Impacts of Branding on Digital Channels’ Effectiveness

In this Vlog we will learn about the impact of branding as well as brand awareness on the effectiveness of digital channels.

– How does the brand awareness influence digital channels? Why?

– The influence of branding to SEO / SEM

– The influence of branding on Social

– The influence of branding to Email / SMS

– The influence of Branding on Display Advertising

Let’s find the answer in the following vlog

Below is the text version of the content in the video:

Welcome to the Conversion Vlog, this time I would like to share with you about the topic BRANDING and how branding affect the effectiveness of digital channels.

– For branding activities that we are talking about here, I would like to talk more about offline activities such as billboards – street signs, offline campaigns. These channels and campaigns are aimed at increasing brand awareness / brand exposure, which means to make more people know the brand.

Branding activities are often difficult to be measured. One of the methods by which big brand names often use is the Brand Lift Method (survey, research, questionnaire) before and after branding activities to measure how the brand awareness of the user changes. There are also a number of studies that will be launched to measure brand awareness.

Based on the experiences I’ve seen in some campaigns, some of the brands I’ve consulted or some of the places I’ve worked in or the activities I’ve done myself, I found that: As brand awareness increased, digital performance increased at the same time. The effectiveness of campaigns using digital advertising channels is not only dependent on digital factors, but also on many other factors of branding. What is the relationship between Branding and the effectiveness of Digital channels?

1. The influence of branding to SEO / SEM?

Firstly let’s talk about the two SEO and SEM channels.

These two channels refer to users who use Google  to search for a particular keyword. The keywords that people are looking for here may be the Branded Keyword or the Unbranded Keyword.

Branded Keyword: Some people get used to buying on some familiar e-commerce sites, when they search for anything to purchase, they usually include the e-commerce site. For example, “buy a mobile phone in thegioididong” “buy a book tiki” “buy a camera lazada”. And when users search those words on google, this search engine will actively find the sites of the seller to help people access it faster. Keyword has a huge influence. For example, the Brand Name of the “The gioi di dong” has up to 1.2 million searches monthly; “Lazada” has more than 673,000 searches. We can see that most of the organic traffic of a brand can come from Brand Name. This means that the better the brand’s Branding is, the more people will search and use the Brand  Name as a keyword to search which leads to bringing more Organic Traffic. And organic traffic from these Brand Name keywords has a higher Conversion Rate than the normal Keyword.

Unbranded Keyword: When people search for keywords like “buy mobile” “buy iphone”. How does the brand influence?

Sometimes when you search for a certain keyword, you get 5-10 results from google search results. If users look at those search results with keywords, they will see some results leading to sites they do not know or have not known yet,  which means before they have not ever heard of those brands. At the same time there are pages they once visited and already know.

For example, in the 5 search results, the lazada or thegioididong site is the site they already know, users will tend to click on the page they already know. Although the page they know may not be in Top 1, 2, 3, the page they know may be in the 4.5; but the user knows what the page is and it is the page they used to visit or that the page belongs to a familiar brand so the user will prefer to click on that page instead of the rest.

This is a common phenomenon, when even though branded pages are not on the top, over time more and more people click on that page instead of the top-result page. And Google considers this a positive signal – a positive sign that these pages are not on top but have a higher CTR than the leading pages. If the user chooses the number 3 or 4 results instead of the first results, does this mean that the site has a good brand, good content, so many people know and prefer to click on it? Google often has the ability to over time take the more clicked results to the top. This is the effect of Branding on the Unbranded Keyword of SEO and SEM.

Next I would like to mention Link Sharing. For example, when we go to a website and find something good, interesting and think of sharing the link of that site. If it’s a well-known website for many people, it’s much easier and more comfortable for us to share that link on social media channels or websites or any place you want to share. This is the same as when you read a post on the top and popular sites such as Vnexpress, you feel more comfortable to share the article link than the article which is also good but on a website you only visit once, you won’t want to share or link to that site. This is most related to the mindset of the users.

At this point, Branding in this case increases Content Visibility (the possibility to get viewed and shared) and gives you more traffic from people who share. Just imagining the possibility of people sharing the link increases from 1% to 2% – that is for 100 people view your site, one will share the link and now with 100 viewers, the number of links you earn has increased dramatically. . This is great support for links in SEO.

2. The Impact of Branding on Social?

What about Social?

As you see this is a demo of a post on Facebook, you see the content consists of the text and images (what people of the post), but also includes Branding (the name of the page, the logo of the page). After the users finish reading the text, they will move to looking at the brand and wonder if they know the brand. And does the brand contributes a lot to encouraging users to interact with your content?

Users feel they want to interact more with a brand they already know, like a person they already know, a site they already know, with the content they’ve previously interacted with, they are more likely to interact again. Brand Name helps increasing the amount of time that they stop and read the content, increasing the CTR (content click possibility), increasing the interactivity with the content, and increasing the content sharing. That’s partly related to the Brand loyalty.

Actually, just as your mentality, when you read the articles on a regular basis, you tend to share the articles of that page. And for a brand you never know before, you will be more hesitant to share or interact or like or comment or exchange. Newsfeed Algorithm (the algorithm of newsfeed on facebook) helps increasing this index. That means the more the user interacts with the brand advertisement, the more the user sees the content of that brand. Thereby we see that Branding is helping to improve the index, increasing the interaction and reach of the brand fanpage.

3. The influence of branding on Email / SMS?

Regarding to other channels such as Email, SMS, there are also certain effects coming from Branding.

For example of advertising on SMS, if users receive the message from the junk phone number, of course they will not want to open messages from such spam number. However, if users receive messages from famous brands such as Mobifone, Vietcombank, or some other brands they already know, the possibility of users opening the message increases. After they finish reading, they will feel less being spammed, less irritable. You can see that Email and SMS from a clear and good brand will have a higher Open Rate or Click Rate on the email as well as bring about Positive Signals.

For example, an email that comes from a well-known brand, a higher open rate and click rate will give good signals to the email controllers: the email content is already viewed by the use then next time the email is automatically and more likely landed into the inbox or the Open rate will be higher, which will benefit your email campaign better next time.

Therefore a better branding will impact the efficiency of views of Email and SMS

4. The Influence of Branding on Display Advertising?

For display ads, for example on a website, news page with multiple banner ads, you will find that if your brand is well known, the likelihood of users clicking on your banner ads will also be higher than banner ads coming from a brand that the user have no idea about. So, facing myriads of banners, users will more possibility click on the banners from a brand they already know, thereby it increase the CTR.

With the current display ads still mostly charged based on CPM or Impression, improving the CTR will help reducing the cost of each click on the banner and therefore makes your banner ads more effective. Of course, this only helps you increase the click and whether users visit your website to purchase or interact or not depends very much on many factors such as content.

Branding contributes to improving the performance, quality and effectiveness of your digital advertising strategy. We find that Branding has a positive influence that good branding will help the digital advertising campaign implemented better and somehow improve the campaign progressively.

This is a part of the bigger part in the interaction between Online and Offline. I will have a more in-depth and detailed description of the metrics for the impact of the two online and offline sectors.

If you have any questions or need clarifications on these two indicators, please ask in the comment section below of this video.

Thank you.