After all, it was very popular. But now the AT&T brand is stronger than ever, and hardly anyone remembers the brand they cut. When faced with a merger today, marketers should tap into paid search to bring the brands together.

A Difficult Journey

Combining two companies can be a painful experience. In fact, it can produce a to-do list from hell. There are seemingly endless meetings to arrange, trainings to schedule, and corporate and consumer-level communications to craft.

Overall, it takes patience, planning, and constant re-evaluation. And throughout it all, you need to reassure your audiences that this merger is in everyone’s best interest.

Understanding Search’s Role

This is exactly where paid search can help. When combining brands during a merger, you should leverage it to test different messages. Doing so will allow you to see what best resonates with your target audiences, make adjustments, and quickly get the information into the market.

Keep in mind that if something doesn’t resonate in paid search, it isn’t likely to do so elsewhere. In short, paid search can help you find the right external messaging so you can ensure that you’re positioning the merger in the best light possible.

How To Create A Successful Brand Union

Below are some paid search tips to help companies combine their brands during a merger process:

1. Create a transition experience. It is reasonable to expect that products and services will be changing as you retire one of the brands. However, realize that even if your company is moving forward, many of your consumers may still want the old product or service. Given that, continue to bid on the relevant terms that support the old offering, and lead your consumers to a landing page that explains the replacement product or service. Be sure it provides them with information about how to convert.
2. Target on-the-go consumers. Will any brick-and-mortar stores be re-branded as part of this merger? If so, be sure to capitalize on the power of targeting on-the-go consumers with mobile search. This is an easy — and still inexpensive — addition that your agency or engine reps can help you with. Remember to add shorter, broader terms to target the shorter search terms used on mobile. Also, be mindful that these consumers aren’t only actively seeking your product or service, they are often already en route.
3. Implement a roll-out plan. To test your re-branding strategy, selectively choose a few (smaller) markets, and gather as much data as possible about how consumers respond to your ad copy and keywords. Then develop a list of findings and revise your strategy as needed before testing on the next market. Slowly work your way up to your largest, most important markets. By continuously testing, applying your findings, and revising your strategy, you can ensure that you’re setting yourself up for success by the time it is most critical.
4. Run paid search concurrently with other marketing media. iProspect research shows that two-thirds of Internet users are driven to search by an offline channel. Considering that, make sure all of your agencies are working together to develop an integrated marketing plan. Be sure that your ad copy uses language that is similar to that used in your other channels. Doing so will allow you to leverage search to capture the demand these other channels generate.
5. Get local. Targeting consumers where they live is an extremely powerful search tactic. Consider localizing your ad copy to a specific market, depending on current brand loyalties. Be sure to include some of the local options, such as Google Places, to concurrently show the locations of your brick-and-mortar stores with your ads.
6. Test your brand messaging. Think about the recent mass failures of new brand logos for Gap and Tropicana. While neither of these situations was the result of a merger, they underscore the importance of testing. Quite simply, you can’t afford to have a brand slip-up like this during such a critical time. Use A/B or multivariate testing to determine what messages resonate with your audience before releasing your ad copy and creative more broadly.
7. Balance your organic rankings. How are you currently ranking on your key terms organically? Are you on the first page? Paid search can help you build your search engine presence on key, non-branded terms. To ensure that your key consumers are seeing and responding to your message, consider double-serving on both brands.

Getting through a merger isn’t easy, but paid search can help make it a success. Be sure to use it to effectively market the union of your brands. Doing so could save your company a lot of time and money.

Understanding the value

In this economy where marketers need to do more with less, it is easy to understand why they might balk at the idea of incorporating branded terms into their PPC campaigns. Many marketers figure, “Why should I pay for my brand to show up in paid search when my organic listings will do the work for free?” Granted, their argument might appear valid—at least on the surface level—but this strategy is actually quite risky. What happens when search engines change their algorithms? Or increase personalization? Or make any number of changes that might destroy those top ten listings? If you pay to play you are essentially purchasing an insurance policy for your brand terms.

Apart from risk mitigation, the truth is, bidding on your branded terms can benefit your brand in a number of ways. First is the additional traffic and revenue you can net. In fact, studies have shown that branded terms can provide significant lifts in revenue. In addition, keep in mind that only 70% of users click on the organic search results. Considering that, the inverse translates into considerable missed opportunity. In other words, if your brand is not present in the paid search listings, you could be missing out on 30% of your potential traffic and revenue. Bidding on your branded terms eliminates that risk and allows you to dominate the search results page and capture all of your potential traffic.

But incorporating branded terms into your PPC campaigns can also directly benefit your brand by providing you with the speed, agility and control you need to meet your objectives—which is something you just can’t get with organic search. And having the ability to quickly and easily make changes to your ads can have considerable brand implications. For example, if your brand suddenly found itself in the midst of a product recall, you would be able to quickly change your messaging in response to the situation, and in the process, mitigate further brand damage.

Finally, bidding on your branded terms will allow you to leverage your brand to cross-sell or test new brand messaging. For example, let’s say that your company wants to change its unique value proposition. Obviously, such a significant change would impact all of your online and offline marketing. Given that, you would want to test any proposed messaging changes before moving forward. Bidding on your branded terms allows you to do exactly that. You can quickly and easily leverage your branded PPC efforts to rotate ads using your current value proposition versus the newly proposed one to test which one resonates best with your customers before pushing to a broader market.

Making it happen

Clearly, bidding on your branded terms is beneficial to your brand and is worth the investment. However, to create an effective brand PPC strategy, you need develop a plan that will allow you to pay as little as possible for your branded terms, while helping them operate at their full potential. Below are a few tips to help you do exactly that:

• Improve your branded quality scores. This can most easily be achieved by placing your branded terms in their own, “always-on” account where they can build historical performance and you can easily control spend. Remember, high quality scores mean lower CPCs.
• Closely monitor your affiliates’ activity. If your affiliates are bidding on your brand terms, they could be artificially inflating your costs. Create a contract with your affiliates that either prevents them from bidding on your brand all together, or enforces a max bid that will not raise your costs.
• Dominate the page. Competitors and affiliates can all bid on your brand. If you are not present at the top of the paid search results, you could be missing out (or paying affiliate fees) on potential clicks.
• Test new messaging. Before you put new ads live in other markets, leverage PPC to test how they resonate with your consumers against your current messaging.
• Alert customers to new products or services. There is no denying that some brand searches are purely navigational. However, by capitalizing on your brand in PPC, you can use it to cross-sell or up-sell through your ad copy or landing page, something you cannot control as easily in the organic search results.

While many marketers are resistant to paying for their brand in paid search, doing so can benefit brands considerably. In fact, by developing an effective brand PPC strategy and fully capitalizing on it, a marketer can ensure that their branded terms pay for themselves.