Building a brand takes a combination of time, money, and hard work. All three must be exhausted to its fullest to achieve a recognizable brand for the audience you’re trying to connect with. Take this into consideration. According to Action Card, after the first impression, consumers take between 5 -7 impressions to truly remember a logo. Bringing us to Slideshare’s research that 80 percent of consumers say that authenticity of content is the most influential factor in their decision to become a follower of a brand. What this means is that a brand should take precautionary steps before thinking of running PPC ads to build their brand and start with hiring a great PPC company.
Take this example into account. Remember all those people lined up outside for days at a time for the newest iPhone? The iPhone has become more than just a brand, it’s built itself a certain lifestyle that has connected with people and has strong emotional ties to their followers. These loyal followers will swear by the iPhone. Apple has gotten to the point of brand affinity, which we’ll discuss later, but having a loyal following means a repeat customer base.
As far as PPC goes, it is widely recognized as the channel that grabs the bottom of the sales funnel, the consumers who are ready to make a purchase. The bottom line is: PPC is much more than that and has the potential to impact the way you see brand advertising. Here are some tips for measuring a PPC campaign’s success.
Take these three keys into account:
- Make it easy to be a loyal customer of yours
- Show your customers that you care
- Make it easy to choose you as their provider
Think about this through the eyes of a potential customer of yours. They want the quickest fix possible to what they may be lacking at the moment. A brand a customer recognizes as the easiest pathway to a solution of their problem, essentially, each customer is going to go the easy route. People absolutely dislike anything that is time consuming and anything that may seem pointless to their situation. Bringing us to our first point as to why PPC can affect your branding.
You’ve probably heard the phrase that “content is king” and it definitely rings true today. Ad copy is one of, if not, the most important aspects of PPC advertising to be as relevant as to what your potential customers are looking for. Ad copy is one of the simplest ways that we can make the process of choosing your brand as easy as possible. The fact of the matter is that it’s too simple that many companies overlook or get too comfortable with general ad copy that it doesn’t convert. It actually takes a lot of research and a lot of time testing what works and what doesn’t is how you know which ad copy is getting you the most customers.
We’d like to dissect the image above to help you better understand. According to Zuza, 33 percent of the Top 100 brands use the color blue in their logo. The color blue is generally used to create a sensation of security and trust, which is particularly important for companies that operate solely on the internet. There’s a wonderful blog post on Brand Buddha that dives deeper into what colors work best for the type of marketing you’re trying to do and what color works best with a certain industry.
Let’s look at some of the ways that writing inefficient ad copy can actually hurt your brand and drive potential customers away. Using sitelinks correctly can really help customers choose your brand because the specific sitelinks you set up with your ad will answer a need that they might be having. Be sure that the sitelinks are organized to be relevant to the keyword it’s matching for. If you have someone searching for makeup and one of your ad’s sitelinks is to meet Selena Gomez, a mix of these different paths is too random and broad that it can confuse the consumer. This won’t be making their life easier; they want exactly what they’re looking for.
Organize your sitelinks to your customer’s stage of interest to boost your brand and showing your customer that you care.
Take a look at the example above to bring us to our next point about sitelinks. Give your potential customers plenty of ways of contacting you. There’s nothing more frustrating than finding a brand with exactly what you need but it’s extremely difficult to contact them.
One particular thing we love about this ad is that it gives you more than just one way to buy their product. They’re saying that if a location is out of your way, you can purchase it online with a discount code. The odds of the shopper choosing Sephora has increased than them visiting a competing brand located near them. It shows Sephora makes it easy on their customers to purchase and be satisfied.
Another great way of gaining trust for your brand is by anticipating issues from your potential customers and giving them ways to answer, vent, or solve their issues. Most importantly, be there when they want to complain because this gives you the best chance of helping and improving their impression of your business. A tarnished brand can always recuperate if handled quickly and properly. People trust brands that look to make things right and the best way to reach them to do so.
We see the example above where Oracle has put a bid on a competitor’s keyword, which is Salesforce in this example. We advise to be careful in using this tactic, especially when competing for a tarnished brand’s keyword. The customer may be there to complain about a customer and not exactly looking for alternative businesses – it’s a tactic that is risky but with the low cost of competing words, it may be a risk worth taking. Below is a great example of Samsung using the news when the iPhone 6 was having issues of bending.
This brings us to our next point: Protect Your Brand. There are several reasons as to why you should be bidding on your brand name. The myth is “We’re already ranking #1 on our brand name but as you earlier saw how easily it was to bid on a competitor’s brand name, it’s a risk not bidding on it. One thing we would advise to keep in mind is that many searchers are not able to differentiate between paid ads and organic listings, which should caution you that if someone is searching you and find someone else on the top, you could be losing out on valuable clicks.
Control over your brand name means control over the message your brand is saying. This allows you to test varying messages in your ad copy to measure which ads are converting and which aren’t. Much of the message that doesn’t show up in your organic listings can allow you to add other information that you’d like a searcher to see about your brand. With brand names being so cheap to bid on, there shouldn’t be an excuse not to bid on it and take control of your brand and message.
Before you opt to going after competitor’s brand names, be wary that they could soon figure it out and opt to go after your brand name, thus, starting a bidding war. Keep in mind that there are rules to follow when it comes to PPC. It’s not the wild wild west after all!
You are allowed to purchase their names as keywords, but you cannot use their name in your ad copy. Also, make sure to aren’t using Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) in your headlines and create an infringement problem for yourself. We highly advise in checking out Google’s Adwords Trademark Policy to help protect you from trademark infringement.
Think about this: according to an article written by Search Engine Land, conversion rates from paid ads compared to organic listings can be 4 times as higher and having paid ads alongside organic can boost clicks by 32%.
All of this in mind, it all comes back to the main point of why PPC is important in branding and it’s to make it easy to be a loyal customer. Again, make it easy to be a loyal customer. Growing customer lifetime value is one of the most worthwhile things a brand can do.
We urge you to follow this tactic to earn loyal customers: remarketing.
Remarketing is essential to make your brand is the one that customers can come back to time and time again. For example, if a customer has bought from you once, why not buy again. Showing your customers more products of what they might like, they’ll be more attuned to choosing your brand. Of course, we say this assuming that you provided them with the best product and service.
Another way remarketing has its value is by remarketing in terms of time since their last purchase. Wrap your head around the tactic of a company emailing you with suggestions or deals a customer may be interested in after a couple of weeks since buying. A friendly reminder that you’re still there and still available to help them with their needs can spark your brand in their minds again.
To provide a simple example: When someone buys a product like makeup remover. A makeup company can estimate around how long it takes for someone to use up all of the makeup remover before it’s time to buy another. As an example, let’s assume that it takes five months to use it all. Around month four, the makeup company could run a remarketing ad to this list of buyers to show up at the nick of time. The customer will probably think that they’ve lucked out to find a special offer at the perfect time. It’s definitely luck, it’s smart remarketing!
When you’re remarketing to a repeat customer, you wouldn’t want to treat them the same as a new visitor because then where’s the incentive to be loyal to a brand if they don’t care as much to treat you like a part of the brand. We say, create landing pages dedicated to different loyal customers so that it’s targeted specifically to them, in a language that lets them know you care for them because they’re such a loyal customer.
When you’ve spent all that time building your brand and nurturing your loyal customers, you want your loyal customers to go out and do the marketing for you. Word of mouth is still the strongest and most efficient type of marketing around because it’s true, people by from other people. Bringing us to how important reviews are for your brand to build trust among your customers.
92% of people say they read online reviews before they buy online- BrightLocal
Time and time again we see clients reporting that many customers are buying their products because they see that reviews from other people highly recommend it. Your loyal customer base can be your strongest marketing arm. This is where seller rating on PPC makes your brand more trusting towards future consumers. The seller rating are the 5 stars you see on the ads next to your brand to assure people that their products are excellent.
There is a minor stipulation. You’re going to need 120 reviews in the past 12 months to be able to attain the seller ratings. This is why getting reviews constantly is very important and can make all the difference in improving your brand. As we know we’ve all done before, sometimes we’ve bought only behind the fact that the brand had a five star rating and they seemed trustworthy.
Remember earlier in this post, and we mean the the very first paragraph early, that’d we discussing the difference between brand loyalty and brand affinity and which you’d want to fall under? Building brand loyalty is very valuable, but to foster brand affinity is the next step to making sure your brand is here to stay. Brand affinity goes way beyond brand loyalty. Let us explain: brand loyalty is essentially someone buying a product because it works and it’s familiar to you. This isn’t necessarily bad but it certainly has its limitations. There is no strong personal connection between brand and consumer. Who’s to say that this habit that they have can be broken with something as simple as a competitor running an ad offering a special deal on the same type of product. Or a minor change in your delivery can spark your customer to want a change because the habit has been broken and now it’s too different from what they’re used to.
Brand affinity is about a consumer having a personal connection to the brand. We want you to think back to the example we used earlier with Apple and how people will wait days, even weeks just to be one of the first ones to have the newest iPhone. There isn’t too much being updated and there are other carriers with phones that are just as great, but the personal connection and the lifestyle that owning the newest iPhone has is priceless to that network of people. People identify with Apple and want to be part of the shared identity.
Successfully being able to build brand affinity requires social intelligence. Being able to listen to online communities discussing your product and actually listening to their thoughts and concerns. By doing so, you’re gathering their info and gaining their support at the same time because they don’t just feel like another customer, they feel like they’re being listened to, taken care of. Installing these changes reduces the time and energy they have to spend on solving a problem, thus, reaching them in an intimate level to build a connection.
Pay per click advertising can be your biggest ally or your worst enemy, depending on how effectively you use it. There are several reasons why paid ads fail even for the best companies. We’ve shown you all the significant ways to use PPC ads to establish a brand and how to nurture your brand to build brand affinity for long-term success. Take our words and put them into action and see how, slowly but surely, you’re going to build a customer base that will follow you to your newfound success. Do your research and see who your competitors are, think strongly about your ads and what PPC ad copy you want to write, and don’t forget to get creative and test out which ads work and which don’t.
