Agencies and internal marketing departments of companies have been managing brands in a similar manner since before the internet.
Many digital marketers believe that since Google and other search engines came along, there is no need to market brands in the same way and all that it now takes is for that brand to be found in the search engine results.
This couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Why your Brand is not Being Found in Search
When you launch a new company most people will not know the name of it and therefore it is unrecognizable to the general population or the targeted audience who are potential customers.
This is one of the main reasons that a campaign is started to build brand awareness to get the word out about your new business, product or service. This strategy will assist getting this new brand name to become synonymous with whatever product or service solution you provide.
For some reason companies with established brand named companies believe they can offer new products and service offerings under a new branded name and Google will automatically know what this is. This is simply not the case.
How Search Engines Comprehend Brands
Similar to people, search engines learn and understand branding in a similar way.
Let’s use a fictitious brand to illustrate this point – LaserStrengthen (hey, I never said I was a branding guy). A new product brought to you by the well established brand of MedPrime Inc.
Let’s imagine this product is able to heal a bone break in less than one week and it was just approved by the FDA. If we are going to think big with an idea…
Now MedPrime being a large, well known brand decides to launch this new product with its well thought out brand name and adds five pages to their website with the focus of ranking for the term LaserStrengthen.
The problem is that no one is searching for the term. No one knows about it yet. Google will probably serve the page up high in the results, because of course the digital marketers are doing their job of getting the page to rank for that particular keyword term.
But Google isn’t providing the page as a result for any other terms and traffic to these landing pages is very low because as stated before, no one knows about the brand or product as of yet.
Search engines are an extremely effective digital marketing medium, but even Google has its limits.
Companies Still Need To Do Branding Campaigns
In this situation, MedPrime Inc. should be getting the word out in multiple ways to let the target market know about this great new product of theirs called LaserStrengthen.
- Emails to targeted prospects
- Display ads introducing this new technological breakthrough
- Trade show booths for the industry
- Online videos explaining how this works
- Articles in industry related publications
- Etc…
In the aftermath of these efforts, there will be two results relating to SEO.
- Google will now have information to not understand the new brand
- Word will have spread about the product and caused people to do brand specific searches and related queries
The big key for your website team is to be sure these pages are not only optimized for the brand keywords but also for the solution phrases.
bone healing technology
bone break healing time
bone fracture repair procedures
Not everyone will remember your product name. But in a situation where you are first to the market with a solution to a problem no one ever came close to considering was possible, brand awareness has to be established first otherwise there is no reason that anyone will conduct the first search. This is where many startups miss the mark when they bring something so revolutionary to the market.
No one was searching for a razor or the month club or ride sharing services until Dollar Shave Club and Uber started their campaigns. At that time, searches for those brand names and related searches began increasing dramatically.