Conference Notes from the "Search & Branding" session at Search Engine Strategies New York '07

Dan Sundgren, Director of Sales, Efficient Frontier
Fionn Downhill, CEO/President, Elixir Systems
Kevin Heisler, Analyst, JupiterResearch

Kevin Heisler, Analyst, JupiterResearch

They had about 1100 responses to their SEM questionnaire.

Broadcast has always said you can't build brand on-line, agencies have said the same, but are changing their tune...

They're recommending things like microsites, content sponsorships, advertorials, rich media ads, etc. Go beyond the 30 and 60 second spots that are traditional.

Integrate branding and direct response.

Need more sophisticated measurement tools - they're needed to push on-line branding - prove that it works.

Increased technical offerings and bandwidth will enable greater branding.

Branding will be done by all levels of marketers - across the board. Small advertisers are able to compete with larger ones on-line.

Dan Sundgren, Director of Sales, Efficient Frontier

Sees "search marketing" changing over to "platform marketing".

Protecting your brand...
Good example is Nordstrom - they're excellent at it. Nike is also great at it.

Using "Official <whatever>" is great. Using trademark and copyright symbol is also good.

Morgan Stanley is bad at protecting their brand - in the AdSense results the top result is a negative link ("Morgan Stanley Scandal"). You must file your brands with the ad platforms so they don't allow people to advertise on the term.

Pepsi had a can design contest, yet in the SERPs there was nothing to help users participate. Google Trends shows a big spike in the term [pepsi can], but nothing there for customers to go to.

One common problem is that the on-line and off-line marketing teams are separate. They need to be integrated and talk to each other.

Presented case studies of Intel's Viiv and Whitepages.com...

How many minutes of interaction (average time on site * number of visitors) is one way to measure success when the objective is brand awareness and generation of buzz.

Different results by DMA - varying CPAs, etc.

Fionn Downhill, CEO/President, Elixir Systems

Case study about Dale Carnegie Training. Carnegie is seen as the father of self-help. They're now a well regarded, worldwide organization.

They had always done off-line lead generation and knew what what a good cost per lead was for their product. Their first on-line ad campaign (not with Elixir) had decent results but there was room for improvement. They had used a lot of vanity URLs and didn't really emphasize the Dale Carnegie brand. All in all, they were buying expensive, generic terms.

Elixir started a new campaign with AdSense - one of the ad groups was all about capitalizing on the Dale Carnegie name. They built on the term "How to win friends and influence people" even though they couldn't sell the book (due to licensing restrictions). End result was that the Dale Carnegie branded terms performed the best and cost considerably less.

Paid search is one of the most trackable actions you can find.

When you have a brand - leverage it on-line.

Everything is now branded Dale Carnegie - pages and URLs.

The campaign Elixir coordinated was far more effective than the first ad campaign. The results far exceeded their traditional off-line campaigns as well as the first on-line campaign, both in terms of leads and sales. Because of the success with this campaign the organization has a handle on what works for them on-line and they're committing more and more resources to marketing themselves with paid, on-line advertising.

[Ms. Downhill has requested that the actual financial numbers not be in this post, but having seen the numbers she presented they were truly impressive.]

Same type of results with MSN and Yahoo! ad networks. Now looking to expand campaign worldwide, however branding isn't as strong in other countries.

Budgets are being moved from off-line to on-line.

Also doing organic SEO but it's a longer term goal. Started campaign 4 months ago which is doing well, but takes longer to get established and PPC.

It's been the most successful lead generation campaign they've ever done.

If you don't leverage your brand on-line, someone else will.

Q&A

Branding is now a participatory exercise.

Even new brands can be launched more effectively and cheaply online.

You should buy the PPC terms for your branded terms even if you're #1 in organic search for those terms since you want to control the message. PPC gives you even more control over the message than organic. And PPC clicks on trademarked terms are really cheap since no one else can bid on them - in many cases (provided you've registered the trademark with the ad platform) they're about a cent a click.

If the client is apprehensive - set goals upfront and then to a small test to prove the value of online marketing.

Top notch creatives are the next big thing. The user experience will also be incredibly important.

Yahoo! and MSN -> when you file a trademark it stops bidding on the term. Google puts the term into a manual process that has to be monitored.

Buy terms for things like customer support (e.g. "Palm Treo Support" or "Palm Treo Drivers") - good luck getting the money from the support budget.

Tags: branding, online-advertising, paid-search, SES-NY
Categories: Advertising, Brand Management, Search Marketing