Sensible Marketing for Small Business

Competitive brand-jacking occurs in many markets that have strong online sales and a complex web of channel and promotional partners. For example, according to new research of one sample industry, the U.S. hotel industry loses approximately $1.9 billion annually in online bookings because channel partners and affiliates compete with the hotels’ direct channels by using branded search terms in paid search campaigns. Once a customer who is searching for a specific hotel brand has been attracted to the website of a hotel partner or affiliate, that customer often books a room at one of the competing properties displayed on these sites.

The power of branded search terms is well known, especially at later stages of the sales cycle when searchers become purchasers. Search engines, in general, do not restrict the use of branded search terms to the brand itself, unless there is a clear case for bait and switch, piracy, or counterfeiting. In the case of the hotel industry, it’s an advertising practice that adversely affects online bookings for the hotels and can also lead to paying unnecessary commissions and affiliate fees for traffic seeking the hotel’s own booking site.

Brands that do not specify how their terms can be used in online search and promotion risk losing business that is searching for that very brand. Online advertising professionals hold the driver’s seat view of how a company’s search terms are referenced online. As the losses in the hotel industry illustrate, additional levels of sophistication in managing the use of branded terms is emerging as a must-do for pay-per-click (PPC) professionals.

How do you take the leadership role in protecting branded search term use by partners or affiliates?

Here’s a recommended process that many brands are adopting:

Examine marketing partner and affiliate contracts and work with your legal team to include provisions that spell out how your company’s brand terms can be used and what enforcement measures will be taken.

If you don’t already have a database of your company’s branded terms, now is the time to create one. You will want to share this database with your affiliates and channel partners so they will know which branded terms are off limits for their use. Of course, the database will be subject to updates as your company adds additional brands or changes existing brands.

Set up a formal online monitoring and enforcement process with the legal team to track misuse and take action according to the terms of your newly revised contracts. Proactive monitoring should track the offenders, the terms, geographical markets, and time of day when misuse occurs. There are a number of software applications available that automate this tracking process.

Bring your social media manager into the conversation to identify how your efforts to protect your brand can complement each other and add to the overall online standing for your brand. As Lisa Buyer noted in a recent Search Engine Watch article, marketers need to “control [their] branded search results before there is a problem.”

Become familiar with the process for reporting brand search term misuse to the major search engines. The responsibility for informing the search engines on abusive practices rests with the brand itself. Your monitoring program will identify instances of abusive competitive practices that are actionable with the search engines.

At the end of the day, developing and enforcing clear policies for branded search term usage by partners and affiliates saves money from unnecessary commission and affiliate payments and ensures the business delivered by extended network partners is truly incremental. PPC professionals who drive their online marketing campaigns to the next level of sophistication by protecting their clickstreams and branded search terms will reap the benefits in increased revenue and customer engagement.

Frederick Felman is the CMO at MarkMonitor.

On Twitter? Follow iMedia Connection at @iMediaTweet

Add a comment

If you are considering building a mobile application or mobile website over the next year, there are a few best practices which you can work into your website re-design process which will make moving to mobile much easier. Below, I’ve put together four key elements which will prepare you for the mobile transition.

Be prepared for RSS Feeds
When you are creating a mobile website or app, we always suggest setting it up in such a way that once you post a new article to your website, it automatically appears on the mobile side as well. Such a setup ensures that adding a mobile presence won’t double the amount of work for your marketing team. The main method for creating these type of automatic updates is by using RSS feeds.

When re-designing your site, map out any section which has frequently changing content (i.e. publications, recent news, press releases, ect.) and make sure you have an easy method for creating RSS feeds for each of these sections. You could even take this a step further and create RSS feeds for this content right from the outset.

RSS feeds are quite common for major media websites and there will be visitors to your website who will appreciate receiving your latest updates in the RSS format. The only point to remember here is make sure your feeds contain the full article and not just a summary of the content with a link to the article. Summary RSS feeds will not work for mobile as they do not give the mobile app enough information to re-create the full article in the app.

Limit PDF Based Content
Many professional service firms are stuck with using PDFs as there is a certain segment of their audience who like having print formatted content. However, the demands of readers are quickly changing and the challenge with having too much PDF content on your website is that it does not translate well to the mobile web. On most older Blackberry devices, the phone of choice for many professionals, PDFs simply will not open. For newer Blackberries, iPhone and Android users PDFs will open but it will be difficult to read the information. Reading PDFs on these small screens require a lot of zooming and scrolling left to right which will frustrate users.

The best solution is to accommodate both sets of users. When you’re planning how to display PDF content, make sure to include a brief extract of the document in HTML format and then link to the PDF. Following this hybrid approach will satisfy both groups of users.

Put Video Content on Youtube
The benefit of putting all of your video content on Youtube is that it is the most common online video platform on the planet and is thus supported by almost every modern mobile device. Distributing video to mobile devices can be quite difficult but Youtube has done the hard work to make video work on most devices.

I’ve found that Youtube is most helpful when it comes to distributing content to Blackberry devices. These devices require a specific technology called an RTSP stream to playback video. These streams are normally quite costly and difficult to maintain, so taking advantage of Youtube saves time and expense.

Start Tracking Mobile Usage…TODAY!
Even if you are not going to be launching your mobile initiative until later this year, you should still be measuring how many people are visiting your site from mobile devices. Measuring mobile visits can be done using free tools like Google Analytics. If your current analytics program does not measure mobile visits, you may want to have your IT staff also add Google Analytics tracking to your site. It’s free and is widely regarded as one of the best Analytics programs in the industry. Finding mobile information is different for every analytics program but you should be able to find a mobile tab which will help you identify which mobile devices your visitors are using. In Google Analytics, this information can be found by going to Mobile and Mobile Devices under the Visitors section. Having this information will help you to determine which platforms you should target with mobile apps and websites once you start into your mobile initiative.