How To Grow Your Brand & Market Share

Marketers and CEOs, how do you grow your brand or your company's market share & sales volume? A few years ago, I posted on my blog titled 'what is your marketing iq?' which has all the answers. The answer is actually quite simple, so simple that most don't know the answer. Most company would think that the answer is to get existing customers to increase their purchase frequency i.e. buy more from you or by increasing customer loyalty. This is why so many companies allocate a substantial amount of their marketing budgets towards customer loyalty program. But in fact, this is not true. The answer to growth is to actually get more customers or buyers. This is not too hard to understand, imagine there are a 1000 people in your market and you have 700 people who are your customers. This is 70% of the market share and thus making you the market leader. Having 100 out of a 1000 people buying multiples times from you still doesn't change the fact that you only have 10% market share. Simple, isn't it?

If you are interested to know more how about brands grow, you need to visit this website or buy this book from Professor Byron Sharp titled 'How Brands Grow'. There are alot of marketing knowledge from this book where most marketers don't know:

1. Growth in market share comes by increasing popularity; that is by gaining more buyers (of all types), most of whom are light customers buying the brand only occasionally.
2. Brands, even though they are usually slightly differentiated, mainly compete as if they are near lookalikes; but they vary in popularity (and hence market share)
3. Brand competion and growth is largely about building two market based assets: physical availability and mental availability. Brands that are easier to buy - for more people, in more situations - have more market share. Innovation and differentiation (when they work) build market based assets, which last after competitors copy the innovation.

DIY Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

No need to pay SEO agencies big money to optimise your website or keep searching the internet on how to do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) yourself. Google has now published its own SEO documentation which you can now Do It Yourself (DIY). What a better way to get a SEO documentation from Google instead of paying big bucks to SEO agencies where most of them give you the same kind of information/guidelines that are already widely available out on Google itself. I guess the money paid to agencies is at least they can project manage it for you and make sure that you are doing the right thing and you don't have to worry. This is the same as paying migration consultants where most if not all migration information is on the internet or the immigration government site but yet you want to have the peace of mind paying the expert to do the right thing for you so you don't have to worry about it. You can download Google's search engine optimization starter guide here or directly from www.­google.­com/­webmasters/­docs/­search-­engine-­optimization-­starter-­guide.­pdf.

Cost Effectiveness of Search Advertising/Marketing

Over the years, I have been selling search advertising/marketing and one of the ways necessary to better sell especially to businesses that are new to search is to prove that it is a far more cost effective way of advertising as compared to many other forms of advertising mediums. Not too long ago, I posted a short but important blog post on my company's blog that search advertising is the most cost effective method of advertising. The study done by Piper Jaffray shows that the cost per lead from the search engines is a fraction of the cost of email marketing, direct mail, online banners or yellow pages.

Google Local Business Optimization - How to Increase your Google Local Business Results / Listings

Recently, I have been spending a lot of my time over the last few months, researching and experimenting, on how to get on the 1st page of the Google local business results. Many of my successful listings are through constant testing & experimentation.

Google’s local business listings is a great opportunity to get yourself up in the rankings of Google for your relevant geographical keywords much easier and quicker than Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and the best thing of all, it is free!

Here are some proven techniques/ways that I have used to get many of my own and clients’ websites successfully on the local business listings:

1. Get as many free listings in the local directories as possible. One tip to find these local directories is to check the ‘web pages’ under the details of the local business listings. Sometimes these web pages will show you the local directories they are listed on.

2. Optimise the title/name in the local directories for the keyword you want, eg if you want to rank for ‘Sydney Widgets’, have this in your title/name.

3. Same with the above, optimise the company/organization name in the local business centre for your keyword. (I got a successful listing for a couple of keywords just by optimizing the name, of which these keywords ranking for don’t even have a website).

4. Under the address information in local business centre, make sure you have the city location chosen as the city you want listing for.

5. Under the description in the local business centre, optimise it for the keywords you want. Of course, don’t spam it!

6. Under the categories of the local business centre, choose the most relevant category. Also, you can add in manually the category. In this case, add in ‘Sydney Widgets’.

7. When you upload your photos, try to optimise it (name of the file) for the keyword as well (I guess all of what I have mentioned are some basics of Search engine optimization (SEO)

8. Make sure you enter in as many details as possible in the local business centre, example hours of operations, payment options, upload photos & videos if you have, and other additional details as well. The more details you put in, the more the Google local business centre’s algorithm will see you as a serious listing and therefore making your listing more successful.

9. Try to add coupons if you can as this will definitely help. As mentioned before, videos will also help a lot.

10. Reviews seem like one of the important criteria that Google looks at when assigning rankings on the local business ads results. Try to encourage reviews from your customers. Don’t fake it! Google can easily find out and you may get yourself booted out from your local map listings. I have seen in many successful listings where there are no reviews. However, try to encourage reviews anyway as reviews does help promote your site to other potential visitors/customers as well.

11. Obviously, example to be successful in the listings for ‘Sydney widgets’, your site content should be ‘Sydney widgets’ relevant.

12. Basics of SEO - optimise the title, meta description and keyword tags for your keywords.

13. There are occasions where your listing may disappear, log into your local business centre again and update it again (example, re-upload photos, re-edit your description etc) and it should come back up again in an hour or so (from my experience)

14. I do believe that part of the local business listings’ algorithm, Google does look at external links going to your site as well. Example, if you have other sites linking to you with the link text ‘Sydney widgets’, I am sure this will help as well.

Below are some other techniques which I have not used listed by others that have said to improve the local business results:

• Include your phone number whenever you write a description of your company on a third party website.
• Include your address and phone number at the bottom of every page.
• Include the name of your city and state in your website’s content, titles, descriptions and page headers (I reckon this is quite an important component, so try to do it although I haven’t done this)

I found these above points from leveltendesign.com & traffikd.com and they have some very good pointers on how to improve/increase your Google local business listings as well.

Google Local Business Ads

My company e-channel is now no.1 under Google's local business listings for keywords such as: search engine marketing Adelaide, search engine optimisation Adelaide, search engine optimisation Sydney, search marketing agency Adelaide & Sydney. This is indeed some great positions to get in Google and an early Xmas present. After some testing and playing around, I have also managed to get my own home address listed in Google's LBA for the keyword search marketing agency Adelaide. Next posting, I will write up on how to get into the local business results and how to optimise for it after months of experimentations.

Google Brand Value of Search Marketing

We now all know that there is brand increase by using Search Engine Marketing (SEM). This has been proven previously before a report titled brand lift of search conducted by Enquirosearch.com back in 2007. This year Google in April 2008 together with Media Screen has releases a study titled ' Brand Value of Search '. The study was done on the consumer packaged goods industry and proves that employing search marketing as an advertising vehicle will positively impact a brand's key metrics.

The key takeaways are: Search build brands

• Brand presence anywhere on a search results page positively impacts key brand metrics


• You have greater control over your message with paid search, especially on a generic search term SERP (Search Engine Results Page)


• Paid search as a branding vehicle: --Drives top of mind awareness for your brand and negatively impacts awareness for your competitive set. --Impressions provide “free” brand lift, without the CPC investment.

I do agree that most of its key takeaways are accurate except for the last point where impressions provide free brand lift. My reasoning for that is your ad might record an impression but it does not mean that the search user will see your ad. i.e. He/she might be looking at only the first 5 listings and if your ad is on the bottom 5; the searcher will not see your ad. Therefore, this impression recorded is not true. So if the searcher didn't see your ad, why would it provide free brand lift?

SEO Vs PPC

While there are differences between Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC). There are in fact a lot of similarities between the both of them. I have come up with a comparison table below during my lunch break today on the similarities of SEO and PPC using Google as an example. It is interesting to see the relevance and the linkage Google is bringing to its natural search results and its adwords advertising program. If we look at the comparison table below and think about it. This will allow us to be better search engine marketers for both SEO and PPC.