You may think I am crazy, but I have found that many marketers forget one of the most valuable tools when marketing online with SEO, PPC, or Social Media. What is this most valuable tool that you may be forgetting? The Brand! Don’t worry it’s not your fault, you either forgot or you were focused on beating your competition. No problem. Here are some items to help you get back on track for those of you that are not using your brand to its fullest potential.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) –
I am constantly surprised when I find SEO efforts that do not include the brand. If it is your own company or a clients company, do not forget to use their brand within the SEO campaign. Most of the time the brand will be right within the domain name, which makes ranking for that brand very simple. But there are many cases that I have found that the company has totally disregarded their brand name within the meta tags, or even the content of their site pages.
To remedy this, simply add the brand name to the meta tags on the home page and other related pages. Adding the brand name to the content somewhere on the home page would be to the companies benefit. Creating a separate page totally dedicated to the brand name explaining exactly what it is and what it means is even more beneficial for ranking and informational purposes.
Most of the time, performing simple optimization techniques that everyone knows will get your brand name ranked in all the major search engines with little effort. You will be surprised at how many people actually search for your products and services by searching solely for your brand.
PPC (Pay Per Click) –
This is where I believe most people are missing out on a lot of targeted traffic. If you do not use your brand name within your PPC campaign you are missing out on visitors that are more likely to buy, rather than someone just searching for one of your top keywords. Here is an example of how you should add your brand to your PPC campaign:
Trust Guard
“Trust Guard”
[Trust Guard]
www.trust-guard.com
http://www.trust-guard.com
http://trust-guard.com
trust-guard.com
As you can see, I have used every possible way that someone could correctly search for the Trust Guard brand name. Another idea would be to add common ways that people misspell your brand name to the keyword list.
Social Media –
In social media your brand is extremely important. When people find you on the various social sites, they need to be able to recognize you immediately. A couple of ways to make sure that they recognize you and your brand is by adding your brand name and brand image (most of the time this would be the logo or personal photo/avatar or your product image) in the profile areas of these social sites. Make sure that your brand name and image is within the content you post as well.
The main key with social media is being consistent over every social site, meaning you should add the same brand name and images to all the social sites that you are signed up with. Once your brand becomes recognizable and you provide great content to the readers and groups on these social sites you will find and increase in brand awareness and more than likely a boost in sales.
Bringing It All Together –
I want to reiterate the word ‘consistency’. It is important that you are consistent with the way that you present your brand, whether using SEO, PPC, Social Media or any other form of marketing. If you are not consistent you will confuse people. If you confuse people you can lose trust. Keep it simple and provide great content and you are bound to succeed.
The guest article by Garrett Pierson. Follow Garrett on Twitter!
