We're Launching An Aggressive Branding Campaign

With the release of our newest brand - Microtank ( http://gnos.tk/microtank ) we've been rethinking our branding strategy. We've just launched an ambitious branding campaign aimed at highlighting our brands. We've done quite a bit of expert research on contemporary approaches to branding. We want to tell you about our progress here on Im0z.

*Our Branding Style
In studying the many theories and styles of branding, we've learned a thing or two. Our marketing team learned, for example, what the technical name of the style of branding Gnosis Arts has already been using. Our branding style is known as "attitude branding." (We've written extensively on this subject at our weekly microbusiness column, Microtank - http://gnos.tk/microtank ).

Attitude branding is a style of branding which associates moral ideals or virtues with the brand. Gnosis Arts brand ideation revolves around the concepts of "knowledge", "freedom", "insight", "intuition", etc., as applied to marketing. These intellectual and spiritual virtues imbue our brands, so this is an example of attitude branding.

*Mind-Share
But how do you make a brand known? That's the objective. The greatest brand in the world is nothing if no one knows about it. Brand recognition is essential to branding; we want our brands to be known and recognized by the largest number of consumers in our target market, right?

In other words, we need a "share of mind." The mind-share approach to branding attempts to make a brand the first brand the consumer thinks about when they choose a product category. So, when people think about "online marketing and Internet PR", the idea is that they will think of Gnosis Arts, or one of our brands, first.

*How Are We Planning to Do It?
Unfortunately, mind-share branding traditionally requires a lot of money, more advertising dollars, at least, than most smaller businesses have at their disposal. So how are we planning to do it? In short, we are looking to exploit new possibilities in the Google Content Network as well as utilize Google's new remarketing system.

*What Is Google's Remarketing System?
Google has recently added new functionality to its AdWords ad serving system called remarketing. What remarketing allows advertisers to do is create ads that "follow around" those who have viewed it. For example, if my ad shows on a New York Times business blog, then those who visited that blog will later be shown the same ad when they visit another content network site (profnetconnect.com, for example).

As you can guess, this "remarketing" may afford a great opportunity to capture some mind-share. As surfers see your ad on one site they frequent, they are showed the same ad on another site they frequent. The branding potential here is significant, at least in theory. We're putting it into practice, to see if there really is a benefit here. We hope to report back to you some positive and concrete steps you can take in brand advertising for your own business.

A second thing we're doing is using the CPM advertising, as opposed to CPC advertising. This is where you pay for 1000 impressions, not clicks. We're doing this to ensure our ad is actually shown a certain number of times. Here we are concerned more about impressions than clicks (or conversions).

Third, we will be pruning the Content Network sites on which we advertise. When we locate a site with regular impressions and decent CTR, we will place that site in the Managed Placements list, and then remove that site from the Automatic Placements category (ideally). This way we whittle down the sites on which we advertise to only the most effective.

Finally, we plan to identify sites which receive a large percentage of repeat visitors. For example, social media sites tend to be visited by the same person, each day. These are the types of sites we want to have in our managed placements lists, too. We want the same visitor, to be shown one of our branding ads, over and over, and on multiple sites, in order to capture a share of mind.

We will keep our readers updated on the progress of this campaign as it progresses, so stay tuned. We will be doing other things as well, such as more aggressive PR. We will also be leveraging our news and press release site for branding as well ( http://pressreleasesonline.net ). This will be a long term campaign involving many elements and much analysis.

How Does A small Business do Branding?

(Clipped from http://community2.business.gov/bsng/board/message?board.id=GeneralBusiness&message.id=661&jump=true)

Branding is all about product differentiation. In a world where competition is so great between multiple products trying to occupying the same niche space in a given "market-position", it has become essential literally to invent ways to attribute, highlight, and emphasize characteristics, and attributes of a product, which would otherwise be absolutely similar to any other product occupying that very space. So why would you think a consumer would pick your product over somebody else's? You tell them it's different, give them a name to remember it by.

For example FCUK T-Shirts are crappy, run-off-the-mill, ordinary T-Shirts. It's just that particular brand name made it stand out - especially among the vocabularly challenged teenagers (that was meant to be a joke).

Here's what Steve Manning, managing director at Igor, a branding and naming firm based in San Francisco, had to say about branding

"A brand creates an image in the mind of the consumer. It says something is different at your firm, something worth more than business as usual. If your firm is a commodity, your customers will choose you solely on the basis of price or getting something for free. If you've got a brand, you're selling a lifestyle and you can sell anything you want,"
Here's a link to the rest of the article:
http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/jun2008/sb2008069_694225.htm

How do you achieve branding?? There is no formula, or a set way. You just have to think up something that will stick in people's minds.

Examples are:

- 2 syllable names
- bright colors
- eye-catching, crazy shapes
- names of icons Obama or Paris Hilton (though the two can never be mentioned in the same sentence

- provide value addition - like a freebie, if you get this or something

Brand-Thinking & PPC

If you've done any Pay-Per-Click (PPC for short) campaign management, then you know how expensive PPC can be. Additionally, PPC campaigns can require a significant time investment, as you must constantly be tweaking your ad text, keywords and bids in order to maximize your advertising dollars. And nothing is more frustrating in PPC campaign management than doing all that work, spending all that money, and getting very few clicks, or a poor Clickthru Rate (CTR).

A Traditional PPC Management Approach

Traditional PPC ad formation and campaign management suggests that you begin by selecting keywords in your market for which you wish to advertise. After selecting your target keywords, you then build your ads around them. While this can be an effective approach, we are finding an approach that is much more effective for our business, and which costs significantly less than the traditional method.

Thinking About Your Brand(s)

Instead of beginning with an assortment of industry keywords, we tried beginning with our brand identity - or the brand idea(s) we wished to convey. By utilizing Google’s Webmaster Tools we discovered that we receive as many, if not more, visitors to our website through name and/or brand name searches, than for the generic “target keyword” searches. In other words, people were finding our business as much by searching directly for our name, our products or our services as they were for any other generic keyword. This has everything to with brand awareness.

Ads Fashioned Around Brands

So, what we did was pretty simple. We launched an online advertising campaign utilizing our brands themselves as keywords for our ads! And we constructed our ad text and appearance around those brand-keywords. No longer did we take the conventional approach of trying to make our ad text “sexy” or “juicy”; we didn’t try to “sell” anything to the potential visitor. We simply let the ad text be a natural expression of our brand identity.

We were astonished at the results. Our ads received a much higher Clickthrough Rate (for a definition of Clickthrough Rate [CTR], click here). For one particular brand-keyword, the CTR was 22% after the first week! And on the date of this writing, our PPC team scored a 100% CTR for one keyword across the search network (content network excluded).

What astonishes me about these stats is that we have a very small nj multimedia firm, with brands which aren't even well known (outside our office - or so we thought!) and for which we are still working to get registered service marks! And it still works!

Why Brand-Thinking Works in PPC

Not only was our CTR much higher when using the brand-identity-approach to ad campaign management, but our Cost Per Click (CPC) was dramatically lower! This is due, in part, to the fact that our brands - unlike generic keywords - are uniquely our own. No other business is really apt to use them. This means there is much less competition driving the keyword price up, than for generic keywords. In addition, the landing pages for those brand-keywords are, as it were, perfectly crafted for those brand names. Thus, our Quality Score for those keywords is higher, thus bringing down the cost we have to pay per per click.

Thinking about your brands, trademarks or service marks offers a fresh approach to Internet advertising and can greatly enhance your online marketing results.