I own a digital agency that has existed for 20 years and did branding until just two years ago.
It wasn’t until we stopped doing branding that I came across a number of meaningful connections and “needs” search and branding teams have that enhance the efforts of both.
Search marketers are often at the other end and far away from brand strategy.
When branding is pressed for return on investment (ROI), it often comes downstream through marketing channels, platforms, and the implemented strategy.
Search often struggles without a differentiated brand or strategy to stand out from competitors in search results for ads or content.
I believe there are great benefits to connecting branding and search, partnering together, and working closely within broader business and marketing teams and environments.
Digging into conversations, my experience, and perspectives shared with me, I’m sharing the benefits categorized for search marketers and brand creatives/strategists alike that can create more consistent and impactful opportunities to elevate brands and performance overall.
For Search Marketers
Content & Creative Standards
In the absence of robust brand strategy development and documentation, search marketers (among other channels) are often left in a vacuum when it comes to creating content and assets needed for SEO and paid search success.
In a vacuum, there are best practices and channel strategies that can guide what gets created and what words, messaging, and creative are utilized.
However, it can be fragmented, inconsistent, and unrelated to broader themes and objectives.
When we have standards and strategies to leverage, we can be a further extension of the key unique messages to bring the brand alive.
I can’t count the number of times there have been conversations between search marketers and sales teams about specific ad copy and imagery that have no grounding or truth from brand strategy to fall back on.
I’ll say this as someone who has done SEO for a long time: You don’t want an SEO to write your copy or design your creative. There are exceptions and unicorns, but you want your SEO experts and SEM specialists doing their craft.
Unique Value Propositions
One of the key measures of search campaigns and strategies is how effective they are in driving conversions – and even deeper, what happens with those conversions and whether they become actual sales, revenue, and profit.
When leads are qualifying, too expensive, beat salespeople up over price, or don’t buy from an online store and go back to Google, we haven’t done our job in telling the story and sharing our value proposition.
There will always be someone looking for the cheapest, and unless we’re the low-price leader, we’ll lose those sales.
But, when someone is seeking our unique offering and factors that can include price but much more are in play, we want to do a great job presenting those at every touch point, including those important to SEO and PPC.
Without having these, we’re either making up our own, leaning on more shallow features and benefits, or inadvertently making our products and services seem similar to everyone else’s.
Support For Off-Page Factors
Unique content, value, and benefits offered through a strong brand identity and strategy can lead to more defined and actionable results.
This is especially true when it comes to attracting links to content (backlinks), and unlinked brand mentions that matter for SEO.
With both legacy focuses on PR and the ability to leverage the brand and newer focuses on digital PR strategies to enhance being found through AI search functions, having a solid branding foundation is important for SEO and PR efforts connected to optimization around external factors and backlinks specifically.
Support For Other Resources
At points in my career managing SEO and paid search, when talking to a writer, UX designer, and other resources, I’ve been faced with questions outside of SEO about voice, tone, style, and other brand aspects.
In many cases, I haven’t had a person, team, or documentation to point to.
SEO especially needs other resources like IT, UX, writers, and others to be successful.
When branding and brand strategy are integrated and accessible, we can again reduce a gap or vacuum created when other resources get pulled in.
The more integrated our messaging is, the better we know our brand and the rules of the road and the more we can do together to be efficient in our resources and not have to do disjointed, unique research in different functions and departments.
For Brand Creatives & Strategists
Connection To More KPIs And ROI
Brand strategy and development have always been critical to any company’s presence, impacting product development, sales, marketing, and customer service.
In so many cases, though, branding has been hard to connect to specific direct key performance indicators (KPIs).
Stakeholder reactions, adoption, and validation of the intended messaging happen.
But most measurement downstream happens in marketing, sales, and other areas well beyond first impressions, and it isn’t explicitly intended to measure brand impact when it gets into marketing tactics and sales pipelines.
With integration and closer relationships between digital marketing (and search) and branding counterparts, more customer journey mapping can be done, bringing KPIs into alignment from the branding process all the way through conversions and sales.
Research And Data Gained
Branding processes leverage market research to guide their work.
Search marketing lives on research data (keywords, audiences, competitors) and analytics to get as real-time as possible in terms of measuring impact.
Search-specific research and analytics are not typically top sources for branding projects. Yet, the data can be a great supplement (and even potentially unique in some cases) to help add another dimension to the market research used in branding strategy decisions and development.
By partnering with search colleagues, a new wealth of information can be gained.
Ongoing Refinement And Optimization
Often, branding, rebranding, and brand strategy are thought of as projects or undertakings that are done once and then done again years down the road – that they aren’t ongoing or continuous processes.
My friend, who owns a highly-regarded branding agency, noted that it is often about once a decade that a lot of companies in the niche industries he serves do a rebrand.
They view it as a one-time event rather than an ongoing strategy or thing to measure, refine, and optimize. That’s a very different approach from search marketing.
By leveraging the insights, partnerships, and opportunities that search marketing and other digital marketing channels offer, branding can become more ongoing and more effective.
Not in the sense of rebranding a company every year, month, or week, but in the sense of being able to make refinements and updates to make it as goal-oriented and effective as possible over time.
Ability To See Implementation All The Way Through
This one is something I was a stickler about in the days that my agency was still doing branding.
It can be deflating, if not frustrating, to invest so much into a complete brand strategy over months and, ultimately, see it not be fully implemented or activated as intended.
In so many cases, the project ended, and even when my team was in charge of implementing the look and feel or messaging in certain places, it was handed off to others to carry forward.
We could find implementations that didn’t follow standards, missed assets, or content that broke the rules.
When search and brand work together, there’s an opportunity to ensure that, down to the keyword and display ad level, there’s a two-way street between search best practices and the brand strategy.
This is to make sure the implementation and activation of the unique aspects of how search is delivered to prospects and customers.
Bringing It All Together
While branding processes and teams might be far away from search tacticians, who are often at the bottom of the funnel driving conversions, and might not seem to have much in common, I contend there’s a big benefit to partnership.
Whether it is a connection to KPIs all the way through, access to data and research, ensuring full and proper implementation, or other factors I unpacked (and even more that I didn’t), in short, brands benefit overall.
We don’t get stuck in as many situations being considered a commodity. Sales teams can be teed up for success without competing on price. Brand affinity can start much sooner, enhancing lifetime value and customer loyalty, which impacts profitability and growth.
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