Brand Campaigns: Essential or Pure Vanity?
**The Real Deal on Brand Bidding: Is It Necessary for Your Business?**
When it comes to brand bidding on Google Ads, opinions are divided. Depending on who you ask, it’s either an essential strategy for any business or a complete waste of resources that should be redirected elsewhere. But the truth is likely somewhere in between these two extremes. This blog post explores the complicated world of brand bidding, shedding light on its purposes, use cases, and whether your business should consider it. More importantly, we’ll delve into some of the best practices for implementing brand bidding if you choose to go down that route.
**Understanding Brand Bidding**
As your business begins to gain traction, people will start to recognize and seek out your brand actively. Instead of searching for generic terms like “car repair garage,” potential customers might specifically type in “Darren Taylor’s service garage.” This shows that your brand is gaining awareness. The question then becomes: should you be bidding on your brand name? This activity, known as brand bidding, often involves running a branded campaign.
**The Four Faces of Brand Bidding**
There are several compelling reasons to consider brand bidding:
1. **Competitor Protection**
– When a brand gains popularity, competitors may bid on its name to divert clicks towards their own business. By bidding on your brand, you protect these clicks, ensuring that they return to you. Over time, competitors may find it too expensive to compete for your brand name and may pull back, realizing that the costs outweigh the benefits.
2. **Alternative Experiences**
– Your homepage serves as a general entry point, but it may not always be the best landing page for specific promotions or optimized conversions. Using brand bidding, you can redirect users to specialized landing pages that offer tailored experiences, potentially increasing conversion rates.
3. **Supplementing Existing Marketing**
– If your brand is engaged in extensive marketing efforts through other channels, such as TV or radio, brand bidding on Google can enhance visibility. This not only helps you capitalize on the investment in brand awareness but also deters competitors from encroaching on your space.
4. **Vanity and Dominance**
– Some businesses simply enjoy the dominance of seeing their brand at the top of search results. While this reason lacks the practicality of others, it’s a sentiment shared by many business owners for whom visibility equates to success.
**The Real Impact of Brand Bidding**
Despite these reasons, brand bidding does not always translate to incremental sales. In tests conducted across various businesses, expanding brand campaigns often resulted in no significant increase in sales. The experiments, involving both small and large businesses, consistently showed that bidding on a brand name didn’t deliver the anticipated growth in sales. More strikingly, pausing these brand campaigns usually had no adverse effect on top-line sales.
“What’s more important, profits or feelings?” This question highlights the critical takeaway from these experiments. While seeing your brand dominate search results can feel satisfying, it’s crucial to focus on tangible business outcomes: profits. If brand bidding doesn’t contribute to growth, investing heavily in it may not be justified.
**Alternative Strategy: Focus on New Customer Acquisition**
One of the key insights is the value of directing efforts towards acquiring new customers. It’s far more beneficial for a business to invest in campaigns targeting potential customers unfamiliar with the brand rather than reinforcing efforts on those already aware. This is especially important for businesses operating on limited budgets. A dollar spent on brand bidding competes against many more valuable uses, like targeting broader industry keywords that reach untapped audiences.
**Navigating Brand Campaigns Wisely**
For businesses deciding to engage in brand bidding despite the odds, it’s vital to follow these best practices:
– **Separate Brand Reporting**
– Always report brand spend separately from other campaigns. This helps in maintaining clarity in performance assessments and prevents brand campaigns from masking the true performance of other areas.
– **Use Brand Exclusions**
– If you are utilizing Google’s Performance Max, employ brand exclusions to prevent it from skewing toward brand terms, which can lead to misleadingly favorable results.
**Conclusion: Should Your Business Bid on Its Brand?**
For most small businesses, the answer is likely no. Unless your efforts align with defending against competitors, bolstering significant external campaigns, or creating exceptional user experiences, your resources would be better spent on acquiring new customers. If you do venture into brand bidding, ensure that your strategy is well-informed and meticulously executed.
In the complex world of digital marketing, making the right choice can feel daunting. Before making a decision, ask yourself: is your current brand bidding strategy driven by tangible objectives, or has it become more about maintaining appearances? Relying on data over feelings could be the cornerstone of your strategic success. As business landscapes evolve, finding the balance between maintaining brand dominance and driving new growth remains a nuanced pursuit. What’s your next move? Are you ready to challenge existing norms and pivot toward strategies that deliver real and scalable growth?
