Generating Brand Awareness Through PPC

Think of PPC advertising and you’ll probably think of data-driven campaigns that are closely focused on conversions. While PPC is most commonly used as a tool to drive profitable traffic to your website, it can also be used for brand awareness.

In this post, we’ll look at how PPC search advertising can be used not just to drive traffic and create direct sales, but also to raise awareness of your brand and strengthen its position within your industry.

Understanding the journey from awareness to action

The goal of most PPC advertising is to produce conversions. However, getting from awareness to conversion isn’t always as simple as producing an action-driven PPC campaign and hoping for profitability.

Early in the 20th century, sales pioneer and Advertising Hall of Fame member Elias St. Elmo Lewis penned an iconic mnemonic: AIDA. Despite being over 100 years old, the mnemonic almost perfectly described the only sales process:

• Awareness (or attention)
• Interest
• Desire
• Action

Think of each phase as a section of a funnel. All marketing campaigns begin with the building of awareness. They then move on to creating interest, building desire and – finally, after a deliberate campaign – encouraging action.

As PPC marketers, we often aim straight for the action phase of the four-part sales funnel. In doing so, we generate sales (often at a significant profit margin) but also miss out on the large number of potential customers that don’t know about us.

A far better strategy is to target potential customers at every point in the four-part sales funnel. Your PPC search ads should build awareness, create interest, generate desire and finally inspire action.

How PPC search can increase your brand awareness

For many PPC marketers, creating ads with the goal of raising brand awareness is a scary prospect. It’s uncharted territory – a field in which the usual success metrics, such as clickthrough and conversion rates, are no longer so useful.

Branding campaigns are, by their nature, difficult to measure on an ROI basis. This doesn’t mean that they aren’t valuable. With the right strategy, your brand-focused campaigns can lead potential customers down the funnel into measurable territory.

Start by targeting broad, informational keywords

The keywords that fuel awareness of your brand are often very different from the ones that fuel sales. One of the best ways to develop brand awareness using PPC is by targeting informational keywords related to your product or service.

Let’s use the example of a business that sells skincare products. You can build brand awareness by targeting keywords that someone potentially interested in skincare will search about. Examples of informational keywords include:

• How to get rid of pimples
• Best ways to get rid of acne
• Home remedies for acne
• How to remove pimples naturally

These keywords are informational because instead of searching for a solution, they are searching for more information. As such, they’re great opportunities to position your brand as the answer to their question – in this case, how to remove acne.

Targeting these keywords has several benefits. Firstly, they’re predominantly long-tail keywords with affordable CPC bids. Secondly, they can also potentially lead to direct sales, albeit at a lower average conversion rate than buying keywords.

Provide valuable information, not just a sales pitch

Since the keywords you’re targeting are informational, you’ll need to develop on-site content that matches the searcher’s intent. Remember that these searchers sit in the first section of the sales funnel and that a hard sales pitch could scare them away.

Instead of directing users towards sales-focused copy, direct them towards content that guides them through the two other stages of the sales funnel. Build interest by writing engaging, factual content related to the problems they’re facing.

Then, develop desire using persuasive content that explains how your brand offers a solution to their problem. Remember that your campaign needs to address all three buying stages – awareness, interest and desire – before it can prompt action.

Replace click-through and conversion rate with impressions

The goal of brand-focused PPC isn’t to drive traffic or generate instant conversions, but to raise awareness of your brand and its benefits. As such, the standard metrics used by PPC marketers aren’t as relevant as they are in a sales-focused campaign.

Instead of tracking your campaign’s effectiveness via your CTR and conversion rate stats, look at metrics such as total impressions and impression share. Both are very valuable for a brand awareness campaign for several reasons:

• The greater your impression count, the more potential customers you’ve told about your brand, its benefits and its position as a solution to their problems.
• The greater your impression share, the more prominently your brand shows up in PPC search relatively to your major competitors.
• Click-through rate isn’t as important a barometer of success as usual, since a view of your advertisement is all it takes to raise brand awareness.

Utilize different advertising methods to raise brand awareness

PPC search is one of the most useful tools in any brand-focused advertiser’s toolbox, but it’s by no means the only one. Other forms of digital advertising – display ads, in particular – can be equally powerful for raising awareness of your brand.

Whether you choose to focus on one marketing method of spread your digital brand awareness efforts across multiple platforms, keep the tactics detailed above in your mind as you plan and execute your campaign to maximize your branding results.