Traditional marketing efforts aim to drive market share by developing top of mind awareness. Get a jingle or clever ad campaign, and then jam it into the brains of consumers using frequent and targeted media placement. And, generally speaking, it works. Name recognition and brand awareness in your local market will drive business.
But online marketing is different. Unless your products / services apply only to your immediate geographic area, your market has exploded. Getting potential consumers to know your name and sing your jingle takes an effort at a much larger scale.
Traditional marketing mentality says we still need to pummel online consumers with our brand. Get a clever video or app that lets participants insult their friends and colleagues, and then try to make it go viral. And, generally speaking, this works too. Compelling campaigns drive traffic.
Blendtec’s “Will it Blend” video series serves as a brilliant example of a viral campaign. I’m sure they’ve seen an increase in sales by building top of mind awareness of the campaign itself. And if you can replicate the popularity of that campaign, stop reading here, you should be doing it right now. If not, there are other things to consider.
On the Internet, you’re no longer branding exclusively for people. The average consumer doesn’t rely on recall to find you, she relies on Google. A strong search engine ranking is far more effective than brand recall at delivering qualified traffic.
Branding for the machine means aiming for top of SERP (search engine results page) vs top of mind. The primary domain name shouldn’t require branding efforts to explain where it points. If you sell commercial blenders, register commercialblenders.com. If it’s already registered, make an offer. Spend $2k to $5k to own your keywords and then point your company name url to commercialblenders.com.
This is a strategy we’ve only recently started leading with. We had to first break out of the traditional branding mentality ourselves. The results are exactly what you’d hope for. The right [keyword based] domain name and a bit of code optimization can take a site from being buried on page five to first position in a week.
Search engine referrals go up, qualified traffic pours in, you make money. It’s a brave new world. No jingle required.