Using Branding to make more money online (even if your Brand is little)

Like just about every term in digital marketing (marketing in general to be honest), branding can be a little confusing to explain and apply.  Our good friends at Wikipedia describe Brand as “a symbolic embodiment of all the information connected to a company, product or service.”

This is helpful information if you have a ridiculous marketing budget or a Fortune 1000 business, but it tends to be dismissed by many SMB companies, especially those who are pure play online firms.

I’m not even going to try to talk about how to build your brand online.  That’s not a blog, it’s a book……a big book.

What I do want to do is run through a few basic things you can examine right now about brands and your business which you can immediately turn into money.

The only thing you need to know about branding to put this post to use is the following:  Visitors who are looking for a brand are worth more than visitors who are looking for a ‘thing’.

Pretty straightforward stuff.  “I am looking into buying a car”.  Not bad.  “I am looking into buying a Porsche.”  Awesome (unless you don’t sell Porsches). A ‘branded’ visitor is already on the sales path as they have bought into and chosen to trust either your brand, or one you carry.  Their conversion rate should be substantially higher than a commoditized search visitor, or someone who is looking for a generic category or product/service type.

Let’s prove it.  Open up your analytics and get the answers to the following questions:

My Corporate Brand

• What percentage/how many of my visitors so far this year were direct type ins or book marks?  What was their conversion rate?
• How many visitors found my site in natural search by looking for my company’s name, or a variation thereof?  What was their conversion rate?

Brands I represent

• Are there any brands I carry that generate significant natural search traffic?  (i.e. 5.4% of our visitors are looking for Coach purses)  What is their conversion rate?

You now have some hard data to show how brands are currently making you money, and like any good dive into analytics, probably have 100 new questions to go along with your answers.  Do brand oriented visitors convert better from the home page or a landing page?  Do visitors looking for a brand I carry also buy other products?  Does this change based on Geography or Multi-channel marketing? Etcetera etcetera…

Taking this branded vs unbranded approach to visitor source also adds significant value to any optimization  or personalization initiative.  Visitors who typed your name into Google do not need to be educated on your unique value proposition, whereas visitors who found you in Google will need to create trust through proper communication and messaging.

In offline marketing branding tends to be a highbrow, high budget affair. Leveraging brands online however, can be worth significant revenue to any firm, large or small.

Cheers,

Jim

Related Posts

• Give a hand to your brand…
• Renting a list? 5 tips to do it right…
• Embrace international customers with personalization

Posted in Conversion, Customer Experience, Jim Cain, Optimization, Personalization, Search Marketing, eCommerce