The Importance Of Creating A Bond

Mother and child. Man and dog. New England and the Boston Red Sox. There are some bonds that last a lifetime. When it comes to paid search, consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketers should take a lesson from them.

When it comes to CPG marketing and managing effective paid search campaigns, it is crucial to create a bond between your brand and the consumer to facilitate loyalty. A quick examination of your own brand loyalties demonstrates exactly why. For instance, think about a product that you are personally brand-loyal to. No matter what is on sale when you shop, chances are this item makes it in your cart. But why?

Your brand loyalty may have resulted from various influences. Perhaps its legacy loyalty and was passed down to you from a family member. Or maybe it could be described as comfort loyalty as it may have been with you for a long time or remind you of your childhood. Or it could very well be associated with necessity because you had a need and this product satisfied what you were looking for. Whatever the source of influence, the brand successfully bonded with you at some point, and as a result, you stick with it time after time.

Try This At Home

Here are four tips will help you stretch your budget by targeting your consumers more effectively and at different levels of the purchase funnel. In addition, they will also help you build a bond with your consumer online, and potentially turn a one-time consumer into a lifetime customer.

Always be on. Search is on-demand marketing. Consumers are searching for information 24/7, and the expectation is that you need to make information available to searchers whenever they are online. iProspect user behavior research showed that 37% of consumers believe that leading brands should appear at the top of the search results. To satisfy consumer expectations, it is important that your ad be found when someone searches for your brand. Because marketers usually don’t have infinite budgets, and evergreen strategies can be costly, you should identify a set of core terms that are important to your brand, image and business that you want to “win” on at all times, and set aside a portion of your search marketing budget specifically for these terms.

Engage early. Although lower funnel purchase-type keywords may appear to yield a higher ROI at first glance, including higher funnel lifestyle-level keywords in your campaigns can help facilitate a relationship with your consumers early on. For example, a typical paid search strategy for a pet food brand may target users who have qualified themselves as pet owners, or those who are searching for pet food. But what if that brand intentionally targeted consumers before they even had a pet by including lifestyle level keywords such as “dog breeds” and “types of dogs?” Although the final purchase outcome of this type of term will be delayed, this strategy may lead to a higher lifetime customer value through brand engagement, versus a one-time purchase value.

Extend your brand beyond the website. In the age of branded Facebook profiles, Twitter accounts and YouTube channels, marketers now have many more options to engage with their consumers. Forming a bond with consumers online is about delivering valuable content and providing the best experience. Paid search campaigns offer the flexibility for engagement with consumers by driving them to these social destinations where different types of content exist. Using social media websites or review forums as destination pages for your paid search campaigns can help deliver the best content for your consumers regardless of where they are in their decision making process. Remember, many consumers want to connect with the brands they believe in, but they just don’t have a place to do so. Smart marketers will connect with them in a forum where they can actually talk to your brand.

Speak with consumers, not at them. Everyone knows that the most effective relationships have a dialogue and ongoing communication between the parties. Forming bonds with your consumers online is no different. Speaking at your consumers works initially to peak their interest, but to maintain that interest and facilitate brand loyalty, you need to provide ongoing value. The first step in effective online communication is to figure out what types of conversations you should be having with your consumers, and the best forums for these discussions to take place—either on your website or elsewhere. In addition, it is important to connect with their lifestyle interests. Valuable brand conversation goes beyond speaking to consumers about your products. Instead, it should show them how your products connect with their interests, beliefs or values.

Given the cluttered, confusing, and highly competitive online marketplace, CPG brands should leverage paid search to foster loyalty and create a bond with consumers that could last a lifetime.

Considering that a website is one of the most important marketing tools, marketers should be mindful that even small site issues can quickly add up and adversely affect brand perception. For instance, a poorly organized product website can frustrate users and negatively impact sales. Similarly, an informational website with stale content can drive users to get their information elsewhere. In short, a poorly maintained website spells risk for your brand.

Though I wish they were a rarity, poorly maintained websites are anything but. In fact, you’ve probably been a victim of one yourself—I know I have. For example, I recently went online to buy a pair of boots. Because I knew exactly what I wanted, I went directly to the manufacturer’s website.

Fortunately, I found the boots in my size, and immediately added them to my shopping cart. But when I tried to check out, I received an error message that my cart was empty (even though it clearly wasn’t). So I tried again. And again. And again. (I really wanted those boots!) But after many attempts to bypass the error, I became frustrated, so I left.

More than a little disappointed in the brand because of the poor experience, I searched for similar boots online. I easily found a comparable replacement on another website, and purchased them without a hitch. In the future, I doubt I will ever go back to the first site.

Maintenance tips to boost your brand

To keep your website well maintained and your brand image up to par, consider the 5 tips below:

Keep your keyword list up to date. Keywords are the building blocks for all optimization efforts on your site. It is important to revisit this list at least once a year to cut irrelevant terms and add in new terms that you should be focusing new content on within your website. There are several free public tools such as Wordtracker and Google AdWords tools that you can use in order to expand your current keyword set, and obtain information on relevance and search volume. Once you have identified high traffic terms, incorporate those keywords into the top level pages of your website for maximum exposure.

Continually freshen web copy. Stale and outdated content can be unattractive for both users and search engines. In fact, search engines “reward” sites for having content that is fresh and frequently updated. When writing new content, have enough body copy on each top level page to support proper keyword phrase density: strive to include the primary keyword phrase approximately 5 times. And don’t forget that including the phrase in your URL and meta data are great ways to strengthen your pages relevancy for search. This task should be tackled at least once a year after you update your keyword list.

Do your own site crawl. Depending on the size of your website and how frequently the content changes, removing old pages and adding new ones to your sitemap file can be a tedious task. To make sure old pages are removed and new pages get proper visibility, perform a site crawl monthly and add important or top-level pages on your website to your sitemap. The crawl can be performed by pulling pages off your server, or for smaller websites, simply clicking through the site to get to the lowest level pages possible. In addition to updating the sitemap file on your site, create an XML sitemap file and submit it to the search engines monthly.

Fix broken links. Broken links not only have usability implications, but they can also negatively affect your brand by causing a poor user experience, especially when they reference old articles that were taken down, or products that no longer exist. Given that, it is important to have proper redirects in place to functional pages, and old pages removed from the site completely. In order to stay on top of this important task, schedule regular website maintenance at least once a month to fix any broken links on an ongoing basis, and ensure that you have a strong 404 page in place that provides a user with an easy way back into the website when they encounter a broken link.

Do regular traffic analysis. You probably look at your analytics on a monthly basis to understand where your external traffic is coming from. But when is the last time you examined other metrics such as top entry pages, time spent on the site, or bounce rate? At the start of each month, look for patterns or anomalies in your analytics data. For instance, if you notice that important high-level or product pages aren’t performing as you would like, try altering different variables on the page, such as content and call to action.

As this year comes to a close, take the time to go through this checklist and make the necessary changes to ensure that your website is delivering a positive first impression. Remember, your brand depends on it.