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Hi, I'm Graeme Benge, and today I'm going to be talking to you about brand
protection. Brand protection has become ever more important as we're seeing
so much more access to brands with the proliferation of online properties,
such as social media and review sites. So it's becoming ever more important
for companies to have a hold over what is being said about your brand, your
services, and your products.
So today I'm going to take a two tier approach. I'm going to look
at a defensive strategy and also an offensive strategy as well so
that you turn defence into an attack.
The thing about brand coverage now is that marketing departments can spend
millions and millions on branding exercises, be it logos, be it forums that
they're holding with their consumers, but that still won't match the fact
that the power of social media and review sites as I've just mentioned means
that you can't control every single mention of your particular brand or
your product or your services.
So what you need to do is to try and control the controllables, to use a
footballing term. First of all you really should make sure you have
marked your territory off. So that means making sure that top level domains
are yours and under your control and the variants of that, that you believe
could be used to, one, spread your message further and to attack your brand
as well. So you might consider variants of your brand name and also your
products and your services as well.
Some things to consider here to take it to that next level is
trademarking of your products and services. With effective trademarking
should you not have had the chance to register a particular domain or even
profiles, such as the usual brand terms, then that should give you a little bit
more leverage in being able to reclaim those as well.
So I would start with top level domains. I would then look at profiles
across social profile sites and business networking sites as well. A great
tool to look at is Knowem, where they have packages that are there to sign up
for hundreds of profiles. The upshot of all of this is that you'll begin to
have control over the domains and branded text that can be used to view
results for your brand terms in the search engine listings.
An interesting strategy that I saw off the back of the Interflora episode
is that they did have another domain, flowers.org, and did still rank during
the time where they lost their rankings for their brand term, and it made
me think as well that if you're in a particularly competitive field, there
might well be good reason to consider another domain where perhaps you branch
out the content to something that's less commercial, perhaps a little bit
more inclusive of your consumer base, maybe something that is a bit more
long form than what you commit to in social media. Build up that profile on
that sub-domain as well. Then you've got another property that can rank for
your branded terms and your products and your services as well. That's not
going to fit every business type. But it's certainly something to consider
as an insurance policy.
What you also need to consider as well is how on earth you can keep track
of all the mentions of your brand and your products, etc. There are some
great tools to look at that are free. Google Alerts is a great one to set
up. Keep an eye how that's performing. Of late it has been a little bit
slow in terms of returning alerts for different things that I've set up.
But there's no doubt about it that it does give you certainly a good
starting point in terms of going and finding where your brand is getting
mentioned.
The upshot of that as well is that it can get give you some outreach
opportunities as well. You might find that a particular site is talking
about you or your brand or your products, and it might well be that you
will be able to reach out to them and perhaps set something up. This is a
little bit more in depth and you can get a much better link out of it. Failing
that, a great citation, which is all good for your profile in the web
world.
I've recently started using Mention, which is a brand monitoring tool. It's
a web application that you can sign up for. You set up the terms that
you're looking to monitor, and it does a very good job at keeping an eye
on things, specifically on Twitter I have found. It's very good at finding
brand mentions and also re-tweets and who those people are that have been re-
tweeting those tweets as well. So it kind of follows that chain of
mentions, which again should alert you in the first instance to any
mentions of your name that might be negative. You can act on that as well.
Similarly, if there are any positive mentions, again you might have
opportunities there to reach out and do a little bit of brand building that
way as well.
TweetDeck, the Twitter web app version can very easily be customisable. Add
a column that is looking for your brand terms or your product terms. That
can give you an up-to-date, real-time view on what is happening
with regards to your brand terms and product terms.
The last tool that I'd like to mention, there are many, many more, but
these three are good starting points. It might well be that you use a
combination of them. Or it might well be that you use one exclusively. But
Topsy is a social media aggregator. Again, you can use Topsy to look for
your brand terms, your product terms, and that will pull in all mentions
from across the web and specifically for social media profiles. It's real
time as well, and you can manipulate the search to drill down into
particular categories of searches as well. I would definitely recommend
that as it is well worth looking at and seeing how that can work for you.
These sorts of things are very much defensive things. It's all
about being aware of what's being said about your brand and your products.
But what I want you to then do is take that defensive strategy and
then turn it into an attack. Use it for good for your company.
So the upshot of a lot of these tactics is that you're going to be able to
start to listen much more effectively to your consumer base or your
prospective consumer base. You can use this to better inform your business
decisions, which might well be at any level. From pricing, there might be a
barrier to purchase from a pricing point of view. There may well be
benefits and features of your product or service that could do with being
amended as well. The upshot of these things is that you're going to be
better aware of what people are saying about you so you'll be better
informed, and the decision making process, as I said, will be much more
better informed from that point of view.
You'll then from this be able to better target page one domination. So this
is where you are looking to dominate the search results for any search for
your particular brand. So get in those first ten results with properties
that you own in some way. Your branded website obviously is something that
you want to get as high as possible in that respect. You might have a
LinkedIn profile as well. That's a very strong profile to get hold of. Then
perhaps the social media properties as well, business networking properties
that you might have set up, all of these can add up together to
dominate that first page of search results so that if anyone is looking to
find out what your company is about, they don't get or you don't get
hijacked by a negative review or any particular negative mention about your
brand name.
Building on from the listening aspect is you should then be able to start
to build your presence in more mediums than perhaps you originally
intended. You may have had your own website. To build that and fill out
content you might put a blog on there as well to keep people up to
date with what's going on. If you have these profiles, a lot of these
profiles are part of communities that are very active, and as a result,
there will be people who are potentially going to view your profiles that
are never going to find your website. So you're going to broaden your reach
and potentially reach an audience that's a little bit more targeted, which
could lead to sales and transactions or at least start to build
relationships up, build mailing lists up.
The benefits of building your presence in different areas is vital, not
least from the fact that it also adds a level of insurance, for whatever
reason, if you were to experience a slump in rankings. If you're keeping a
stream of traffic that's coming to your site that isn't just based on
organic traffic, should you find that you're losing any kind of traffic
from an organic sense, it's going to be mitigated by the fact that you're
able to drive traffic by other means, whether it's through referral traffic
from profiles that you set up or from email traffic where you have been
building a list up as well.
So building a presence in these different fields is going to broaden your
appeal, but also add a layer of insurance and put more eggs in different
baskets as it were.
So that's my view on brand protection and some of the things that companies
should consider. If you've got any more questions, feel free to get in
touch with us on any of the profiles at the end of this video. Thank you.