SEO Battles : SEO vs Brand

Quotes

• “Brand marketing is about feelings and trust. Anything you want to do with brand marketing youre trying to get something out of your audience that is intangible, very human, and feelings that are not measurable.” -Lillian

• “It is about creating the intangible ideas that people form in their mind about a brand and getting it to a point where you can influence peoples decision-making when they are at a point they are ready to buy.” -Lillian

• “I break brand marketing into two parts. Theres the brand development, i.e., whats the story we are telling, how do we want people to feel? How do we want to represent ourself?” -Ben

• “Then theres a separate part of brand marketing which is how do you drive awareness, how do you drive affinity, and there are channels that are a little harder to track from a direct response perspective because they are not pixel-able and they are not direct-response driven. They are just meant to help you understand what the brand is and what its about.” -Ben

• “Even though it is difficult to measure, its been proven that it does have an impact on buying decision.” -Lillian

• “The brand advertising, your billboards, your radio, your TV, even print often as something that is untrackable but inherently just have abrand value. You get the impressions, you build the awareness, you build the consideration, you just cant tie it back to an ad because there is no click. To me that is not an untrackable channel. That is a channel that you have to track over a long period of time.” -Ben

• “On the flip side, SEO is a channel that you can evaluate in real time but it also takes a long time to cultivate the channel.” -Ben

• “It was just about how you justify spending money on the brand. I read an article where a company had uncovered that their branding actually had a bigger impact on sales than they have originally anticipated. This article was talking a lot about how much money you spend oon any kind of performance marketing and theyve been focused too much on the short-term wins for their investors. And Ive heard this story many times. We do look short-term. People expect results right now and you forget about the brand story.” -Lillian

• “We are in a world right now where everyone is so focused on counting every click and evaluating things in real time. Often, you cant just make micro optimizations minute by minute to try to get past a certain threshold.” -Ben

• “At some point when you hit a certain level of growth you just cant spend anymore efficiently and you needto start building the awareness for your brand and that gets into brand marketing and part of that is SEO.” -Ben

• “I think SEO can serve as a brand channel more now than ever before because you can create content to introduce your brand to someone who is searching for a general topic. It may not be direct-conversion related topic but you can create content to serve as a branding channel and two, there is the notion of zero-click, the voice search, the Google answer box types responses which is now being seen as brand SEO.” -Ben

• “If you are showing up for answers for multiple questions on a similar topic, this is huge for your brand. And if youre showing in an answer box as well and theyre not clicking through, this could be from an impact perspectiveand theres a chance they didnt see the name of your company while they got the answer they wanted.” -Lillian

• “Where it is exciting is when it mentions the questions that show up and they click through. You really want to be there for your niche.” -Lillian

• “My takeaway is that theres a lot of overlap between brand marketing and SEO. As we compared SEO as a performance marketing channel as were talking about paid social, it does have performance marketing capabilities and also has brand-enhancing capabilities.” -Ben

• “So when youre comparing your SEO strategy to your brand with SEO, you can create a marketing channel that has a long-lasting brand impact that you dont continually have to pay for, youre not buying the media all of the time, and youcan start to establish your brand and introduce your self to prospective customers.” -Ben