When developing your pr marketing strategy for your web site, ask yourself, is buying my branded name as a keyword important?
We recently had this asked by one of our pr clients. The answer isn’t a simple yes, or no. You might think, wait, my product or company name is important, how can you say it isn’t. The reason to consider buying it or not, is purely an emotional decision, mixed with a business decision. To help me further explain this pr marketing strategy, I read an article in iMediaConnection that is titled “5 Reasons to pay for branded keywords“. The five reasons are based on a study he uses to show ten top companies, and lists those who do, and those who do not. For example you would think that McDonalds would purchase their keyword with Google, wrong. What about IBM, wrong again. Both of these companies, along with Intel do not purchase their branded names as keywords on Google, or any other search engines.
So why aren’t these big companies buying their names as keywords. Here are a few of their reasons:
• “We are already in the number one slot in the natural search results, so why waste the money?”
• “We have not integrated search into all of our marketing campaigns.”
• “We believe other companies should not be allowed to bid on our branded terms, so we take the same approach.”
• “We have not given it much thought.”
So as you can see, this may or may not be a good reason for you or even the big guys. But it is their decision. The article points out good arguments why you should consider buying the keywords. They are:
1- Consumer Behavior
2- Your competition will
3- More control, there are two others, check them out on the article.
Yet other major companies like Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Toyota and Mercedes-Benz do purchase their branded keywords. I usually tend to tell my clients, if you can budget purchasing your branded keywords, then it is a good pr marketing strategy to do so. Most companies are not worldwide and should make the decision to do it or not, before their competition does and they have no choice to make.
To learn more about web marketing, or to improve your pr marketing strategy, give Carson Marketing, Inc. a call. They can get your site noticed and positioned high on Google, Yahoo, and MSN, among many others.