Corporate identity theft — is a competitor using your brand name to steal customers?
February 2nd, 2010 § 1 Comment
Identity theft is a huge topic among consumers these days, but corporate identity theft, the use of your own company’s name by a competitor, particularly if it’s a keyword on search engines like Google AdWords, is no trivial matter.
Recently, as we were building a new AdWords campaign, we shared with the client that their brand name was being used by a competitor on AdWords to advertise against them. This tactic was a revelation tour client, but certainly no news to us. And that took us to a discussion as digital marketers on how to build your keywords from a strategic viewpoint. Here’s what we came up with:
Select and organize your potential keywords from four strategic categories:
1. Category: What are the keywords most likely to be in search strings that describe your product or company’s industry category. Are you a shoe or apparel business, or in automotive, or window repairs? What best describes the industry, service, product or other category you’re in?
2. Product name: Include the name of your own product(s), and those similar to competitor’s products or services. Searchers very often search on known product names, but use that as a means to find similar, related products.
3. Competitors: Here’s where it gets interesting: include names of your competition. Much like the category search, someone looking for a Toyota might also be interested in Honda, etc.And look for competitors using your own brand name, and list against them.
4. Features & benefits: And include words that describe key describe key features of your products or their benefits. Energy saving, non-toxic, anything that associates credibly–and that’s the test, that it is relevant and thus credible–with your business or products.
Finally, more is better. Since with AdWords you pay only if the ad is clicked on, the more keywords the better. But you also want to balance that with the reach of the campaign, so make sure you are targeting a geography that you can address or fulfill.
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