It is a well known fact in the digital marketing community that managers dealing in paid search and contextual advertising, for clients that spend millions on branding, hardly ever consider the importance of branding through search. However, it is expected that in the future, the impact of search on improving brand visibility, influencing attitudes, as well as effecting dormant purchasing behaviour, is sure to be integrated into KPIs utilized in optimising online PPC campaigns.

Building your brand can be as vital as generating leads or making sales. Most digital marketing professionals use pure direct response metrics and KPIs to ensure that their campaigns are fully optimised, and generate maximum profits. This sort of campaign may be considered good enough, for clients who do not care about influencing future customers. However, if a business wants to build a strong presence on the Internet to win new buyers, they have to think further than just harvesting existing demand.

In most digital marketing campaigns, search engine marketing is usually given credit for a purchase made by a customer, primarily, because running a search is the last thing done by a customer before visiting a landing page. This may be a fact, but other digital marketing avenues such as public relations and traditional advertising also encourage buying behaviour among customers, either directly or indirectly.

Most website visitors arriving on a landing page through search cannot be expected to convert within the session time of a cookie. This does not mean that these visits have no value. Customers may return to a website weeks or months later. The credit for such visits should rightfully go to proper branding; and when giving credit, search marketing should also be recognised for providing searchers with a captivating branding experience.

This makes it important for the digital marketing content on the landing page to be interesting, and engage the viewer, so that even if they do not make a purchase today, they will remember the brand, and come back some time later. Even if they do not return to the landing page created by your digital marketing company, your branding should be strong enough to get them to visit your offline store.

One of the simplest ways to do this is to dig up ‘funnel keywords’ which indicate that a user has not decided what he/she wants as yet. For instance, indirect phrases like ‘travel in UK’, rather than ‘London hotel’ or ‘car rental London’. After making a list of branding-related keywords, various metrics can be set to measure user behaviour, and the resulting outcome of branding activities on revenue.

After a client learns about how search can help in brand building, and influencing customers, digital marketing specialists will find it easy to garner a bigger share of the marketing budget.

Qudos Digital is a leading digital marketing agency, and can be contacted on 0845 388 5583 or info@qudosdigital.co.uk.