Recently, I took a trip to Las Vegas and flew Southwest Airlines. Knowing my apprehension toward flying, my friends allowed me to have the window seat. As the 7 hour flight got under way and I found myself watching the clouds outside, I noticed the pronounced branding going on right outside my window. Here I was flying Southwest Airlines and right there on the wing, flipped up so I can easily view it, was Southwest.com staring me in the face. If that isn’t obvious branding then I don’t know what is. It’s like they just really didn’t want you to forget to use Southwest Airlines for your next trip and here I was already on the flight.

So what does all of this mean? Simply this: branding is very important at every stage of the marketing cycle. Hopefully you are having a great experience, as I was with my flight, and this was just a friendly reminder of who I was flying with, so I would remember to use them again. According to toptenlinks.com, Southwest Airlines was rated number 5 in the rankings among the top airlines. While it’s great that they are in the top 10…they still aren’t number 1, which is where Delta stands. This really isn’t all that surprising considering how long Delta has been in business compared to Southwest, but Southwest is on the rise and if they continue with marketing strategies such as their  brand awareness efforts, they are well on their way to that number one position.

One of the top goals that a business should have is for their name to become well known. If you think about it, Coca-Cola and Pepsi would not be where they are today if it weren’t for brand awareness. How often do you hear someone say they are thirsty and want a coke when really they are possibly talking about Sprite or even a Pepsi? Coke has just become a household name. Although that might not be a realistic goal for a smaller business, it should still be something to work towards. Becoming well known doesn’t have to mean everyone knows your name (insert Cheers theme song here) but it is important to become well known among your clientele and your competitors.

How can you build brand awareness? There are many ways to go about this for your business or product. To start with you can do a pay per click campaign. Bid on your name. Put your name in your ads so that it’s one of the first things searchers see when they do a keyword search and see your ad appear. Next, realize that your website is your brand. In using the Coca-Cola brand name again, their brand wouldn’t be as strong if their website was www.softdrink.com right? So remember to put your business name or brand in your website.

In conclusion, while branding is not the holy grail for your marketing campaign, it is important to remember that it is a vital dimension to success.

I posted an entry on June 18 that discussed the battle for #2 in the PPC world, and wanted to provide the latest on the search engine landscape.

There is no question that MSN has been more aggressive than Yahoo in terms of increasing their market share, and trying to become a serious rival to Google. In recent months MSN has made the following moves - Microsoft attempted to acquire Yahoo, their latest version of Internet Explorer attempts to direct searchers away from using Google search, and they recently launched a promotion to pay searchers a cash rebate for making purchases while using Live Search. All these attempts haven’t given MSN the lift they most likely were hoping for with the overall search engine market share, but MSN continues to stay aggressive with recent acquisitions of Powerset (search engine), and Greenfield Online (online shopping). In addition, MSN has a new Adcenter management tool in beta that is similar to the Google Editor, which helps to make daily account management for advertisers more user-friendly (Yahoo lags behind both Google & MSN with management tools for their PPC advertisers).

The numbers don’t lie when it comes to US search engine market share over the last 3 months. According to comScore’s 3 month numbers (May, June, July 2008), MSN is still struggling to gain traction:

Google
May 2008 – 61.8%
June 2008 – 61.5%
July 2008 – 61.9%

Yahoo
May 2008 – 20.6%
June 2008 – 20.9%
July 2008 – 20.5%

MSN
May 2008 – 8.5%
June 2008 – 9.2%
July 2008 – 8.9%

I’m always surprised companies do not test or refresh their ad copy on a regular basis.  It is not enough to simply make changes to your ad copy during the holiday season or when you want to run a special promotion (10% Off for the Month of May!).  It is important to tailor your message during the holiday season, especially for online retailers who rely on holiday sales, and that message is probably different than the rest of the year, so it makes sense to have different ad copy running during the holidays.

In addition, you probably do not offer a special discount all year round, so a “10% Off” promotion dictates special ad copy as well.  However, testing and refreshing ad copy should be a continual process in search engine marketing.  It’s quite helpful that Google (and your target audience) provide the test platform you need to make the right decisions about choosing the most effective message.

At MoreVisibility, we create multiple ads for every campaign and rely on real time statistics to show which ad copy is effective and which is not.  Regardless of the time of year or the promotion you are running, you should create multiple ads for your campaigns and continually test their effectiveness.  Google makes this campaign optimization process very easy, because you can set your campaigns so the best performing ad is displayed more often while you rotate multiple ads. 

As you see that one ad is outperforming another, create new and fresh ad copy and replace the poor performers with these new ads.  Reset the Google settings in your campaign to rotate your ads equally so you can start to gather click-thru data on the new ads in addition to the best performing ad you kept active.  Once you have enough quantifiable data, change the settings in Google to optimize the ad delivery and see if any of the new ads become your new best performer.  By doing this testing and refreshing of ad copy, you can zero in on the best marketing message that will drive more traffic to your site and keep you focused on optimizing your campaigns.

The bottom line, do not rely on the time of year or a special promotion to dictate when you change your marketing message in your Pay per Click (PPC) campaigns.  The better option is to allow your potential customers to tell you what works and what doesn’t.  Continually adding and testing new ad copy will provide you with the best feedback a business can have: unsolicited customer feedback!