Using Search to Boost Branding
At Search Engine Strategies New York a few weeks ago, much of the buzz centered on tapping search for brand marketing initiatives. That’s hardly surprising in light of the great results marketers have achieved lately using search engine marketing (SEM) as a branding tool.
In keeping with the opportunity curve theory, branding through search is likely to deliver effective and efficient results for many years to come, but those who capitalize early will realize the most impressive returns. Which means there’s no time to waste.
A recent Yahoo! study of fashion-focused 15- to 19-year-olds showed that more than half used keyword research to learn about unfamiliar brands. And many of these teen fashionistas are just as likely to use search to find CDs and download music as they are to look for clothing and research fashion trends. According to Diane Rinaldo, head of Yahoo! Search’s retail vertical, consumers use search in some retail categories more for learning about brands than for facilitating a purchase. For those marketers accustomed to viewing search purely as a direct response channel, this may come as a surprise.
In campaigns for mass retailers, electronics manufacturers, and multichannel housewares manufacturers, we’ve found that search impressions and exposure to “product category” keyword search advertisements can increase the association between the sponsoring brand with that product category in the mind of searching consumers. In one specific test campaign, a multichannel mass merchant wanted to increase consumer brand affinity between its brand and several product categories. During a four-week campaign, the retailer maintained first-place search rankings for such high-volume category keywords as “KitchenAid” and “coats.”
Yahoo!’s Buzz Index provides a specific metric—“brand overlap”—to quantify the change in brand association created by this type of campaign. Overlap is the percentage of searchers for one keyword who also search for a particular second keyword. For instance, overlap data show that during the first seven days of March, 5.3% of people searching for “Jon Stewart” also searched for “Oscar,” and 4.3% searched for “Academy Awards.”
In our test campaign, we found that increasing our client’s search visibility on the keyword “KitchenAid” strengthened the connection in the searching consumers’ mind between this manufacturer’s brand and the retailer’s brand. Prior to the campaign, the retailer’s brand affinity score was 1.86% on “KitchenAid”; in other words, 1.86% of the time that a consumer searched on the term “KitchenAid,” that same consumer went on to conduct a search for this retailer’s brand.
Following the one-month top-position blitz on “KitchenAid,” the retailer’s brand overlap grew by a full two percentage points, to 3.86%. Across Google and Yahoo! for this four-week campaign, this one keyword generated almost a half-million impressions precision-targeted to consumers who wanted to learn about or buy a KitchenAid product. And based on the overlap data, those impressions alone created as many as 10,000 follow-up searches on the retailer’s brand name.
Many variables affect brand affinity, especially other marketing initiatives, and more research needs to be done showing the relationship between visibility in search results and brand awareness. Early efforts, though, have proven extremely promising. As more marketers tap search to build brand awareness and favorability, you should always test and invest to ensure that emerging best practices deliver the desired outcome.
Cam Balzer, director of search strategy for Performics, the Chicago-based performance-based marketing division of DoubleClick., is a monthly contributor to CHIEF MARKETER. Contact him at [email protected].
