I shouldn't have to pay for an ad campaign for my own brand.. Right? Well yeah.. You do. Unless you want your competitors sliding in your prospects DMs tryna steal yo leads. (Translation for my baby boomer pals: Unless you want your competitors to steal your prospects by bidding on your brand name and displaying a compelling ad on Google). Think of all the offline channels you're investing your marketing budget in; Flyers, radio, sign writing, magazines the list goes on. If a half page spread you paid a couple thousand quid for to market the winter special you're having on Venetian blinds in Living etc Magazine has sparked motivation for mum to finally get it sorted, you better hope she's not reading the magazine whilst in a waiting room somewhere. Otherwise you bet she's not going to remember your website domain. She'll probably remember your business name and punch that into Google when she gets some downtime though. However if you're not bidding on your brand name, there's a very high likelihood your competitors are and consequently appearing above you on Google. Surely she'll skip past those ads until she finds you.. Right? Oh but look! Your competitors are having winter specials too. And there's some pretty good specials like yours. Oh wow! One has a fancy looking, shiny, bold, coloured, clickable call to action link which she can click and be connected instantly to someone who can book a time for someone to do a measure and quote! Which she does.. Nice. Your magazine ad just spoon fed your competitor a sale for a cost per lead of probably 40p. Ok so now that I've got the obvious reason you should be protecting your brand name on Google, here are 4 more reasons you need to run a brand campaign on Google.

1. Highly targeted clicks:

   A lot of people searching for a brand name are likely looking for that particular brand and are typically much further down the buying funnel thus being closer to the point of conversion compared to people who may have come from one of your more broad search terms.

2. Better campaign performance:

   Brand name clicks are generally very cheap which means more clicks on your ad which means greater click through rate which means greater quality scores which means better campaign performance which makes me happy.

3. Dominate the SERP (Search engine results page):

   The 1st page of Google is real estate. If you are able to own as much of that real estate as possible with paid ads, organic listings, social media, and so on, you are setting yourself apart as an authority. There's countless amounts of studies and statistics proving that by appearing in both the organic and paid ads, you're demonstrating to searchers that you’re an authority in your industry. Authority = credibility = trust = clicks.

4. Cover Mobile Search:

   Mobile search has long overtaken desktop. The image below is what a typical mobile search looks like. Notice something? Ads take up the entire page. And there's still 2 more ads below and then the maps before we get to the organic results. That's a blistering amount of swiping by today's standards. Especially if someones looking for your brand name.

To learn more about brand strategy, please get in touch with KMG.