Is Your Brand Killing Your Search Campaign? - Who Defines the Conversation?
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I could hardly blame you if you want to throw something at your monitor after reading that. All of your branding was supposed to differentiate you from your competition! Am I now telling you that you have to make yourself just like him to get the searchers to notice you? Before I answer that question, ask yourself this: would Southwest have tried to differentiate itself by price if people who fly weren't concerned with price issues – if, in fact, price wasn't one of the first three things they consider?
When it comes to the search engines, it's not your competition that defines the conversation; it's your audience. So your marketers may be trying to push your brand as offering them one thing, but if they're searching primarily for something else, they're never going to notice. And at the point when they first express their need – by putting key words into a search engine – they are in total control of the conversation.
If a brand marketer tries to get control of the conversation at that point, however, they'll never hear the customer's needs. Hotchkiss explained this in terms of pay-per-click search ads when he pointed out that “By not bidding on a keyphrase, the marketer is also removing themselves from the conversation...they'll have no opportunity to fulfill the need.” When you say you aren't X, or that your brand is positioning itself as an alternative to X, you're choosing to not participate in the conversation – because you don't control it at that point! Your potential customers do – and they think they need X. You're not going to convince them that sure, you can give them X, but you're really about Y, and that's what they really want, if they don't see you when they look for X in the first place.
I'm not saying you should be trying to rank for keywords like “shaving cream” when you do dog training, or fine jewelry when you sell food gift baskets, but if you offer both beading supplies and jewelry-making classes, you should consider trying to rank for both, regardless of which one you consider more important. Do your keyword research, and you'll find out which one your customers consider more important – then, when they click through your search ad, you can try to sell them on your brand and show them why getting your Y (and your X) is better than getting your competition's X.
In short, by launching a search, a web user expresses a need; by displaying a search text ad, you're saying, via your search campaign, that you can fill that need. That's all. Anything else comes later.
Photo by jaymacweb; use permitted via Creative Commons license.
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