The Opportunity For Brand Marketers

Whether your slow season occurs after the holiday rush or during the first week of August, it can be the perfect time to focus your efforts on creating brand awareness. Because many marketers turn off their campaigns during this time, the competition can be greatly reduced. As a result, your brand could have increased visibility in the search results, which could lead to new business at a lower cost.

In addition, a focus on brand awareness during the off-season makes sense because many consumers are further up in the purchase funnel then. Rather than making immediate purchases, they are interested in exploring their options and are open to discovering new brands. This mindset, along with the reduced competition mentioned above, creates opportunity for your brand to be discovered by new customers.

Lastly, your slow period is the ideal time work on brand awareness quite simply because you have the time to invest in testing to determine your most effective messaging. Taking the time to do this now will prove invaluable once your peak season hits.

4 Tips To Improve Brand Awareness During The Slow Season

Below are a few tips to help you boost brand awareness and optimize your account during your slow season:

• Always be present. While it may sound basic to some, many marketers need to be convinced that it is important to continue to advertise and keep their paid search campaigns running during slower times. Sure, traffic may be lower when things are slow; however, savvy marketers know that there is still an opportunity to gain business. During your slow time, ensure that your brand is always present.
  Doing so will allow you to fully capitalize on the visibility opportunity when other companies make the mistake of letting their brands “go dark.” By continuing to protect your branded terms and test and expand your efforts with unbranded keywords, you will be in a stronger position when things get busy again.




• Clean up your accounts. Paid search accounts are always changing. In fact, chances are that over the past year you most likely added, removed, and changed keywords and ad copy for your campaigns many times over. While it is important to keep campaigns updated, these changes can create clutter that adversely affects performance.
  While things are slow, take the time to review the structure of your campaigns, your keywords, and your ad copy, and remove what you can. Doing so will not only help boost results by ensuring that you are staying relevant, but also help you optimize your accounts throughout the year by keeping them manageable.




• Review your goals. While you may have clear goals established for 2011, some things in your organization or the marketplace may have changed since they were originally formulated. For instance, the company may have announced plans to launch a new product, change its website, or target a new customer segment. Or perhaps a top competitor may have started a major marketing program. Such changes could greatly impact your goals for the year.
  
  Fortunately, your slow period is the perfect time to review your goals and make any necessary adjustments. As you revisit them, be sure to find out if your organization has any new initiatives planned so you can be prepared for them throughout the year.




• Create your strategy. If you have not already created a plan for the year, now is the time to do it. Start by taking a look at 2010 and determine what was successful – and what was not — and leverage your learnings to create a stronger account for the new year. In order to keep the account growing, be sure your plan takes into consideration any additional marketing initiatives your company may be running in 2011, along with your competitors’ efforts.
  You may also want to consider other efforts you have not explored yet. Perhaps this will be the year to try mobile or a Spanish campaign. Lastly, be sure your plan includes tests throughout the year; otherwise, you might forget when things get busy.

While you may be tempted to relax during the off-season, you should capitalize on the opportunity to build brand awareness. Doing so will help you get a leg-up on the competition, and put you in a far stronger position when things pick up again.

After running a successful PPC campaign for some time, it can be difficult to gain additional traffic beyond your branded and non-branded industry terms. Often, the next step is to try to gain market share from your competitors. However, this can be tricky—and unfruitful—because consumers are actively looking for your competitors. As a result, click-through-rates are low and cost-per-click is high.

However, Google’s display network can provide marketers with a solution to this situation. Specifically, the network’s coupon sites are a great way to gain customers who may not be brand loyal and who are looking for a deal. By creating campaigns around your competitors’ branded terms on coupon sites, you can offer users an enticing deal to try your product.

Case in point

Earlier this year a consumer packaged goods marketer wanted to focus its PPC efforts on stealing users from competitors via a coupon offer. Initially, the company ran the offer on the search network, but saw few clicks and conversions, not to mention high CPAs. As an alternative, they decided to focus efforts on coupon sites on Google’s display network. Given that coupon redemption increased by 29% in 2009, targeting these value-conscious consumers was a great area of opportunity to gain users. Ultimately, the new display network strategy boosted their conversion rate 400 percent, and reduced CPA by 70 percent.

Here are a few tips to help you leverage the display network to gain market share from your competitors:

Entice customers to switch brands. Setting up this type of competitor campaign is incredibly simple, but you will need something to offer customers to lure them away from the competition. Since you will be focusing your efforts on couponing websites in an effort to steal away non-brand loyal customers looking for a deal, make sure you have what they are looking for: coupons! Make sure to also bid on your brand terms so you do not lose your current customers who are looking for a deal from a competitor with a similar game plan.

Research a comprehensive keyword list. Set up ad groups focused around each of your competitors individually so you know which one is providing you with the most value. Make sure that your keyword set includes not only competitor branded terms, but also coupons, offers, deals, and so on so you show up on the sites you want in the display network when you begin running with automatic placements. Get specific right from the start, as your coupon offer won’t have much of an impact if it ends up next to a blog post touting a competitor’s product.

Get in Google’s display network. Create a separate campaign for the display network so you can compare how your competitor ad groups are performing more easily. Make sure that you are opted into the display network initially with automatic placements. As the campaign runs, continually monitor your placement report to make sure you are showing up on coupon sites and not irrelevant blogs. Since there are so many couponing sites and blogs out there, this is a good way to get an idea of what sites are talking about your products—and your competitors’—so you can then further optimize your campaign.

Add placements. Once you have a good idea of the specific display network sites you want to target, bid on those placements individually so you control how much you spend for each visitor. Additionally, there are a lot of coupon sites with areas for specific verticals, so get more detailed and target those sub domains or directories with your managed placements. This will help you avoid showing up on pages for unrelated goods or services. If all else fails, Google’s placement tool has a category just for “coupons & rebates” to help you find additional coupon websites to show your ads in the Google display network.

Continue refining. Once you are successfully managing the placements that get great results through managed placements and finding other sites through automatic placements, keep refining. Add keywords to make the campaigns more specific, remove sites that are irrelevant, and continue to look for those sweet spots where your coupon cannot be downloaded enough.

Overall, coupon sites on the display network can be an effective means to help marketers gain market share. Savvy marketers will develop enticing offers and start luring away their competitors’ customers today.