Companies want to grow. Obvious statement, right? This is the reason why we all have jobs as marketers; companies need to grow and they need people who understand how to do that.
I have a startup client who uses this as one of their mantras:
I think it's true. Today I want to talk about how small businesses and startups can grow their brand company through smart marketing even when they don't have a huge budget.
Let me also say that I have stopped telling companies "Oh sure, we'll get you ranking for (insert keyword here)," because that's a small-minded approach to marketing and growing a company (especially a startup). I now tell startups to focus on growing their branded traffic, because that is ultimately how you get links, mindshare, and win online. This advice has only increased since the Penguin and Panda algorithms started rolling out. We're not seeking to trick or game the search engines; we're seeking to build brands online.
Here are a few ways to build branded mindshare.
Produce content
As Will Critchlow said in his SearchLove presentation (embedded at the bottom), you don't have to have money, but you do have to have one of these:
- Time
- Talent
- Balls (aka take risks)
Often, what you need to do first is establish your thought leadership, and that is done through content.
Some of my favorite examples are MailChimp's Resources:
And Grovo's resources:
I also respect what the founders of BufferApp have done by getting content all around the Internet to grow their startup. They've written on leading blogs such as ProBlogger, and now they're even being asked to do interviews, such as this one from Blueglass.
Leverage channels other than search
When looking to grow your company, you should not just leverage search (though it is a great medium for growth). For more on this idea, read Matt McGee's classic You Can Diversify or You Can Die from 2007.
We have so many channels to leverage for growth at this point on the Internet. You've all seen this:
I also want you to think about how you can use other platforms, such as forums or social networks, to tell a story and get attention.
For example, Grovo built out their History of the Internet on their Facebook Timeline:
When they launched it, they did outreach through PR and got exposure (and links) from all these places and more, driving over 300 signups:
Their branded traffic increased after being flat, and has kept increasing to this day:
Have a spokesperson
Having a spokesperson, or public face, is highly underrated by most companies. Potential customers don't (usually) connect with a brand, but they do connect with a person.
Would SEOmoz have grown its community, consulting, or software as quickly without Rand as the face of the company? I don't think so. In fact, his author page is the 8th most linked-to page on SEOmoz.
There are many ways companies can get their spokesperson (a CEO, a CMO, an awesome consultant) known:
- Meetups
- Conferences
- Blogging
- Presentations
- Social media
- Q/A Forums (like Moz Q/A)
- Engaging in online conversations (forums, blog commenting, social media)
Display these people prominently on your website.
Get real
This goes along with the spokesperson point above, but one of the best ways to start getting your company known is to be involved locally. I don't care if you are a tech startup or an international pharmaceutical brand - being involved in your local as well as online community is one of the best ways to build your branded searches and brand advocates.
Here's one example:
Yes, yes, SEOmoz is doing marketing that increases their branded searches (for both SEOmoz AND Mozcation). They're not trying to get us to link to them saying "SEO software," either :-)
Be lovable
I've often challenged clients with "What makes your customers happy, and what is going to make your brand lovable?" In my opinion, there is nothing worse than a faceless brand. It's not trustworthy, it's not likable, it's not fun. Even if you are in a serious industry, you can have a brand that people love because they connect with it.
For example, do you know this guy?
Or this guy:
Or this gal:
Mailchimp has Freddie, and they've even sent out large plush versions such as this one in SwissMiss's studio in Brooklyn:
We associate the face or mascot with the brand. It's called affinity and it works.
Look for search opportunity
Finally, one way to do this in the search results (see, we're still talking about SEO as it pertains to marketing) is to look for areas of opportunity. What are your competitors not doing that you can do? Are they not marking up their sites with Schema? Are they not leveraging image search? How about videos and video snippets in the search results?
That's where you need to go. And use Tom Anthony's SERP Turkey to test if the investment to get those results is worthwhile.
Will Critchlow and Rand Fishkin's presentations from SearchLove
To wrap all this up, I'd like to leave you with a few thoughts. Building branded searches, honestly, is harder than building rankings. Branding is a longterm play, and it's not something that you can do overnight to gain traction. If you're looking for a quick hit to suddenly get a lot of users, branding isn't your answer. But ultimately, it's the right answer for growth and a successful business.
I'd also like to leave you with a couple of presentations about inbound marketing on a budget. This kind of inbound marketing will also win you branded searches. Will and Rand went head to head, as they are known to do at Distilled's conferences, about "Inbound Marketing on a Shoestring Budget". Both had stellar presentations, so I wanted to provide them here for you to flip through and get more ideas:
Compliments John for this post, which nails the reality of web marketing right now as a communication and promotion tool of your brand (startup or not).
I think that what you are describing is quite known to the "older" of us, us that we have seen how old school SEO is fading away.
The problem is - as always - in being able to educate the clients. It may sound astonishing, but sometimes you can find many CMOs who don't really get it, and still think at web marketing as something eminently technical, where keywords and rankings matter above everything else.
I know, it's stupid, isn't it? Especially when those same CMOs should understand that Marketing is Marketing, online or offline, and SEO is a "tool" which has its peculiarities, but the same purposes of all the other marketing disciplines.
Said that, I'd like to suggest to consider how Brands tend to create a branded universe, whose inhabitants are its "personas"; personas whose values and ideals are coincident with the brands one. It is an old tactic in advertisement, as it exists since late '80s (classic example was CocaCola), but it is something that can be considered a strong tactic if developed online, especially if take into consideration the social web.
Somehow SEOmoz has - without purposely wanting to do it - done something similar creating a "World of SEOs" around its TAGFEE tenets and everything derivates from its application.
Awesome words, Gianluca. I totally agree with you on the branded universe paragraph. It's much harder to convince companies that they should go for a targeted audience, though. I think it's a good history lesson to look at companies like Coke. They didn't go for EVERYONE to drink Coke. They targeted specific people and nailed that niche, then went for a different one.
This is the blessing and curse of products that "everyone" needs. Yes, everyone needs it, but you can't market it to the whole world. So we must break down who our customers are (into types or personas) then figure out how to reach them.
Aaahhhh marketing.
I wrote a post on a specific problem with the "everyone is a marketer" approach (https://inboundandagile.com/truth-about-companies-where-everyone-is-a-marketer/) a while back, but I'll summarize here.
Unfortunately, many companies that adopt this approach give everyone the tools, but none of the training, guidelines, filters, standards, or anything else, so you end up having crap content come out, and it makes the company look bad or, at the very least, inconsistent. The worst offenders are often CEOs because no one, but the board, can tell them No, and a lot of CEOs – while they are the owners of the brand – aren't marketers.
I can't tell you how many cringe-worthy "everyone is a marketer" pieces of content I've seen. It's terrible.
Thanks Eric. I think this is an important point. While I think that everyone in the company should be looking for opportunities for interviews, content, and links, not everyone is a "marketer". My client makes a distinction between "marketing" and being a "marketer".
I think CEOs can be great brand advocates when they have direction from someone who knows what they are doing and are willing to take direction. I've had CEOs doing outreach before, but it was under my direction and guidance.
I hope this wasn't a "cringe-worthy" piece of content :-)
Definitely not. Great post as always, John, and thanks for the follow up.
Great post! (throws up deuces and logs off)..
No way, you can't get rid of me so quickly.. :) I like the ideas represented in the post, especially the concept of a mascot or non-human representation of a brand.
One could argue R. McD lends himself to the brand's large portion of child consumers. However, Moz does not have a large market for children (younger than 18). As we can see through tweets, his popularity at Mozcon, and via the drawing contest, people respond well to Roger.
A mascot could be a clever way to brand all types of brands. People like entertainment. Check the expenditures on entertainment for any given year.
Good words dude. Thanks.
Thanks John! Very interesting marketing remarks here.
p.s. "aka take risks" made my day! :)
I'm not sure if you coined the phrase: Branded Traffic but I like it! Especially given the inroads and impact Google Authorship is having on helping the rel=author SMB guy who wants to go toe-to-toe with the Big Boys.
The piece JD Rucker posted up on socialmediatoday entitled: Social Signals, Quality Content, And Search Marketing will Merge in 2013 combined with a few of the dynamics you purport here John will make a lot sense to the SMB guys I've been working with and advocating they consider taking a more pro-active approach with establishing their Though Leadership in their perspective niche markets.
thanks for the reference, needed some further info :)
I like the resources page - a good idea. Thanks for the post!
Awesome article, John. In the past, I've done a lot of PPC work with free downloadable content. However, not until recently have I had the chance to provide free downloadable content through social media and organic search. When the content is good, the campaign will do very well and word will continue to spread organically. More recently, I've been doing a lot of video as it appears to be consumed so much more than just text. Whiteboard Friday has also proven that.
Again, great article!
Thanks so much for producing this post. It's awesome.
Nice blog!! I really believe adding a public face to your brand automatically gives you edge over your competitors.
Images + Social Networks work amazingly well too. Also branding the spokesperson allows for a human bond with the company. Think about successful companies... there is always a face attached (microsoft, wikipedia, apple, virgin media, google, godaddy, etc). Nice article. Thanks!
I agree, one cannot always rely on Google otherwise they might be the next Nextag or discount flights company that will swept aside once the Big G monopolizes everything.
Very beautifully conveyed the three most important elements for success: time, talent and risks
Great post. It seems branded search is the new thing to do.
Got to say that this is one area where small businesses can beat the corporates! While the corporates go through their stifling approval process, small businesses can quickly react to changes and events in the niche. While the argument is that they have more to lose, this fear quickly becomes a total aversion to all risk.
It's also common for larger businesses to lose touch with real people and become increasingly abstract when they think about what their brand means. It doesn't matter squat what your brand means to you - it's what it means to your customers.
Do something great and unexpected for one of your customers (doesn't need to be a *big* thing) and see what happens..
I think my favourite aspect of this post is that it shows that how companies do things rather than what they do contributes hugely to their brand - the MailChimp photo speaks volumes about them as a company. Far too many companies claim they don't have a brand, but they do, they're just not controlling or projecting it in a planned way, as almost all of the examples you've quoted do.
Exactly. Great point. Companies need to be controlling and thinking about their brand and directing the public perception. It's the same argument as most companies give when they are asked why they are not on social - it's hard to control and you're out there available for criticism. I always tell people that the conversation is going on already, so why not get in there and be involved and be able to direct the conversation?
Hi dohertyjf i think the best way to brand your company is via content. Place unique content & distribute it to as many networking sites as possible.Thanks for sharing your knowledge
Excellently written. For a way to see how one business boosted its business and increased ROI 25x check out this story. I think everyone here will be impressed. https://bit.ly/TrXO3z
Great post. People tend to struggle with growth. Marketing is pretty key these days in terms of audience.
Hi! John Doherty your blog post is very helpful, that will be helpful for peoples who want to enhance their company through marketing. To increase the business you have to socialize your companies to become popular among peoples, and build inbound relations with different leverage channels.
What do you do if you dont sell a product though?
It is an effective post to read, i must mention one thing here - all the points that John has mentioned in the article are very practical.
Our favorite SEOmoz post of the year? Maybe. A top 10 post? Definitely. There's always that push vs. pull affect going on in business and we definitely believe we're reaching more of a pull economy. Are we completely getting away from pushing our products to people? No, definitely not...however more and more people are looking for that pull, through content and good service...and that starts with your employees and the people that you hire.
Interesting and true article. My personal opinion, after penguin, what Google is looking for is a brand not a keyword search. An authority website should look for building a brand than just mere keywords pointing to their website.
And a lot engagement through every sort of media.
Thanks for the article.
Great seeing people realizing that general marketing is a part of SEO, and not a completely different ballgame. That is really great!
In addition, branding is also very often seen with outbound marketing methods (expensive) but it works.
a great post.
A lot of people equate marketing and advertising, but in reality, advertising is just one component of your marketing. Everything else your company does (especially in this lightning fast social media age) should be considered marketing.
Thanks for this blog, it was easy to understand and straight to the point! Gave me a lot of inspiration of what i could do for my master thesis!
Sweet!
Oooft! Fantastic post. Love the looking for search opportunity advice, many people neglect to take a good look at the SERPs. Also couldn't agree more with 'real-life' marketing. Since launching my startup I've had success with networking, usually via the people that I meet at events spreading the word for you and then generating brand searches.
Hey John, really great tips in this list. I especially like the last one "Look for search opportunity." I think now is a great time to work with markup to help content shine in the search results. Thanks!
Reading through Will's slides gives the impression that something either hilarious or awesome happened over the last half-dozen or so, but I can't work it out from the slides alone.
Yes, some hilarious things did happen at the end. Sorry you can't figure it out from the slides :-/
I uploaded the audio here: https://www.mixcloud.com/willcritchlow/
Thanks for sharing with us dohertyjf!
Hey dohertyjf!
First off! Thanks for Sharing Brand Awareness with use of such great examples of Brand Pictures. I would thanks to you sharing for both the slides which are an incredible informative.
We believe now, Talent, Time, and Balls always necessary to create brand of any website.
Thanks
I've been working with a lot of local small businesses recently and one of the hardest parts of the job is trying to get buy in for branded search improvement...until you show them them the numbers. Most if them are shocked to see their personal names in the searches and the behavior of those visitors. Finding ways to integrate what they do in their current workflow with online communities is where I'm finding great value for my clients. I think Google is making some incredible changes to aide the results of that work but who knows for sure.
Great stuff John!
I have to agree, but how do you get clients to understand this? I have a client who basically refuses to use their business name on anything. From the sign out front to all signage within the store, no where will you see the brand name. they love keywords, so all 'branding' is basically a bunch of scrambled keywords to represent their business. What would you suggest to convey to them the importance of even upgrading their signage to include their business name?
I think you need to find/write a case study on Apple, Coca-cola or McDonalds and explain that for these very successful companies branding is everything to them. Your client can't dispute these companies are wrong.
Also what type of business says no to more money?
" Everyone at our company is the Marketing " That is on my desk now !!!
"Be lovable" Great! If your company is not approachable you will never reach your goal.
Great piece and great comments. Its always a plus when you don't just gain something from the article but also from the comments!
Good job guys!
Thank you for this write-up, John! And thank you for including traditional media outreach as one of the channels brands can use to help drum up inbound links and brand recognition.
Great post. The objective should be always try to get the most traffic from a brand search.
A lot of businesses out there desire to rank well for competitive phrases, mostly at SME level, but larger companies are sold on the idea that number one for a key term is happy days.
In a lot of instances, it can lead to a lot of traffic, but the constant SERP fluctuations these days means there are calls along the lines of 'Argh! We're not number one!'...'YAY! We are number one again!' and so on.
A brand search for a big company is a sign it's well recognised. If you're thinking of a burger, you're probably thinking of a McD/Hungry Jack's/Whatever. A brand search for an SME is huge because it means the business is becoming renowned for a product.
Wow...I look fat stretched in my avatar. Time to sort that out.
The title of this post really threw me--it seemed like a first post of someone's brand new marketing blog; but there were some interesting concepts in here. I like the way you used real life examples such as SEOmoz, Mail Chimp, and McDonalds. Marketing with a small budget is something I'm grappling with, so thanks so the ideas.
Glad it helped you out!
Thanks for sharing!!
Interesting post...
In 2012, way of marketing has changed. Now, it is all about to give a shape to your business rather than just focusing to get maxmum sales because when your business has no recognition in the industry then it means you have no customer retention as a backup of your business. This way of marketing would make people more fearless from any of the update when they earned reputation through word of mouth marketing.
This is a good-ass post!
I'm doing a marketing project with a real business for a class on a pretty limited budget, so posts like this are my best friend right now. The visuals, examples & slides were a fantastic addition, thanks!
I think it's especially easy for companies/people in general to get caught up in themselves a lot and the point about making sure you aren't only tooting your own horn is a good reminder. In thinking about strategy I've been focusing maybe a little too much on only the features the client offers and not things they could be doing outside of just their little bubble.
Talk about tunnel vision... but hey, thanks for looking out in my periphs!
As a marketer, I totally understand the "build your brand, not your links" idea. To be perfectly honest, I also get the purpose of growing branded traffic, but that's gotta be a hard sell to your clients!
You've bought my love!!!... Thanks for your post.
Great stuff!Would you or anyone else be able to elaborate further on this one:Look for search opportunity?
Let's say your blog races with the top sites in the world for that niche.What would you be looking for that they aren't doing? (Like the rich snippets you gave for example)
Rich snippets, videos, images, news. These are all examples.
HQ videos really have a potential if you can create value from it... I see many industry blog and can say there are very few blogs who are focusing on this idea of doing series of videos on different topics...
I guess it's because the funds and resources you gotta have in order to produce them.
Small blogs that compete with huge sites never have this kind of money, and when they do, they would prefer spending it on SEO or something, rather than producing HQ vids.
:\
It's not always about money though. Filming a video doesn't cost anything really (I have an HD camera that I bought for £150 - while the quality isn't incredible it's more than passable).
More often than not it's about time and effort. And most people aren't willing to invest that time and effort.
Filming a video and editing it takes time and effort. It's not easy. But those that are willing to go above and beyond to make the extra effort are more than likely the ones that succeed.
It doesn't even have to be high quality to start. Have you seen the first Whiteboard Fridays? They're terrible. Terrible lighting, terrible camera. But they caught on and so the equipment has gotten better year after year.
The point is to start.
Hi John, As You discussed all the metrics are come in inbound marketing and all these are free ,but I think two things are missing like Business listing and classifieds, is it not part of the Inbound marketing ?.
Those are tactics, not strategies. They could be part of inbound marketing, but they don't fit in the same scale as the ones that I mentioned.
John Thanks for replied but i think tactics is the part of strategies and strategies is the part of Marketing.