Building B2B Brands with Search Marketing

Building B2B Brands with Search Marketing

Building B2B Brands with Search Marketing E
Oil and water. Mars and Venus. Search and branding. D
I
Not long ago, search marketing and branding were viewed as two entirely different aspects of the marketing mix. Many diehard pros specializing in one of these U
domains or the other still struggle to find value in, or even imagine, using search marketing to build or reinforce a brand message. G
The purpose of this whitepaper is to provide a straightforward overview of how to build your business-to-business (B2B) brand through search marketing. It avoids N
philosophical debates about the relative value of each - something both brand marketers and search marketers tend to fall into all too easily - to focus on ways to identify tangible brand-building opportunities in the context of search marketing and O
provide top tips for getting started. I There are three fundamental ways that search marketing - including both paid T
search and search engine optimization (SEO) - connects with brand initiatives: U
1. Brand initiatives provide key inputs for search marketing campaigns L
2. Search marketing delivers an impactful, branded experience O
3. Search marketing impressions, CTR and conversion rates are affected by brand campaigns S
Search marketers tend to be most interested in the first of these as branded terms like company, product or service names are the top ROI drivers for most search marketing campaigns. However, mounting evidence suggests the second and third points are just as relevant: . "SERP branding", or ensuring a strong brand presence in paid and organic 1search results, significantly impacts brand metrics and purchase intent . Simple exposure to a display ad for a given advertiser increases searches 2on both branded and generic-but-related terms , and improves search 3marketing conversion rates Search marketing and branding are intimately related, or should be, so let's look at each side of the relationship in more detail.
1 Enquiro Research (2007), "The Brand Lift of Search", http://pages.enquiroresearch.com/brand-lift-of-search.html 2 Fulgoni, Gian M. & Morn, Marie Pauline (2008), "How Online Advertising Works: Whither the Click?", http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Presentations_Whitepapers/2008/How_Online_Advertising_Works_Whither_The_Click 3 Atlas Institute (2007), "Where Can You Find Your Customer", http://www.atlassolutions.com/uploadedFiles/Atlas/Atlas_Institute/Published_Content/dmi-CombinedImpactSearchDisplay.pdf
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Understanding the Relationship Between Search & Branding E
To start understanding 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 types. This D
I information-saturated environment has produced what many refer to as the Attention Economy where, as Bernardo A. Huberman, director of the Information Dynamics Laboratory at Hewlett-Packard, so aptly puts it, "the value of most information has U
4collapsed to zero. The only scarce resource is attention." G
It is extremely challenging, and costly, to build a strong brand in the minds of people struggling to quickly identify and attend to only that which is most important at the moment. The challenge is even greater for prospective customers who've never N
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 unless they have an urgent need for it at the moment? Not a chance. What about O
your brand names? Highly unlikely. The 10 technical differences between your I
product and the leading competitor? Nope (maybe one if you're lucky). Examples of T
truly breakthrough B2B branding campaigns are few and far between, and becoming more rare by the day. U
In this information-overloaded haze, what people will recall are vague impressions: L
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