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How Google Brand Ads Build Authority
I remain a strong advocate for bidding on your own brand terms, and yet many organizations continue to believe that the additional expense makes it a questionable idea. In the hyper competitive online world, leveraging all of the tools that help get your message out there and define you an authority is critical. There are many reasons why spending money on branded paid search makes sense. These are two compelling tactics that will benefit your authority marketing efforts.
1. Define and reinforce your brand message
A paid search / PPC ad contains text within the ad that defines and reinforces your brand message. Since branding is so closely associated to authority, this is a great opportunity to shape and control your messaging. Your ad can be A/B or multivariate tested, with contrasting or slight changes in your message, and the results can be measured.
What is multivariate testing?
Optimizely.com explains it like this:
As in an A/B test, traffic to a page is split between different versions of the design. The purpose of a multivariate test, then, is to measure the effectiveness each design combination has on the ultimate goal.”
Clicks on your ad represent a first impression of what people associate with your brand name message. This first impression click, as I like to think of it, is valuable insight into what resonates with your brand development efforts. A well-crafted ad, with multi-variant testing is an effective and inexpensive way to provide a little focus group type insight as to what value propositions perform best.
2. Track Authority Marketing
The second compelling reason is the measurement of search impressions on your brand’s terms. With authority marketing, there are lots of great ways to track success, such as the increase in unique visitors, blog subscribers and social followers that convert into sales. But how do you track if going to conferences, doing public speaking, mailing your book out to customers and increasing your influence through a variety of less track-able channels is all paying off?
Running paid search ads on your company name and/or your personal name gives you insights into the overall effect of people typing brand terms into the search engines. This gives you a better idea of how your overall Authority Marketing is working toward building your brand.
We had one client that got an amazing review from one of the top industry influencer sites after doing some outreach. Traffic shot up to our client’s website from the referring URL, and they saw a corresponding lift in brand searches. By tracking the search impression trends via PPC brand ads, we were able to have a clear picture of the Google branding effects of influencer outreach.
Branded Paid Search Impressions Tracking Report
The following chart shows the results of our efforts:
Typically, graphics showing upward trends in sales are more exciting, but ones that show an increase in your brand awareness can also be an upper management favorite.
The small investment you will make in doing branded paid searches, and having a killer brand lift story, is worth its weight in gold when your boss asks if Authority Marketing is doing anything for you.
Additional benefits of branded PPC ads
In addition to the two main reasons for running brand ads above, you should also consider the following benefits:
- Numerous studies have shown that having more real estate in the search results increases conversions. Essentially, if you have both a paid ad and an organic listing, you may get more than double the clicks. In this case 1 + 1 may actually equal 3.
- If competitors are buying your brand name keywords, then you also better be showing up in the paid listings next to them at the top position, to ensure your voice is heard.
- Some companies don’t even rank well for variations of their name, so running brand ads solves this problem well in your organic issues. This is especially important during a reputation management crisis, where every extra search result helps control the message.
The bottom line is that making an impression with PPC brand ads is more powerful than most people think. You certainly have to watch over the costs, because even some midsized companies can spend a lot of money on the ads, but in the end, have much more to lose by not having solid brand lift data and testing of the brand messaging.
Do you think that Google ads on your company name or personal name are worth it?
5 Annoyingly Successful Thought Leadership Examples
Most people dream of having a better life. In their minds they may picture certain people and say, “I want to be as rich as Donald Trump” or “as famous as Oprah.” Curious how they got there? Was it by being an author or getting on TV and regularly being featured in the media? Let’s look at a few traits of people that stand out from the crowd in their industry and are almost annoyingly successful.
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Donald Trump – Real estate expert
Just about everybody loves money, and Donald Trump – love him or hate him – is one of the top names that comes to mind when you think of how to make more money. Think he’s all fluff? It’s pretty amazing that Jack Canfield who has sold more than a half a billion books gave him a testimonial for the front cover of this book. I haven’t read the book but I’m certainly tempted by this endorsement.
When Trump moved to New York he made it a point to meet and work with highly influential people, which helped his business grow. Having his own reality TV show also deepened his personal brand. Then, after almost going into bankruptcy, Donald Trump came back strong and didn’t let a bad spell slow him down.
Getting Roasted by President Obama
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Tony Robbins – Personal development expert
Depending on your age, you probably remember the semi-annoying infomercials years ago that helped make Anthony Robbins famous. He’s one guy that I had to see in person for myself to decide whether or not to commit to his books and training. I did the fire walk. I laughed, cried and jumped up and down for several days then immediately came home, published my first book and changed my life. Thanks for the inspiration Tony, and for a very small burn on my big toe.
Tony now gets a minimum of $1 million to be your personal coach. He has coached such people as: Bill Clinton, Princess Diana, Hugh Jackman, Mother Theresa, Serena Williams, Leonardo DiCaprio, Pamela Anderson, Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev and Larry King.
Tony says he’s read 750 books and attended every personal growth seminar that he could afford, in order to get to where he is today. He’s definitely come a long way from being significantly overweight and living out of his car.
Tony getting roasted by Ben Stiller
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Oprah – TV personality
Some people say there is a war on women, and even more so on ethnic women, but clearly Oprah has shown what is possible in America despite some challenges.
What made Oprah famous?
In 1976, Oprah Winfrey moved to Baltimore, Maryland, where she hosted the TV chat show People Are Talking. The show became a hit and Winfrey stayed with it for eight years, after which she was recruited by a Chicago TV station to host her own morning show, A.M. Chicago. Her major competitor in the time slot was Phil Donahue. Within several months, Winfrey’s open, warm-hearted personal style had won her 100,000 more viewers than Donahue and had taken her show from last place to first in the ratings.” – Biography.com
Sticking with it for a long time (1986 to 2011) and having a warm-hearted personal style certainly helped. Oprah is also an actress, philanthropist, publisher and producer. She grew up poor and overcame being repeatedly sexually abused, to go on to become a billionaire.
What about lesser-known thought leadership marketing examples?
The following are a few examples of people that stand out in the marketing community and have a bit of a flare to them.
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Rand Fishkin – Inbound marketing and SEO expert
Better known as the founder of Moz.com – one of the world’s leading blogs on search engine marketing, Rand extended his text based content into a popular YouTube phenomenon known as whiteboard Fridays, as can be seen below.
After working with conversion-rate-experts.com, Rand increased his sales by over $1 million per year. After many years of search marketing consulting, he switched over to focus on software sales and growing his blog / community. His website has 229,000 pages indexed in Google and 2 million backlinks. He is a frequent speaker at the top Internet marketing conferences in the world and is the author of one of the most significant books on search engine optimization.
Rand frequently pushes the personal branding envelope by wearing yellow sneakers and experimenting with unusual mustache styles.
While I was writing this, one of my employees sent the following whiteboard Friday video to our entire team. Interesting coincidence.
YouTube thought leadership marketing example
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Tim Ash – Conversion rate expert
Tim Ash is the founder of the Conversion Conference, and one of the leading conversion rate optimization experts in the world.
Hinge marketing in the book Visible Experts says the following of Tim:
Tim’s wife met him when he was leaving one startup to found another. He had invested everything in his idea, and launching his firm required an 18-month period when he took no salary. “I wasn’t the best date, since I had to be picky about where I could afford to eat,” Tim jokes. He chalks up his success to a combination of stubbornness, industry expertise, a very supportive wife, and a high tolerance to risk. “My parents are immigrants from Russia. They left everything behind to bring my brother and me here when I was eight years old,” says Tim. “So the model of risking everything and working hard for success was natural to me.”
Tim also credits his success to specialization. His firm does conversion rate optimization and nothing else. I have been to Tim’s conferences and hired him for consulting on some of our more advanced conversion projects. The level of detail he puts into this one topic sets the bar really high for anyone trying to improve their website using just a web designer, developer or advertising agency.
There are so many great thought leader marketing examples, it’s hard to know where to begin. I am going to make this a regular series including regular podcasts and the growth trajectory of local and national thought leaders.
A common trait, beyond the typical tactics of having a book, a TV show, a blog and being popular on social media, is the more intangible personality factor. All of these people share one thing in common. They have a lot of passion and energy for what they do. So much so that they are almost annoying. But when you’re making millions or billions of dollars, you’re entitled to be different.
Who are some of your favorite local or national thought leaders?
SEO basics for building trust and authority
Google gets 6 billion searches a day, making search engine optimization absolutely essential for building trust and authority. Gone are the days when having a website and being listed in the search engines was nice, but not a requirement.
If you want to be a true thought leader, then you need to provide high-quality results when people search for your name, your company name, and the topics that you are associated with. If you are not at the top of the results, then you are missing out on one of the largest media channels in the world.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization is when you intentionally adjust your website and create content with the goal of raising your status in search engines. Thankfully there are plenty of SEO agencies who can handle the technical components for you. I recommend that you focus on developing authoritative content and leave the technical stuff to the people who obsess over it daily.
Technical SEO – Not rocket science, but almost
Last week I had a call with one of my customers that I wish I could have recorded to share with you. There were five of us on the call, including their marketing and development person, and we were talking about the 14,000 crawl errors listed in their Google Webmaster Tools account. GWT lets you look at a variety of technical issues on your site, including whether or not Google can properly see or “crawl “ each of your pages.
The conversation would have sounded completely ridiculous to outsiders. We were practically talking in programming code. Rick Floyd, one of my team members, was explaining Regex syntax, which is sometimes used when writing 301 redirects, and he was sketching it out along the lines of the following:
^ and (.*) and \w{3,}?$
I’ll be honest, it went over my head, and so I’m thankful to have people even more technical than me on my staff.
Below is a list of technical SEO issues just to give you a feel for what is involved
URL Structure
- Create clean, keyword friendly URLs
- Each page, including the homepage should have one URL (Referred to as canonical)
Search engine Indexing
- Create an HTML and or XML sitemap
- Proper use of the Meta robots tag and No-follow tags
- Check for broken links, which result in 404 errors
- Check redirects, such as 302s and 301s
- Properly use Robots.txt file
Also check the following in a crawl report:
- Google SERPs site links, geographic setting, and preferred domain
- Page indexing speed, title tags, and description tags
- Instant previews
Website Code
- Check load time issues using a tool like GTmetrix
- Don’t use JavaScript or Flash for menus
- Proper handling of AJAX pages’ URLs
- Minimize ViewState on ASP.net platforms
- Avoid frames that cause issues
- W3C validated CSS and HTML
- Rich snippets and microformats
ROI tracking and analytics
- Set up goal tracking in Google analytics
- Set up Google analytics e-commerce tracking
- Track external and internal promotions
- Set up event tracking on outbound links
- Monitor social sharing
Doesn’t that technical SEO checklist kind of make your head spin? I’ve been doing this for 20 years and it’s still a long list to keep track of. Again, as long as you outsource the technical side of it and simply focus on high quality content, you’ll be fine.
Does Google want you to do SEO?
If Google thought that all search engine optimization was bad, then they wouldn’t create documents like the following:
How to learn SEO
There is so much information about learning SEO that can be overwhelming. If you want to get into some of the technical details, I recommend starting with these two guides, and following their corresponding blogs.
Content marketing and building links
Google, in their documentation about search engine optimization, says that it is important to start a blog and add regular, fresh content and then get people to link to your website.
Why focusing on blogging is the easiest way to build SEO authority
You know your business like the back of your hand. If you can produce content as well as you can talk to your customers, your search engine authority will skyrocket. Gone are the days when you could just slap a bunch of keywords into your text, make a few new pages and get some crappy directory links to make your rankings skyrocket.
Pretty much the only thing that works with search engine optimization these days is blogging and engaging customers/influencers with your content. Of course, that’s only once you have solved your technical SEO issues and optimized the core pages of your website.
The biggest SEO mistake to avoid
Don’t just add content. Add content based on extremely specific keywords. Sure you can pick “head” terms like “Boston lawyer” but writing content around long tail keywords like “what to do if you get pulled over for drunk driving” can be highly effective. Rand Fishkin of MOZ explains the importance of long tail optimization as follows:
Long tail, as Google has often mentioned, is a very big proportion of Web search traffic. It’s anywhere from 20% to maybe 40% or even 50% of all the queries on the Web that are long tail…and get… fewer than maybe 10 to 50 searches per month. Somewhere around 18% or 20% of all searches Google says are extremely long tail, meaning they’ve never seen them before.
Keyword research – the foundation of all search engine marketing
The first thing you need to do is pick keywords using a combination of the following tools:
- The Google keyword tool, which now requires you to login through a Google Adwords account.
- A social media listening device like HootSuite, to determine what questions customers are asking across the web. You will be writing blog posts to answer these questions.
- Keywordtool.io to find a variety of related keywords that Google doesn’t always show you.
Once you have your keywords selected and placed on your most important product and services pages, as well as blog posts, your next step is to start thinking about the more advanced tactic known as link building.
Google says the following about link building:
Make sure that other sites link to yours… Links help our crawlers find your site and can give your site greater visibility in our search results. When returning results for a search, Google uses sophisticated text-matching techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant to each search. Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.
Keep in mind that our algorithms can distinguish natural links from unnatural links…such as link schemes and doorway pages)…Only natural links are useful for the indexing and ranking of your site.
If you are going to do SEO and you want people to link to you, then it is absolutely essential that you are an author and an authority/influencer. Deep content on influential sites is what generates back links, not outdated link building tactics like article and directory link building.
Social media optimization and connecting with influencers
No search engine optimization campaign would be complete unless you share your content with customers, influencers and the media. I have seen way too many people (including myself at one point) spend time blogging without taking it to the next level and sharing their content in specific communities. SEO just doesn’t work that great anymore if you don’t create a powerful blog that gets a lot of back links and social shares.
Summary
- Think strategically about content marketing, not just SEO in isolation
- Pick keywords, including lots of long tail – longer key phrases
- Optimize your most important product and service pages
- Use your blog as the primary way to add new content
- Share your blog with influencers, customers and the media to get back links and social shares
- Get tons of traffic to your site and retire rich at an early age!
Having a site that gets tens of thousands of visitors a month puts you in a position of power and influence. If you can turn those visitors into people subscribing to your email newsletter, that’s even better! Considering how competitive SEO has become, building your status as an author and thought leader, has gone from being important to being a requirement.
Expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness – EAT
Google employees, known as quality raters, judge your content and reputation using an acronym called E.A.T., which stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
If SEO, then consider the following things that Google publicly states:
- It is important to have a blog and share helpful content
- You should get high quality “natural” links to your site because of your content
- The reputation, expertise and authority levels of the authors of a website are critical
It would then stand to reason that the thought leadership approach at least in regard to SEO is not up for debate?
3 sales tips for success
There are very few people in the world that like to make or receive cold calls. Inbound marketing uses content to generate numerous impressions of your business, and encourage the prospect to call you. Thought leadership content is utilized a lot less when doing cold calls and prospecting, but before we can begin using that approach, you need to dig into the idea that your job is to educate, as well as solve problems, not “sell.”
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Educate, don’t sell
The Internet has radically changed the selling process. People have so many options for researching, that they often know who they are going to hire before making a call. You should be part of the conversation to such a level that customers feel like they know you personally, as well as what it might be like to work with you through your blog and content. Or you can continue to mostly pound the phone and wait for referrals.
Referrals, ironically, will check out the content on your site 80% of the time – based on a two year Hinge Marketing study of over 1,000 buyers of professional services – before truly believing that the person referring them is giving good advice.
I still believe in some cold calling too, because there are times when I want to target an exact list of niche companies, but I never just call and ask if they want to work with us. I always lead by being helpful and sharing our content, an upcoming event or an opportunity to co-create content together. Essentially, this ties inbound and outbound marketing together.
When I do meet with people, I rarely use a presentation, and mostly ask and answer questions. This brings me right to the heart of solving their problems and increasing ROI – which is the main reason they will pull the trigger initially.
Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D., wrote a book called Inside The Buyer’s Brain that talks about what buyer’s value. As you can see, specialized skills and expertise are critical.
Lee Frederiksen also adds the following insights:
While problem solving was the most common reason that buyers hired a Visible Expert, that was not the benefit they extolled in the end.
Instead, buyers rank new learning as their biggest payoff. Initially, clients don’t seek out Visible Experts because they want to be educated. But in retrospect, they identify learning as a top benefit of the engagement. For these clients, working with a Visible Expert not only solved their problem, but also helped them see their path forward more clearly.
Benefits of working with a visible expert
The moral of the story is not to underestimate how important educational content is in the sales and consulting process.
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Build Relationships by co-creating content
In the world of selling and keeping clients, the relationship is everything. My father owned the 6th largest advertising agency in New England, and if I had a penny for every time he told me it’s all about building relationships, I could be retired. He’s even come into my office to speak to my entire staff about this topic.
One of the ways that I build relationships is by podcasting with prospects and co-creating content with them. A lot of times, I don’t even follow up specifically to try and turn it into a sale. I simply build lots of relationships and content at the same time!
One example of this is attorney Andrew Laver, former President of the Philadelphia Legal Marketing Association Chapter. After doing a podcast interview with him, he then went about listing it under his publications on his LinkedIn profile.
James Matsukas of Pierce Atwood Law Firm is another example of building relationships with our clients. We met during one of my talks at the New England Legal Marketing Association event, where I then invited him to do a podcast with us. He later put the links to our site, the legalmarketingreview.com, on his bio page. Several months later he became a client, and one of our favorites at that.
Just last week one of my colleagues, John Cass, and I took Jim to lunch. We did this because we want to do a better job on his account, and sometimes feel that things are not moving fast enough. After an amazing first half hour of talking about jazz and food, we ultimately got to the heart of what would make our relationship better.
Sometimes you have to go old school and get face-to-face, and we find consistently that co-creating content creates a unique bond.
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Follow up regularly using new content
Co-creating content isn’t going to work for every industry. From our experience, one thing that does work consistently is to follow up regularly with prospects by sending them links to blog posts that you have written and various types of helpful content.
Back in the 90’s, my sister was working in sales at McDougall Associates Advertising, and she followed-up regularly by sending other people’s articles to prospects in the mail. She had great success with it because it showed the prospect that she was being genuinely helpful.
It is much more powerful when you combine a follow-up with your own thought leadership. For example, some banks buy “canned” content that they didn’t write and use it successfully to nurture their existing client base. It works, even with content that they didn’t create, but it works better with your own unique content.
In regard to following up, I recently asked legal business development coach Stewart Hirsch if following up with content is one of his recommendations. He agreed and said:
If there’s something that a lawyer has written that has value to another person, passing that on is really valuable and blogs are such an easy way to provide that value.
But to send a blog without having a reason to send it is almost like being in a room, networking in a setting where somebody’s just passing out their card. Just handing them out without thinking about who they’re handing them to or why, when there’s something relevant that’s been written, it can be very valuable.
In the end, it also has to be relevant and put into context. You just can’t blast out random posts to a prospect. If you can figure out what is concerning them and line up your content with their business goals, then you will have a much greater impact.
With this in mind, never call a prospect and say, “I just wanted to check in”. Instead, say something more along the lines of, “I wanted to let you know about this recent blog post that addresses some of the things we last discussed.”
Finding the right people to get your content to will be another big part of the challenge. Using social selling skills, such as digging deep into the organization beyond just the typical person you would contact, can be a great way to increase your chances of connecting.
The CEO might not want to meet with you directly, but by reaching out to them on a social platform like LinkedIn and sharing a helpful piece of content, they might tell you someone else at their organization who would.
No matter what industry you are in, we can all agree that selling has changed. The big question is whether or not your salespeople have the developed sales strategies that will help them avoid looking like an old school used car salesman.
What are some of your favorite modern sales tips for success?
Personal branding tips for experts and companies
Creating a personal brand is about discovering what is unique about yourself and amplifying it. True thought leaders are not just experts; they lead the charge in some unique way of looking at their industry. For some people, this just grows naturally, but for many, it is a well thought out and systematic process of selecting your niche and marketing yourself along with your company.
Benefits of personal branding
- Greater job opportunities, whether you are a student or a seasoned pro
- Better contacts and business relationships
- Ability to charge a much higher fee for consultants
- Industry recognition
How to build a personal brand
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Specializing in a niche and defining your target audience
The first step is to select a niche. If you are trying to get greater recognition, it is much easier to do that by being a big fish in a small pond rather than trying to become well-known for more general topics. If you are a marketing person for example, you might decide to specialize in financial marketing or law firm marketing.
By becoming involved deeply in a specific category you can build your brand a lot quicker. You will be able to go to conferences where your target audience meets and learn what makes your industry unique. The more specialized knowledge you have of one industry or one specific topic, such as low cost Youtube marketing or Latino family business financial planning, the quicker you will become recognized.
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Personal branding statement
The second step is to develop a personal branding statement. Your statement should be 1 to 2 sentences answering, what you are known for (value), who you serve (your audience) and how you do it uniquely (USP).
Personal branding statement examples:
“I help professional service firms build trust and authority through profitable content marketing.” – Authority marketing expert
“I leverage my avid love of learning and mastery of online technology to facilitate career management for trend-setting professionals who strive to be dynamic and high achieving in their business.” – Career coach
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Securing a domain name and creating digital assets
Building a personal brand has changed radically as the Internet has permeated every aspect of our lives. Having your own website and blog along with active social media accounts is an essential part of the process.
Neil Patel, one of my Internet marketing heroes, asked James Schramko the following question:
If you were building an online presence from scratch today, what 3 things would you consider to provide the biggest ROI on your time and money?
He responded with notes on the importance of building social communities:
- Podcast (rich media) because it gets you on iTunes showing in related shows
- Feature blog to host rich media (podcast + videos) to build a list
- Emailing my customers a lot to create a bond and cause action
- Regular Facebook updates (because everyone is there)
Make sure to, at the very least, create the following social accounts:
- Google plus
- YouTube
Knowem.com is a great tool that allows you to open social accounts in your name all at one time. They provide an inexpensive service to get all of your accounts opened.
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Influencer marketing
Creating content will only get you so far if nobody is willing to share it and spread the word about you. Reach out to influential people in your industry and if possible, write guest posts on their blogs. Just make sure you’re reaching out to high quality sites or Google will not think highly of your connections.
BuzzSumo is a great tool to find amazing content matched up with your keywords and the authors that created it. If you are not doing outreach, going to conferences and meet ups, your thought leadership will be more like being shipwrecked on an island with a great idea.
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Regularly connect with the media through public relations strategies
Becoming featured regularly in the news is one of the most powerful ways to prove your authority. PRleads.com and helpareporter.com are great tools that give you access to what journalists are looking for. If you respond quickly with short bits of expert information, you will be amazed at how quickly you can get in the news.
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When going to war, consult a general
Having a mentor or a business coach is essential for speeding up the time it takes you to reach your goals. There is likely someone who has mastered the goal you are trying to attain and can save you an incredible amount of time by teaching you things to avoid as well as expert tips and tricks.
The most important thing is that you be yourself and follow your passion. If you are not a passionate expert, then it is unlikely that you will have the stamina to continually create content and blog posts, as well as believable talking points for the media.
Take your life to the next level
Whether you are a student or an expert with 30 years or more of experience, personal branding can bring your business and life to the next level.
Hinge Marketing wrote an excellent book about professional services marketing, and explains what they call the “halo effect”, where personal branding rubs off on the company associated with the expert. This is how Elizabeth Harr explains it:
Visible Experts, professionals who have attained high visibility and a reputation for expertise in their industry niche, bring many benefits to professional service firms that result in attracting clients, growing the firm, and increasing profit.
If you are prepared to put in the hard work and are comfortable enough to take center stage, you’ll find that personal branding is a relatively easy process. It will take years to build it up to where you have a massive platform and blog, but within a few short months you can make an initial impact. Just be prepared for when people start treating you with a little more enthusiasm and respect. It takes a little getting used to, but feels really good.
What are some of your favorite ways to build your personal brand?
Photo credit: stefano principato / iWoman / CC BY-NC-ND
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