Raising brand awareness: why you should invest in your own brand

Have you ever searched for your own name in Google to see what pops up? Well, maybe you should do the same for your brand, you’d be surprised.

It may sound counter-intuitive, but you aren’t always first result of search on your own brand, that’s a very complicated and competitive process.

Why is it important?

Beyond the obvious fact that you want your customers to find you straight on top of their google results when they type your brand, being first result on your own key word has other benefits.

First, it protects your territory. Many of your competitors, especially if you evolve on a highly competitive market such as clothing or services, won’t hesitate to bid on your brand. Why? Because they want to show that, even for people typing your brand, they might be more appealing, and having their brand ranked higher than your own can be sufficient to change the customer’s mind. And that’s perfectly normal (most brands bid on their competitors’ name as a keyword).

On services such as plumbers, many companies will try to reach first rank on Google, because for these types of offers, most of the time user won’t look for a specific company, but for a service and its decision will mostly depend on the ad ranking Google will suggest.

Second, by bidding on your own brand, you can decide on which page of your website you send your customers. For example, you might have a special offer you want to boost, or a particular activity you want to develop, and rather than sending the consumers on your homepage, you can then decide where to orient them.

The resort ‘Riviera Villages’ chose to focus their ads on the different accomodation options available in their hotels. That way, they insure that users will be more likely to click directly on the Accomodations page, rather than going on the welcome page and browse the website before finding accomodation information.

But of course, you aren’t the only one trying to rank 1st position on search results, you’ll soon realize that many of your competitors also bid on your brand name…

Is this all legal?

Well, actually it is. Your competitors can perfectly bid on your brand as a keyword, as long as your brand title does not appear on their ad.

In France, according to jurisprudence, the only point to respect is that the consumer must not be confused on the origin of the products, meaning that you can buy the brand as long as there is no conflict of identification of products.*

Here, the first Ad is the brand’s one. But we can see that right underneeth is a competitor’s ad. But the brand’s name ‘Les Prairies de la Mer’ isn’t used in the title, to avoid conflict.

*More information on legal details and why you should invest on your competitors’ brand can be found here: https://www.hallaminternet.com/bidding-competitor-keywords-google-adwords/

How can I protect my field then?

By paying for it. But be reassured, bidding on your own brand is usually cheap.

On Google Ads, you usually pay by the click. This price depends on the quality score that Google will assign to your keyword. This quality score depends on different variables, such as the relevence of your ads, the landing page and the click rate*. Logically, you are best positioned on those three variables, making you the best-quality bidder. Thus, most of the time, you will appear on top of the page on your brand’s keyword.

Do not forget to bid on many variations of your brand title: with or without an article, misspellings, etc. You wouldn’t imagine how popular ‘Facebok‘ or ‘Gogle’ is on the internet.

More information on the quality score can be found on the Google HElp page: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/140351?hl=en-GB

How do I follow this investment?

There is a simple metric that can help you identify your position: the ‘search impression share’: it represents your ad’s impression rate on 1st position on Research Network’ for a defined keyword. If it reached 100%, then your brand is first result on Google Search.

Extract of the Google Ads Help: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7501826?hl=en-GB

This KPI allows you to monitor your investment: if your impression rate is low, you’ll have to increase the CPC on this special keyword in order to go up on search results.

Here, we can see that the resort ‘Le Phare île de Ré’ decided to bid on keywords such as ‘camping le phare’, or ‘camping le phare île de ré’. On such keywords, their Search impression share reaches 10%%. This means that when a user searches for ‘campign le phare’ on Google, the resort’s ads will be on first position.

Of course, trying to be first position on every keyword might ask for a high investment. You’ll probably have to make some choices, for example accepting to appear only second or third result. This can be a good decision if you already have a strong brand awareness and are confident that users searching for your brand won’t hesitate to scroll a bit before finding your content.

Well, now it’s your turn!

Are you convinced of the importance of investing on your brand now? If so, then you’re ready to become number one. And remember, even if you think you control everything that is published about you, you always want to check it out from times to times to see how you rank, who is bidding on your brand and how much visibility you have.

About this article

This article has been written by a student on the Grenoble Ecole de Management’s Advanced Masters in Digital Business Strategy. As part of a content creation assignment, students are given the task of writing articles based on their digital interests and disseminate the articles online. Articles are marked but we make minimal changes to the content. Thanks for reading! James Barisic, Programme Director, MS DBS.