Does your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising match the branding for your company? If it doesn’t, you may want to consider adjusting your ads to be more on-brand. 

Think of a brand that you like or whose products you purchase frequently. Can you picture their logo from memory? What about the color scheme of their vehicles or their products? If you have a company brand that you can think about off the top of your head, it means that they have done a great job on their brand advertising to increase brand awareness.

Now imagine that for your own company. What does it look like? How does your clientele recognize you? What stands out to people who haven’t used your services yet or to people who have?

Your brand awareness is an important factor that you need to consider as a part of your strategy for search engine marketing for contractors, especially in regard to PPC.

Your Brand, Brand Awareness, and Brand Advertising

Let’s start with defining your brand. Your brand is a combination of the promise you make to your customers, including what they can expect from your services, and what differentiates you and your services from your competitors. In short, your company brand is who you are, who you want to be, and who people perceive you to be, including everything from your name and logo to the products and services you offer.

Your advertising brand strategy is the how, what, where, when, and to whom you plan on communicating and delivering your brand messages, and it must match your branding in order to increase brand awareness.

Brand Awareness to Build Equity

Brand awareness can be defined as the extent to which consumers are familiar with the distinctive qualities or image of a brand of goods or services. Strong brand awareness is built with consistent, strategic branding, which leads to strong brand equity, or added value brought to your company’s products and services. This increased brand equity or value can allow you to charge more for your brand than what an identical, unbranded product may command (think about this in terms of the cost for Coca-Cola versus any other generic soda brand).

When you have an established brand and you are building up your brand equity, your messaging in areas such as your landing page content and your ad copy becomes a vitally important part of your strategy. This is because they can either help or hinder continued brand awareness.

This is where your paid search/PPC strategy comes into play.

Using Paid Search to Your Advantage

Paid search as a part of your branded advertising strategy helps to increase brand awareness by increasing your presence on the search engine results page (SERP). When you incorporate paid search ads into your marketing strategy, it allows you the advantage of setting the parameters for that ad, including allowing you to bid on your name.

Why Bid on Your Name?

Bidding on your name is, in a way, like bidding on the idea that a customer will have enough awareness for your company brand that they will search for your name online. You bid on this by setting up your paid ads with your name as the keyword.

If you are wondering why you should bother with bidding on your name for your paid search strategy, we have six reasons why it’s a good idea.

1. It helps you take up space. Bidding on your name ensures you take up more space in the SERPs and increases your chances of conversion.
2. Better control. Paid ads, unlike organic listings, give you more control so you can set them up to match your company brand—which is what your customers are searching for in the first place.
3. Keeps out competition. It may seem odd but the truth is that if you don’t bid on your own name, your competitors will.
4. Improved cost-efficiency. Using branded keywords helps you get more bang for your buck because it offers high relevance in regards to the search term, a high-quality score, and a lower cost.
5. Helps with lead generation. Bidding on your name can help to generate higher quality leads from high-quality traffic.
6. Ties together your branding. When you bid on your own company name, you are better able to make sure that your online and offline presence (ie. Your website and your company vehicles) match and resonate with customers.

Your paid search can help boost your brand awareness by delivering the right brand messaging on the search engine results page. This means that, if done right, it will communicate, visually and verbally, the key tenets of your brand. By ensuring your paid search matches your brand and creates brand awareness, it will help bring customers to you to build additional brand awareness, increasing your brand equity and thereby your value so on.

Looking to give your search engine marketing strategy a big helping hand? That’s what we are here for. Contact iMarket Solutions today to learn more. Dedicated to Contractor Success.