The pharmaceutical brand had invited a patient to the meeting. Because this individual has the condition that the brand treats, they were able to provide us with tremendously valuable insights that we could incorporate into our efforts.

This was an amazing experience for me because despite having attended many ePatient conferences over the years, this was the first time I had a seat at the table to not only hear the patient story, but also ask questions about their journey and day to day life.

This experience reminded me of just how important it is for patients, care givers, HCPs, and the pharmaceutical industry in general, to have an unbranded website.

It is an opportunity to get around all the limitations of what you can and cannot include on your brand site, and get back to basics. In short, it allows you to provide patients and caregivers with the kind of information they are truly looking for.

3 Tips To Make An Unbranded Site Work

What are some ways to ensure you give yourself the best opportunity to provide good information to patients and caregivers?

1. Leverage search to get to know your audience segments

It’s no secret that people – patients, caregivers and even health care providers — are using search engines to find health related information. In fact, a 2008 study by Jupiter Research indicates that 72% of users are turning to search engines to find this type of information.

That represents a huge opportunity for pharmaceutical marketers to leverage search engines to get to know their target audience. Using search engines as a jump-off point for your market research will not only tell you what your audience segments are looking for, but also how they’re looking for it. Leverage this information to develop your content strategy so you can become a resource for them.

2. About that content … get committed and dedicate resources to act on it

It’s one thing to identify the opportunity and know it exists, but it’s another thing to act on it. Creating the content you need for an unbranded site requires dedicating real resources – both the budget kind and the human kind. Because this type of initiative is resource intensive, you also need to be committed to it.

With the large number of health information websites out there, along with the Wikipedia’s of the world, it’s hard to compete with them no matter what. However,  a half-hearted effort that produces a five page brochure site won’t give you a fighting chance either.

3. Don’t just develop the content, optimize it!

Given that the vast majority of people search for health information via a search engine, marketers must work to ensure that their efforts are found in the search results. In other words, if you’ve committed to creating the content, be sure that you’re giving yourself an opportunity to be found when someone is looking for the information you have generated.

This means ensuring that your content is technically accessible to search engines. To accomplish this, use Flash in moderate doses but have an HTML back up, incorporate keyword phrases in your content that people are using to find information, and create useful resources that people will want to link to and share within their social circle.

Overall, unbranded websites represent an opportunity for pharmaceutical brands to get back to basics, and deliver the information their audiences are looking for.

Stock image from Shutterstock, used under license.

Online visibility is directly related to how many times your ads appear in the search results, which is directly related to your budget and bidding strategy. Usually, the more money you spend, the more often you appear. But there’s a way around this dynamic.

One way to overcome this problem is through match types. Match types are used to further segment your audience and qualify your click traffic. As your search traffic becomes more and more qualified, the engines will begin to reward you by lowering your costs little by little.

Using this simple rule of the engines (the more relevant you are, the less you pay); marketers can lower their branded costs by strategically using match types to qualify their traffic.

How Match Types Can Help

Catie noticed that her client’s brand awareness had dipped. Naturally, she wanted to rectify the situation. However, she knew that she wouldn’t be able to get additional budget.

So she set up an experiment with her existing brand campaign. Her effort tapped into the different match types available in search, and the various budget tools Google offers.

Over the course of three months, Catie was able to boost her client’s impression share by 70% (See below graph). In addition, her efforts increased her client’s ROI by 71%. Moreover, she was able to achieve these results without spending an additional penny.

Increase impression share with a strong match type strategy.

5 Tips To Get The Job Done

If you need to increase your brand’s presence in the search results without spending an extra penny, the below tips should help you get started:

1. Indentify and separate keywords. Even within brand campaigns, there will always be a few keywords that outperform the rest. Review your performance data and identify your top performing keywords. Then place them into their own separate campaigns. This will give you granular control you need to boost efficiency.
2. Leverage match types. Set up your branded campaigns to run across the various match types: Broad, Phrase, and Exact. This will help you capture as many branded impressions as possible. Be sure each campaign includes all of your top performing keywords. This step helps you maximize your branded reach.
3. Spread the budget around. The costs associated with each match type will vary. For example, Broad match terms are usually more expensive than Exact match. Therefore, you should designate a larger portion of your budget to the Broad match campaign, a lower percentage to the Phrase campaign, and an even lower percentage to your Exact campaign.
4. Accelerate your spend. Set your Exact match campaign to accelerate spend. The engines will serve out the Exact match first since they are the most relevant match to the search query. Because there is nothing more exact than Exact match, these keywords will be served up before Phrase or Broad match. Exact match CPCs are always lower than Phrase and Broad (and your Exact match campaign is made up of your top performers). This approach will help you save budget that you can reallocate to your Phrase and Broad match campaigns. This extra budget savings allows your campaigns to run longer throughout the day, thus increasing your brand presence.In addition to spreading your branded campaign longer in the day, you will probably see increased conversion metrics on the back-end. On average, Exact match types yield strong back-end performance metrics.
5. Don’t forget negatives. To keep the engines from matching your Broad and Phrase match campaigns to your Exact match campaigns, use negatives. Take your top performing Exact match keywords, and be sure they are on Negative Exact match within your Broad and Phrase match campaigns. This simply keeps all three campaigns from cannibalizing one another.

Brand presence is very important in the digital search space today, but boosting its performance doesn’t always require an increase in budget. Match types can help you get the job done without incurring additional costs.

Direct linking occurs when the affiliate uses the merchant’s website as the display URL, with an affiliate link as the destination URL. The effect of this tactic is that the affiliate does not need to operate a website because it is directing traffic straight from the search page to the merchant’s website.

This tactic, while economical, efficient, and easy for the affiliate, creates problems for merchants.

Common issues include:

1.   Channel Conflict

Channel conflict arises when the merchant and the affiliate are advertising on the same keyword set. In this instance, Google, Yahoo, and Bing only show one advertiser at a time with the same display URL.

Because the affiliate and the advertiser are using the same display URL, the two are in essence competing to be served on the SERP. The end result is a bidding war between the affiliate and the merchant on whose behalf the affiliate is advertising in the first place.

2.   Messaging Conflict

Messaging conflict occurs when the affiliate has developed its own ad content that doesn’t match your messaging.

Examples include off-brand messaging, outdated offers, or offers that you do not want promoted against certain keyword combinations. As in issue #1, here, only one ad can be served at a time. If the ad served is the affiliate’s ad, then your brand message isn’t being seen.

3.    Revenue Wars

Revenue wars refer to the struggle between your SEM team and affiliate teams to each gain credit for conversions, actions, and/or sales from paid search keywords.

If revenue is not properly attributed to the SEM team, for instance, then ROI calculations will suffer, causing issues with your bidding methodology and most likely the logic and algorithms in use by your campaign management vendor.

Because we have the affiliate ad on the one hand, and the SEM team’s ads on the other hand vying for impression share, it is likely that revenue attribution will be skewed when direct linking is deployed.

The Search Monitor and other compliance vendors have been working with SEM Brand managers and affiliate teams over the past several years to identify instances of direct linking in order to rectify the problems noted above by eliminating the direct linking tactic from the affiliate’s arsenal.

It is noteworthy that some affiliates are allowed to direct link, in which case, these affiliates are white listed and empowered to run with this tactic, however, in the vast majority of instances, direct linkers are violating the terms and conditions of the affiliate agreement.

It seems to be a reasonable hypothesis that the deployment of compliance vendors would generate lower instances of direct linking over time.

However, the trends are actually the opposite. We looked at a 10 month time frame spanning from June 2010 thru March 2011 across nearly 20,000 keyword variations, across many different vertical markets. What we found is that the instances of direct linking is actually growing, and not shrinking at all.

In fact, the rate of direct linking affiliates has more than doubled since June 2010. Keep in mind when reviewing the chart below, that not all of the keywords checked contained affiliate marketers and the trends below are averages across all terms reviewed.

Three reasons why the rate is on the rise rather than decreasing is a function of several factors:

1.  As with all types of fraud, there are times when fraud levels off, re-surges, declines, levels off, and resurges again. Downward trends can happen if other better tactics are discovered to be more beneficial for the fraudsters. When those tactics dry up, old tactics are recycled again.

2.  There are simply more affiliates than there are merchants who have adopted compliance tools and therefore, only the most diligent merchants have cleaned up their programs. We are still in the early stages of this type of compliance checking and therefore, most users are early adopters.

3.  The summer months generate less traffic then the winter months, and therefore, direct linkers perhaps take a sabbatical during those times. However, if this were the sole cause of the trend, we would see a big spike during the holiday season, and a leveling off toward March.  This is not the case, and instead we see a steady growth pattern, with a surge in March.

We are also seeing the same types of resurgence with spam trends.

According to Symantec’s State of Spam and Phishing monthly report for March 2011: “As forecasted in the last month’s report, average daily spam volume did increase for the first time since August 2010. The average daily spam volume increased 8.7 percent in February month-over-month. Overall, spam made up 80.65 percent of all messages in February, compared with 79.55 percent in January.”

Unfortunately, those affiliates and other types of fraud purveyors are always looking for ways to get around detection. Merchants engage with great diligence for periods of time, and then there are time spans when attention is directed away from compliance, thus, opening up the opportunity for an increase in undesirable tactics.

It is a cycle that is continuous. Just as direct linking is on the rise today, it is entirely foreseeable that it will decrease over periods of time in the future as well.

Understanding The Shift

There are more brands competing in search than ever, but the playing field is hardly level. In fact, it has shifted. Today it favors well-recognized brands that have built brand equity. Those who haven’t invested in their brand are being left behind.

A recent study underscores this point. According to a recent Kenshoo report, “the number of clicks on search ads increased by 54% from 2009 to 2010, while the number of search ad impressions (the number of times these ads appeared) increased by only 1%.”

This finding demonstrates that while the overall number of searches remained flat, traffic increased drastically for those brands already running robust search programs.

The Importance Of Integration

Many marketers think they can leverage paid search to drive ROI without investing in brand. Unfortunately, this thinking is delusional. To win in this arena, you first must invest in creating a well-known brand that is top of mind with consumers. Doing so will build volume that you can then capture via search.

The significance of this dynamic is supported by an iProspect and Forrester Research study on the integration of search and display. It reveals that display advertising is effective at producing brand lift, particularly when it is used in combination with paid and natural search.

In fact, the study indicates that “almost as many Internet users respond to online display advertising by performing a search on a search engine (27%) as those who simply click on the ad itself (31%).”

This finding underscores the importance of investing in display advertising to boost brand as it will increase the number of branded searches. In turn, it will yield a higher direct ROI as these terms tend to be cheaper than non-branded terms.

Learning A Lesson

Clearly, investing in brand is key; however, it won’t drive ROI by itself. Connecting branding efforts with paid search is essential. A major home electronics manufacturer helps us see why.

The company was running an aggressive display campaign, evident by their ads being found on a large majority of consumer electronic review sites. This was an ideal branding initiative as it hit consumers when they were in the shopping mindset. It also communicated the brand’s unique value proposition. Fortunately, the effort produced a substantial increase in search query volume for the brand month-over-month and year-over-year.

However, the manufacturer did not run any paid search campaigns to capture the demand they had created, and only one retailer capitalized on the manufacturer’s newly-created brand interest. Consequently, the lack of connection between the branding effort and the search program hurt the conversion and click-through rates. Ultimately these disconnects resulted in lower online sales for the retailers carrying this brand and for the manufacturer itself.

Taking Action To Build Brand Search Volume

Below are three tips to help you build your brand online to create more volume and better connections:

1.  Leverage the content networks

Both Google and Bing/Yahoo! have comprehensive content programs that can be managed from paid search interfaces. If your brand doesn’t have display creative, utilize the best performing ad copy from your search campaigns and leverage it in the content networks.  If creative is available, test between text and other types to see which combination of copy produces the highest return.

By expanding to where your consumers are digesting content, you will inevitably build brand recall. This is particularly true for the retail industry. Another iProspect study indicates that online display ads produce a brand lift of 5% in regard to the likelihood of purchasing from a particular retailer. It is also worth noting that the same study found that the combination of paid search and display advertising produces a 15% lift in unaided brand recall.

2.  Leverage social media

Until recently, measuring the value of social media interactions has been difficult unless the vehicle being used was a direct sales tactic such as a coupon. According to research done by Syncapse and hotspex, the value of a Facebook fan is $71.84 more than a non-fan. This data alone supports the value of a Facebook campaign focused on acquiring fans; however, there are more benefits.

By generating social media buzz, you can drive consumers to search for your brands. Therefore, it’s imperative that a brand’s unique value proposition be communicated in a consumer-friendly manner in order to generate awareness and chatter. Without conversations, the value of Facebook and other social media mediums is limited, and without buzz, there are no incremental queries on the search engines. By generating incremental brand queries, sales will increase online, and thanks to Facebook fans, off-line as well.

3.  Leverage online videos

According to a study conducted by YuMe, more than 66% of respondents watched more online videos than they did 12 months ago, and 48% said they planned to increase viewership this year. Taking these statistics into account, it is easy to see why video should be considered for more than just funny clips. Today, videos are a means to gain mass media recognition.

Given that, brands need to leverage online video to grow their awareness, not just as a way to repost their TV spots. By creating branded content, marketers will be able to build deep relationships with their consumers and generate greater brand awareness. In turn, this will lead to higher branded search queries.

In today’s competitive search landscape, the best way to drive ROI is to first invest in building your brand, and the above tactics can help you do just that. Then, you’ll be in a great position to tap into paid search to capture the demand you’ve created.

Conversely, branding is not the ‘usual’ way that the search channel is used. This is primarily because branding objectives differ greatly from direct response goals and therefore the same measures do not apply. Usual branding objectives encompass things like creating awareness, generating familiarity, promoting consideration, and driving recommendations.

While clicks and purchases are not relevant to the measure of a branding effort, there are metrics that can be derived from the search channel which do fit nicely with a branding strategy.

For example, we can measure efforts to create brand awareness from stats like reach and frequency, a.k.a. impression share. We can measure familiarity and consideration by cleverly bidding on paid search terms that connote our brand and measuring the effectiveness via click thru rate on our advertisements as compared to other connotative keywords.

Branding on the search channel is important because the opportunity for exposure is big and continues to get bigger. During a recent joint webinar with The Search Monitor on Budgeting Intelligence, Eli Goodman of Comscore put forth the following key information on search use:

• Search intensity has grown by 11% since January of 2010 – search intensity refers to the number of searches per search.
• Searchers are usually looking for something to do, somewhere to go, or for places to find information.

The Top 5 Ways To Use Search For Branding

1. Target interest-based keywords

Branding can be about connecting with your target base through relevant interests. There is a gaping hole of opportunity within paid search to target keywords that connote interests tied deeply to your brand. For example:  if you run a search for cooking related keywords like ‘fried chicken’, ‘crab cakes’, or ‘chicken soup’, you will find virtually no advertisers.

However, these are great opportunities for home focused brands like William Sonoma, Calphalon, and others to get in front of their target market, not for the purpose of driving a sale but simply as an opportunity for branding.

You can try the same exercise with recreational keywords like ‘wilderness kayaking’ or  ‘sky diving’ or ‘biking events’. Again, you will notice that there are either no advertisers or only a small subset of advertisers that offer the specific expedition style sport.

These types of interest based keywords could present a great opportunity for Camelback or Specialized to run branding based ads.

2.  Target traits-based keywords

Branding can be about emphasizing unique traits of your brand. You can target keywords that emphasize your key selling points coupled with your ad copy to hammer home serious brand messages. This is great strategy for manufacturers and is totally underutilized.

For example:  if you search for keywords that denote quality, there is a dearth of advertisers like ‘high quality brake pads’, ‘unbreakable sink parts’, ‘stain free carpet’ or ‘knowledgeable insurance broker’.

3.  Optimize video

If you have strong video advertisements that depict your brand messaging, you need to optimize your videos for organic search results. You should promote your videos through YouTube sponsored search. You should promote these videos on social media using the pay-per-click platform offered through Facebook.

4. Brand Meta Tags for organic SEO listings

Organic listing descriptions are often pulled from your meta tags. I find that brands are hyper focused on getting a top rank, that the description is often overlooked. The listing description is a fantastic place to put out branded messaging. You control the meta tag descriptions. Your tagline and other targeted messages can gain more reach through placement within your organic listing descriptions.

Pizza Hut does a nice job of this with strong branding messages within its organic listing copy: “Pizza Hut – home of America’s favorite pizza, delivering delicious hot pizza and WingStreet buffalo wings straight to your door. Order your Pizza Hut pizzas”:

5.  Be there when your brand is queried

You should have a strong presence when your brand is specifically being searched.

This includes:  slogans, brand names, product names, typos, and adding ‘.com’ extensions to your keywords. This should also include brand phrases – keywords that contain your brand.   While I am stating the obvious, solid search data also supports this, as Comscore noted during our presentation together that out of the top 15 paid search terms (based on click volume), 11 are brand names.

Consistent Messaging From Search To Site

When considering these options, also bear in mind that the landing pages where you are driving branding traffic should show continuity of messaging. If you are promoting your ‘stain free carpets’, then the landing page should explain more about how your unique process enables you to provide carpets that shun stains.

Remember that the goal of your branding campaign isn’t to drive a sale today but to create awareness about a specific trait, style, or need that your brand meets – in turn driving long term customer loyalty and hopefully word of mouth recommendations to friends and family.

Yesterday, my company released a response to our friends, summarizing our thoughts (I’ll put a link at the end of this post, but I’ll summarize the response here). In it, we discuss that there are two issues here.

One is the tactical issue of cheating, which, of course, has been covered in great detail.

The second issue isn’t getting as much attention, and it’s philosophical in nature. Companies are still looking for the easy and cheap way of accomplishing their goals, rather than actually taking the time to understand what the market wants and delivering fantastic site and customer experiences.

What is truly amazing about this situation, and others like it, is that we don’t look at why Google is placing such disproportionate weight on links, particularly in this case, when so many of the links are of poor quality.

Even when Google’s algorithm caught JCP with its face covered in cake and icing, the resulting shift downward in rankings (as described in the NYT article) was pretty meager, especially when compared with the effect after human intervention.

Of course, links are tremendously important to search rankings, and all of the brilliant readers of Search Engine Land understand that.

However, what we have here is a situation where JCP as well as many other brands / retailers, have a complete void of assistive and rich content to accompany their site experiences, and that lack of content is what requires search engines to look off the site for signals that this site and these pages are even worth considering.

The sad part is that in the physical stores, you can interact with salespeople. These people will talk to you about what bedding will look good in your home. They will help you dress for your first day at the new job. They will tell you what the bulleted list of product features on a steaming iron actually does for you and your clothes.

What these salespeople don’t do (in most cases) is just blab out some marketing language about each product and have a call to action on their foreheads.

The even more unfortunate part of all of this is that there were tremendous resources (in people and money) poured into link development and gaming Google (which continues to happen at thousands of companies who are seeking “the easy way”).

All of those resources could have been put into researching what users were looking for in search, what users were doing on the site (and not doing), and creating a brilliant site experience with relevant content to satisfy all of those external search and on-site hopes and dreams.

Doing this would have naturally separated JCP from its competitors who were not willing to invest in creating a genuinely great site experience or developing the same content on their site.

Brands Are Missing Big Opportunities

Today, most commerce sites look more like self-serve warehouses (albeit very pretty warehouses) than real stores with helpful salespeople. Brands tend to approach the real-world experience with customers in a very human way: they ask questions, learn what people want, and know that by giving them a good customer experience, they will succeed in the sale.

Online, however, these same brands turn into scientists, devoid of this same warmth and care for the customers’ needs, instead focusing on how many walls in their mouse maze need to be electrified and where they need to relocate the cheese to get more mice to their meal. Or worse yet, they just dump 10,000 mice into the maze, knowing that at least a few won’t get shocked, die from exhaustion, or jump out of the maze entirely (scientifically known as “mouse bounce rate”).

The issue is that companies are looking for quick wins with no effort. And they’re looking for these wins to build loyalty, brand affinity, conversion rates, and all of the sorts of things that “quick wins” actually do completely the opposite of.

Usability is not the practice of making people do something. It’s the practice of studying what people want to do and making their experience better. Consider what would happen if the usability of the air conditioner in your car were to make you choose a temperature that Ford thought you should want. You’d probably hate your whole car.

I’d urge us to collectively think about what a future where we truly deliver great experiences to our audiences looks like. Does that sound like something Google would want to rank highly? Does that sound like something that would garner word of mouth? Does it sound like it would have greater conversion, greater loyalty, greater customer lifetime value? It does to me.

Today, I can only list a dozen or so brands off the top of my head who I feel really care about me. And I pull my wallet out for them more than anyone else, I recommend them, I invest in them. I can list a thousand brands who I feel will cut any corner to do it the easy way, knowing I’m a captive or forced audience, or just knowing they have another bucket of mice they can dump into the maze.

There’s a reason for this ratio. But I think it’s a terrible one, because nobody in the short list I mentioned first is struggling for cash flow.

Truly analyze your audience; look at them as human beings, not mice. Pretend they are right there in front of you. How can you give them something truly better? Google is dying to rank that experience first, because Google wins when the user wins.

More reading:

• Our response to our clients and friends on the NYT JCP SEO Debacle
• New York Times Exposes J.C. Penney Link Scheme That Causes Plummeting Rankings in Google
• 3 Issues To Consider Before Focusing On More Traffic

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.

In that scenario, the typical landing page would contain the advertiser’s logo and look ‘official’ as if it were authorized or even owned by the brand holder through the use of colors and brand like design.

The website might prominently display a form for you to enter your email address in order to receive a prize such as a gift card or will ask you for more information about yourself, thus creating a ‘lead’ to be sold by an affiliate marketer.

Affiliates Misrepresent Your Brand Identity In Email

This tactic has an additional ploy – email. Yes, I am talking about SPAM, but a special kind of SPAM where the brand owner is unknowingly being exploited in unsolicited emails for the benefit of affiliate marketers with a tricky design, intended to skirt around the CAN SPAM act.

We have seen all sorts of brands exploited in this manner including phone providers, phone manufacturers, nationally known restaurant chains, computer brands, and major airlines. I am purposefully not mentioning any of these brands by name due to potential liabilities for them under the CAN SPAM act.

To refresh your memory, the CAN SPAM act sets out rules to govern email messages that promote or advertise commercial products or services.

The basic tenets of the act are:  not to be false or misleading in the header or subject, to allow recipients to opt-out, and to inform recipients of who you are, where you are located, and how to opt out.

The misdirected brand tactic for email uses the following clever ruse:

• A prominent brand is mentioned in the email with a call to action e.g. confirm your phone order for a [cell phone brand].
• The ‘from’ field contains an alias disguised to look like a subject such as ‘Travel Confirmation’.  You will need to view the email details to see the email address of the sender (which is an extra step if you use a free web mail account).  When you do that, the ‘from’ field will appear to come from an individual, probably a fake name, at a website that doesn’t display a web page and is registered as a private domain so that you can’t obtain the registration information.
• The message subject makes it look like you have already ordered something e.g. ‘please confirm reservation ABC123’
• The message body consists of 2 lines of text – no images.  Your email is the greeting line, followed by a message in the body such as ‘Please claim your promotional tickets on [a popular airline]:  Confirmation Code ABC123’. Like the sample shown below.

• The opt-out portion of the email appears below the fold, after scrolling through a yard of white space. You will then find 2 places to click to opt-out. The first will appear in text with a bogus address. The second will only appear if you enable images, and will contain a second different address embedded in a blurry image.
• If you click through on the link in the email, just like in the misdirected display URL trick, you are misdirected to a web page that appears to be an official site sanctioned by the brand with a logo and brand colors, but is actually designed by an affiliate marketer to obtain your email address or other personal information.
• Finally, opting-out of the email is not effective. The reason is because the affiliate is operating under multiple aliases. Opting out of a single alias does not opt you out of the others.

The ruse is compounded in that on the surface, it appears to be compliant with CAN SPAM, however it is not. In fact, violates several of the tenets of CAN SPAM laws:

1. It is false and misleading. The subject implies that you ordered something when you did not. The link leads to a brand imposter web site. Last, the domain from which it is sent is a private domain, thus violating the underlying spirit of being upfront as opposed to misleading.
2. It doesn’t provide a proper address. It is implied that the address provided should match the sender. However, there is no way to verify a match since the private domain makes it impossible to verify.
3. The Opt-out is Improper. While you can opt-out, the method violates the spirit of the act. Since the affiliate is using multiple aliases, you would need to opt-out from each alias at an incredible pace in order to keep up with the barrage of spam. Further, the opt-out is located after a lengthy stretch of white space, making it tough to find. Finally, opting-out may only be another clever way to confirm your email address and thus opt you in instead.

As Brand owners, you need to be aware of this tactic and monitor email vigorously for it.

The CAN SPAM act specifically makes it your responsibility to monitor email messaging. If your brand is identified in the email, you are just as culpable as the affiliate. The fine for violating the CAN SPAM act is up to $16,000 for each separate email. Monitoring costs a lot less than the penalty and will save the good will of your brand.

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 receiving the barrage of emails from brands this holiday season, some who I have done business with before and some I have not, I started to wonder:  Should you develop new year’s resolutions for your brand? What about putting your brand on a diet? Saturated fats are bad for us, perhaps saturated brands are bad for us too.

A brand can’t over-eat, but it can do things like over-email and over-coupon.

Over-Emailing Your Customers

The first step to solving a problem is admitting that you have one. Brands are addicted to email. My personal example: I spent 3 hours recently un-subscribing to marketing emails all from my favorite brands, particularly those who sent 1 email a day over the holidays, 1 email a week the rest of the year. Multiply that by all of the brands that you love, plus the ones you don’t, and it gets complicated.

I wanted to write them each a letter so that they wouldn’t be sad when I left. I wanted it to say something like this:

My Dearest Brand,

We have been friends for many years. I buy things from you, you send me those things. Sadly, though, I must end our email relationship. It’s not you, it’s me – well actually it is you. You see, there are a lot of brands in the sea, and they all email me. Your email doesn’t get noticed, and distracts me so that I often miss more important emails from friends, family, and colleagues. I also suspect you are emailing others and saying the exact same things, which makes me feel less loved. I will continue to buy things from you, but we must break off our email relationship. When I need you, I will find you.

All the best, Lori.

Perhaps a better strategy is to send relevant information and to do it at relevant times. Maybe it’s a bad idea to send the same un-personalize email to everyone. Look at what was purchased in the past by your customer, and send that customer relevant and personalized information. Do it with a frequency that makes sense based on what that customer buys from you.

Know your customer’s buying buying patterns and history. Do you know how long it takes for a sweater to go out of style or to lose its fluff in the wash? For example, if the person bought a sweater and you know they will need new sweaters in 12 months, email them then. If you do that, then we can get back together – in an email sort of way.

Over-Couponing = Brand Site Devalued In SERPs

I have dubbed 2010 as the ‘Year of the Coupon’. We have Groupon, Living Social, Restaurant.com, and locally focused businesses like Mobile Scoops. We get them in our email, on our phone, and did you also know – we get them on search from web sites mostly operated  by affiliate marketers. These affiliate coupon websites dominate the search results.

Therefore, when you offer discounts, promo codes, or coupons, the side-effect is that you will find yourself quickly getting knocked down on search results. This unintended consequence on search pages occurs when the coupon websites, who are promoting your coupons, get pushed to the top of the search results, inevitably pushing your branded website down.

Just run a search with this combination of keywords: ‘any brand + coupon’   or ‘any brand + promo code’. You will see a list of coupon and deal web pages at the top of the natural results and find yourself perhaps low on page 1 or completely absent. Here are a few examples to try:  ‘Sony Promo Code’ , ‘Dell Coupon’, ‘Hanna Andersson Shipping Code’

Result: The entire 1^st page of the organic results consist of coupon websites.

From a search engine perspective, this is the proper result – relevant content based on what the consumer is seeking which is a coupon. But from a brand perspective, is this how you want to be represented? Perhaps a better strategy is to develop a web page of your own that showcases your promo codes and coupons so that you are on top and controlling the message.

To give you a taste – here are the top 6 results on the search for ‘Sony Promo Code’:

Is this the way you’d like to present your brand’s body image in search? If the answer is no, it may be time to think about putting your brand on a diet.