B brands with search marketing.

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.