Why You Need To Start Caring About Non-Branded Campaigns

Whether you specialize in ecommerce or lead generation, a sound PPC strategy always includes non-branded campaigns. In this post, we will cover how these campaigns can help you overpower your competition, strengthen brand loyalty, attract new customers, and drive traffic to your websites.

Gain a Competitive Edge

If you want to overpower your competition, you should bid on non-branded terms. Why? You might ask. Why did you feel that it was necessary to bid on branded terms? Chances are that you did not want potential customers to be stolen by your competition. That is why you were willing to invest in branded terms, even when you had great brand awareness. Now, your competition will most likely bid on non-branded terms too. If you do not bid on relevant non-branded terms, you are going to lose out on potential customers. It is like you are allowing potential clients to walk right through your competitor’s doors.

Attract New Customers for Long-Term Survival

If you want to avoid closing your shutters permanently, you need to attract new customers. It’s for survival. In some cases, a business may experience a decline in new customer reach because of:

• Not balancing branded impression share: Let’s say that you have 83 percent impression share on branded terms. The other 17 percent is all resellers. This shows that you have maxed out your reach on branded terms and do not have any competition. Additionally, your branded Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) has dropped over the past few years (e.g. over a three-year period).
• A lack of non-branded campaigns: Because you were only running branded campaigns during this three-year period, you may have overlooked the importance of seeking fresh avenues to attract new customers.

Sometimes, all it takes is one search term to bring in new customers and expand your reach. Bidding on non-branded terms can help you discover these golden search terms.

Build and Maintain Brand Loyalty

Without brand loyalty, you cannot generate revenue. If a consumer is loyal to your business, the individual always spends more than customers who are not loyal. Running non-branded campaigns are a stellar way to reach new customers that have not entered your market funnel. When you execute these campaigns correctly, you can grow your customer base at a significantly higher rate. This creates more opportunities to build brand loyalty.

How you do retain existing customers? A RLSA non-branded campaign should suffice. You should create ads with specific messaging, e.g. offering a new deal or any other content that is relevant to them. This way, they do not resort to researching for your competitors.

Direct More Traffic to Your Website

In order to successfully generate new customers, PPC marketing strategies should incorporate non-branded campaigns. Let’s say that you work in a t-shirt manufacturing company called ABC (in this example, ABC is also a well-known brand). In ABC’s current PPC strategy, they utilize ABC T-shirts as their main (branded) keywords. Statistics show that these terms are searched 200,000 times over a one-month period. T-shirts, on the other hand, is the non-branded keyword. It averages approximately 500,000 queries per month. As you can see, ABC needs to include non-branded keywords in their PPC strategy as these keywords garner more traffic.

Here’s the tricky part. The CPCs of non-branded terms might be higher. Hence, you need to leverage them in the most efficient manner possible. After evaluating your brand recognition and industry, choose non-branded keywords selectively before adding them in your campaigns. For instance, you can target Linen T-Shirts instead of just T-Shirts. If you choose extremely competitive keywords that are not specific enough to your service or product, you will drain your ad spend budget like crazy. When you work with top-of-funnel terms, you should always expect to see higher CPLs and lower conversions rates. Oh, and don’t forget to set up Remarketing Lists for Search Ads too!