A Guide to Brand Bidding and How It Impacts on Lead Generation
Most online businesses are familiar with keyword bidding. It’s a simple way of climbing the search results that has proven to be effective again and again. But what if we said that you might be missing out on an important aspect of your keyword strategy?
Instead of looking at the latest trending topics, your keyword usage should be focused a little closer to home.
What Is Brand Bidding?
Brand bidding is the process of bidding on keywords containing the name of your brand or product. This probably sounds like an unusual approach. After all, who else would use your brand name in their advertising? Surprisingly, the answer could be ‘lots of different businesses’.
This is especially true if you’re an established brand and a leader in your industry. Newer, less successful companies will use your name to get more attention to their advertising.
Think for a moment about any leading product or brand. How often have you seen competitors label themselves as an ‘alternative to BRAND NAME’? It’s an effective and popular tactic utilized in many B2B sales strategies.
Whilst you’re focusing on other keywords, your competitors might be outbidding you by your own name. When a customer searches for your brand, they might instead click on a rival link. The only way to avoid this is to become the leading bidder for your brand name. For that, you’ll have a brand bidding strategy.
A Guide to Brand Bidding
If you’re unsure about where to begin with brand bidding, look no further. We’ll share some top strategies to help you build the strongest approach.
Assess Your Competitors
Brand bidding should begin with a thorough assessment of your rivals. Is competitor bidding the reason your links aren’t appearing at the top of search results? Or, is your brand name recognition too low to rank highly in the results? It’s important to understand the situation before jumping into any bidding strategy.
Competitive analysis involves diving deep into rival strategies. What keyword do your rivals currently deploy to attract an audience? What is their share of voice within your market? Answering these questions is key to understanding the threat posed by rival companies.
Create Goals and Choose Metrics
You’ve assessed the competition and decided that brand bidding is a strong tactic. Now, it’s time to look inwardly. What do you want to achieve from brand bidding? The answer ‘to beat my competitors’ isn’t concrete enough.
Businesses utilize brand bidding for a variety of reasons, including:
- To draw more traffic to their website.
- To achieve a high number of conversions.
- To have clear control over brand messaging on search results.
- To spread brand awareness.
Whatever your goals, it’s important to assign a set of relevant metrics to help monitor your success. For example, let’s say you want to achieve more conversions. You might set a goal of boosting your conversion rate by 50%.
Refamiliarize Yourself With Your Audience
You have a clear idea of your goals. To deliver them, however, you need lead generation ideas for B2B built around the wants of your audience.
Even if you feel that you know your audience well already, it is worth familiarizing yourself. Audience behaviors and habits change over time. To remain at the top of the search results you need to find the brand keywords that your audience will respond to.
Look at the data from your different audience touchpoints. Your website, customer service, and social media will all provide useful information. Consider audience preferences, habits, and the different ways they interact with your brand.
Build your future strategy around this information. Use it to guide the kinds of content you produce and keywords you utilize.
Utilize Negative Keywords
The idea of using ‘negative’ keywords might sound counterintuitive. These are keywords that make your ad less likely to show up in search results when a user includes them in their query. There’s a clear reasoning to this approach. Negative keywords make your ads less likely to reach the wrong people (i.e. users who won’t convert).
By including these terms alongside your branded keywords, you make your ad more efficient. You cut out viewers that are unlikely to be engaged, whilst retaining interested users. This ensures you are using brand keywords proficiently and staying ahead of competitors.
Rethink Your Ad Copy
What persuades users to click on your advert? In most cases, it’s your meta title. This should tell a user everything they need to know about your brand or product. Too often, however, businesses opt for bland and boring titles. These won’t help you connect with your audience, and may even persuade them to click elsewhere.
To hold a user’s attention, make sure you include enticing copy alongside your brand keywords. Best practices for creating strong meta titles include:
- Entice a viewer with interesting and relevant content. Be sure to highlight the unique selling points of your product or service.
- Avoid rambling, and aim to be straight and to the point. Above all, keep it to fewer than 580 pixels, or your title will be cut off by Google.
- Compare the performance of different titles against each other. You might not have the best approach straight away. Keep testing until you find a title that lands with users.
Alongside your meta title, you should also consider your meta description. This is the small paragraph of text beneath your website link on the search results. Follow similar practices to those listed above. Try to keep it brief and accompany your branded keywords with useful information.
Chase Competitor Keywords
Remember, you always have the option of giving your competitors a taste of their own medicine. Just as they can target your brand, you can target theirs.
This approach can be highly rewarding, bringing a portion of competitor traffic to your site. There are, however, some heavy caveats to this.
Featuring your competitors in your adverts can easily backfire. Firstly, it’s against Google’s terms of service to include a rival’s name in your meta title. Any attempts to do so will see your ad being removed.
If you do feature a rival brand in your advertising in some way, be careful of the language you use. Being overly critical can come across badly to potential customers. And remember, any false claims could lead to legal issues with a competitor.
You need to think outside of the box to make this tactic work. Think about how you can highlight the USPs of your product compared to your competitors, and tell a compelling brand story. For example, you link to a comparison article on your website.
When Not to Utilize Brand Bidding
Although a potentially highly effective strategy, brand bidding won’t work for everyone. Here are some scenarios that suggest this approach might not be the best tactic for you.
You Have a Limited Budget
Whilst brand bidding might make sense strategically, it might be a poor decision financially. If your organization is on a limited budget, it should carefully review its finances before conducting any bidding. Do you have the resources to sustain a long-term strategy?
Equally importantly, would your resources be better focused elsewhere? Start a conferencing call using your virtual call system, and involve marketing leaders and stakeholders in the decision-making process. With a clear go-ahead, your brand bidding strategy will be on much stronger footing.
You’re Already Well-Established on Search Results
If your brand is already well-established online, it’s unlikely that you’ll need to utilize brand bidding. A simple test is to do a quick search for your brand name. Is your website amongst the first results to show up? If so, you are already in a strong position with branded keywords. It’s probably better to focus your resources on other marketing efforts.
You’re Putting More in Than You’re Getting Out
As with any form of marketing, brand bidding should be sustainable. If you’re investing more in bidding than you’re getting from sales from your ads, you need to rethink your tactic. Keep a close eye on your ROI to make sure you’re on track.
Brand Bidding Might Be the Answer
Is your brand struggling to establish authority in search results? If so, brand bidding could be an extremely effective strategy. As we’ve explored, this approach brings many benefits. You can prevent rival companies from poaching your traffic, improve brand visibility, and get more users to convert on your website.
Of course, like any marketing tactic, brand bidding requires a clear strategy. We’ve explored some of the ways you can achieve this. Start with a clear competitor analysis, and establish whether brand bradding is the right tactic. Then, set clear goals for yourself built around the needs of your audience.
A successful strategy won’t come overnight. But with time, you can read big rewards. So, why not consider whether brand bidding is the answer to your business?
