Building the Brand

Branding is a tough game to play. In traditional advertising building a brand can cost millions of dollars. The big boys on the block (think Wal-mart, Sears, Coke, Miller) literally spend billions of dollars annually building the brand. I’m sure that you would be happy to to have that kind of money to throw around, but chances are that your budgets are significantly smaller. Let’s take some learnings from the big guys and show you how to apply them to your business.

Measuring the value of a brand is pretty tough work. Owning the trademark for Coca-Cola has got to be worth something right? In practice it is hard to nail down a price because a brand is not a tangible thing. In truth, it’s more of an art than a science. In the financial world when they put a dollar value on a brand they call it “goodwill.” This is the figure that traditionally gets tossed around.

In the online world there are a few fantastic ways to measure the penetration of your brand. The two best metrics you should follow are:

  1. Direct Navigation Traffic
  2. Number of monthly searches on the brand term and it’s derivatives.

Take Bidz.com for an example. I went to Google Trends and typed in “bidz.”
bidz branding

As you can see, over the last few years, they have enjoyed about a 20% increase in their brand term searches. Now, that’s cool. The data above is Google’s view of the world. When you are assessing the demand for your brand you’ll want the hard facts from your web analytics package.

Go back six months. Measure all the traffic that you received from search engines that included a brand term. Do the same for last month. What is the change in the traffic from these two periods?
Do the same process for your direct navigation traffic. Is your brand getting more prevalent or less?

Start now. Go measure the pulse of your brand.

Have questions about this post? Ask a good question in the comments section below and I will answer it and give you a link on our blog roll. Fire away!

Related posts

TRESemme Nails the Message, Misses the Market

Earlier tonight I was watching Hulu.com (which is really great place to burn a few hours and watch some TV online). I noticed an interesting video advertising concept. TRESemme was running a series of ads throughout the videos. Before the video began there was a screen asking you to "Choose the...

Bad News for Advertisers: Yahoo to Serve Google Ads

Recently Yahoo and Google announced a new partnership. Here's the skinny. Yahoo will serve up Google's ads on about 80% of their search volume. This move will add about a billion dollars annually to Yahoo in the short term, but in the long term they are going to effectively kill off their search...

Google and the Tragedy of the Commons

Don't get me wrong, I love Google. I remember quite clearly what it was like surfing the net in the 90s. Finding what you were looking for was often really hard. Google was absolutely the key to unlocking information quickly and we loved it. Years ago, when I started advertising with them, I...

1 Comment

  1. Trackback: Leveraging Free Web Video Services to Spread Your Marketing Message | snowcaplabs.com

Leave a comment