Do you really need to spend on brand search?

_{Forward this email to someone with a lean marketing budget.}

The brand search argument

If you look, you’ll find countless internet debates about whether or not it makes sense to spend money on brand search. You’ll surely find an answer that confirms your existing opinion (see: internet debates), but I’m here to tell you there are 4 distinct scenarios in which it makes sense to spend on brand search.

Otherwise, you’re probably wasting money that could be better utilized elsewhere in your marketing budget.

A lot of the arguments you hear in favor of spending on brand search seem to make sense. Typically, you’ll hear things like:

“Search is a high-intent channel that harvests demand (as opposed to social, which creates demand), and folks searching for your brand are the HIGHEST intent!”

• My counterargument: All 100% true — but this still isn’t a strong argument for paid search. If you show up at the top of the page in organic listings, you’re still going to harvest that high-intent demand.

“You have to play defense! If you don’t bid on your own brand name, a competitor will!”

• My counterargument: Also entirely possible. But maybe you spend 30 seconds each week checking to see if this is happening, before you start spending money on brand search.

“You want to be able to control the narrative! If you have bad press or reviews, brand search ensures you decide what people see about your brand!”

• My counterargument: If this is the case, a search ad is the flimsiest of bandaid fixes. Address the root problem here and you’ll be a hundred times better off.

Instead, here are the 4 times it does make sense to spend money on brand search.

If your competitors are

The “playing defense” argument IS a sound one, if you need to. Google your brand’s name right now. Is a competitor’s ad showing up first? That means they’re bidding on your brand name, and it would make sense for you to come in and “defend” that turf by bidding on your own brand name.

As soon as you start doing this, your competitor’s ads should all but disappear from the top slot. Google will see that your brand name is significantly more relevant to your site than your competitors’.

If competitors aren’t bidding on your brand name, then you really don’t have to, either. But just because a competitor isn’t bidding on your name today doesn’t mean they won’t get the bright idea to do so next month. Like I said above, this could be something you check once a week (which is free and virtually zero effort) so you can jump in when needed.

If your brand name is generic

Maybe your brand name is a made-up word or phrase that’s unique to your brand alone, like “Oura” or “Misfits Market”. Someone searching for these things could only be looking for information about your brand.

Or maybe it’s a regular word or phrase, like “Mode” (the analytics platform) or “Calm” (the meditation app).

In cases like this, you want to be sure that folks that are actually searching for your company can find it easily, at the top of the page, without needing to scroll through a bunch of irrelevant results.

You might be thinking, “What if I’m Mode, the analytics company, but someone is googling ‘mode’ for help on their math homework?” Well, that just means you might have a lower click-through rate on your brand search ads than you’d otherwise expect, because the folks that aren’t looking for you aren’t going to click your ad.

CTR is mostly a vanity metric you needn’t worry too much about, though it is an ad quality signal, and therefore can impact how much you pay per click. If you’re focused on improving your CTR, it should be for ad quality and conversion quality purposes.

Unless you’re in a situation where your brand name is highly generic and there are multiple companies with the same name, your brand CTR should still be the highest in your account by far.

If you need to geographically target

Some of the startups I work with started out by operating in just a few markets, and then expand their footprints as they scale.

If you’re not operating on a national scale, bidding on brand search in your markets of operation can be a helpful way to ensure you’re showing up in search results within the markets you serve. SEO alone may not be enough to surface your brand in the markets you want when you’re new or small.

Bidding on brand search immediately as you expand into new markets can also help you measure awareness of your brand in new markets over time, if you keep good track of search volume.

If you want another easy way to measure impact from other initiatives

Assessing the impact of other marketing initiatives on brand search is a smart way to measure the less measurable — think awareness and brand plays like out of home, audio, TV and the like.

To do this effectively, you do need to have a solid baseline of brand search volume and performance as a basis for comparison.

Take this example:

I work with a healthtech client that has a detailed listing about their services on a third-party directory. Clients who come in after viewing this listing should be much higher intent than those that come in cold, so we’ve tested sending some traffic to this third-party page.

While there’s tons of rich explainer content on this page, the page is not at all conversion-optimized. Therefore, our expectation is not necessarily to see many direct conversions from the traffic we send to the third-party page, but perhaps a correlated increase in brand search volume during the time this test is live.

We’re running brand search already, because we fall into the generic name bucket, so establishing that baseline won’t be a problem. If none of the prior three situations apply to you, but you think you may want to use brand search to measure impact from other initiatives in the future, think about how much baseline data you’ll need to be comfortable using it to make decisions.

The bottom line

If you have a healthy marketing budget, maybe you’ve decided you want brand search to be always-on, regardless of the cost. But if your budget is limited, or if you just want to get smarter about how you’re spending, brand search may be an easy line item to cut.

Ultimately, the best test is to pause brand search for a week or two to understand how incremental it really is. Were these folks going to find you anyway? And if so, do you need to keep paying for them?

This week’s edition of Growth Therapy is brought to you by Stori AI. They’ve won a bunch of Product Hunt awards by building a sweet AI-powered social content generation tool that ensures your brand look and tone is consistent, and even nudges you when you’ve been posting too much promotional content (❗️ We’ve all been there). Check them out at the link below ⬇️

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✨ One marketing thing: A great article came out in the NYT this week about the decline of made-for-Instagram cookware. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — you can’t market your way out of a bad product. (If you’re actually interested in cookware that could outlast you on this earth, All-Clad, Le Creuset, and even newcomer Made In make pieces worth investing in).

✨ One fun thing: This week’s newsletter was written with a view in Jackson, WY 🤠 

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