The question of whether or not a branded campaign is necessary comes up quite often when working with businesses that are starting to invest in a paid advertising strategy. In this article, we’ll be going over different views that surround this topic and share reasons why we believe branded campaigns are important when utilizing search engine marketing.
What is a Branded Campaign?
Before we begin discussing the benefits of a branded campaign, it would be beneficial for us to define and clarify what it is. When dealing with paid advertising, your brand is essentially bidding on specific keywords in hopes of your ad being shown when somebody searches for those words. With a branded campaign, the search term that you’re bidding on is the name of your business. Now, an even bigger question arises.
If They Know Our Brand, Why Bid?
The reasoning behind this question makes a lot of sense. If people already know the name of my business, why do I need to pay more money for people to find my website? In this section, we’ll be covering a few reasons why branded campaigns should still be considered.
You have competitors.
As with any successful business, people will begin to notice. Unfortunately, this means that your competitors are likely taking note too. By bidding on your brand name, your competitors are able to show up at the top of the search results whenever your business is being searched for, allowing them to potentially steal away some traffic or conversions from your site. Choosing to run a branded campaign helps you fend off any advances that your competition tries to make because your ads will be more relevant to what the searcher was originally looking for. The advertisement platform will also recognize that your website is more relevant to the keywords that were searched and it’s likely that you’ll still show up higher in the ranking than your competitors.
Take Up Space
If your goal is to drive more traffic to your website, taking up even more space in the SERPs isn’t a bad idea. You may already rank highly organically and have your business show up in the local maps portion of the search results, but there’s another place you could be appearing. By still running a branded campaign, your business is still covered in case any sort of Google algorithm alteration negatively impacts your organic ranking. The ad section is still widely used by those who are conducting searches and should not be neglected even if you’ve achieved a high rank.
Maintain your budget.
If you’re concerned about your budget being depleted by having to allocate some of the funding to a branded campaign, worry not! Typically speaking, having a branded ad is more budget-friendly than you might expect. Compared to industry search terms, branded search terms are cheaper because there isn’t as much competition for those exact words, and also the cpc is lower because the ads highly match search intent. It’s also more likely for your branded campaign to convert because people who are searching for your company have a very specific intent and would be more inclined to finalize the purchase. Any competitor that does try to compete by bidding against you would, fortunately, have to pay more than you since your ad would be more relevant.
Promote brand awareness.
Customers who are still in the phase of researching will be spending quite a bit of time looking for what business they choose to use for their shopping needs. Whether it’s looking at social media posts, reviews, or different services offered, customers will usually need to interact with your brand several times before deciding. If your ad has been readily available to them throughout this process, then they likely will have clicked on it to learn more. Now, if they decide that they want to go with your business at a later date, all they’ll need to do is search for your business rather than the industry that they were looking for in the early stages of their research.
By setting up a branded campaign in addition to your other campaigns, you’re giving your business a lot of opportunities to be seen by those who are looking for both your industry and your specific company. The difficulties that would come from a competitor bidding on your brand name would be lessened by your presence in your ads section also! Hopefully, this article has served as a way to clear up any misconceptions that you may have had about whether or not your business would actually benefit from a branded campaign.