Can your customers Google you or your business? If not, you have a brand management problem.
How Brand Management Works.
At its core, brand management is SEO. We’re optimizing your website for your brand. I know, it sounds simple, doesn’t it… and sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t.
When I was starting Fire Media Lab, I thought I had picked out a pretty cool name that captured the way I envisioned my agency, and I worked out a cool logo. Then I put together a website, and I built social pages like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and a bunch of others.
I Was at the Bottom of Page 1 for My Brand!!!
After a week or so, with my site indexed in Google, I was at the bottom of page 1 for my brand. The challenge I faced was that there were two other websites with similar titles as my brand, and they were powerful sites. One was MIT Media Lab, and the other was OSHA Fire Safety Lab. So yeah- to get my brand secured in search took competing with a major university and a significant safety workforce site. My name was unique, but I still had to fight to get my site to the top of a search for my brand.
Brand Management Gone Bad
Sometimes, nothing drives the point home like a good story of something gone wrong. So here we go, a personal story where my life gets more complicated than it should have.
I get fake calls from the IRS. Or more appropriately, I get calls from folks in India pretending to be from the IRS. They usually threaten me with a warrant for my arrest if I don’t send $8,000 by PayPal within a half hour or something ridiculous. The first time they called I almost fell for it. I had recently divorced, and my X wasn’t cooperating with closing out taxes, so claims that I was behind on taxes could have been true. I finally just said, “Send the cops over if you have to, because I don’t have the money”. Once the call was done, I reflected on it and was able to piece together all of the nonsense.
Several years later after many calls with the real IRS to resolve tax years before my divorce, I can spot the fake calls within seconds… plus they keep calling from the same number and I think I have that number flagged in my phone as SCAM. Believe it or not, I don’t mind talking with real IRS agents. The real IRS agents are professional, courteous, helpful… and they don’t curse at me tell me to… ahh nevermind, we’ll save their comments for another conversation.
Occasionally I’ll answer the fake IRS calls and threaten to send the authorities over to shut down their operation if they don’t send $10,000 over to my PayPal account or something within 30 minutes. When I do this, they’ll actually block my number and stop harassing me for about 3 or 4 weeks.
Before I was receiving fake IRS calls, I was receiving bogus tech support calls… from the same number.
When I reviewed my call history, it became clear how these scam calls started. Poor brand management.
Several years back, I bought an HP desktop computer for my kids. After about six months, the computer stopped working. It turns out it was just a bad video cable. If I had paid more attention to what was going on and double checked what the kids were telling me, I should have been able to catch this. When I needed HP tech support, guess what I did to find it? Yup- I googled HP Tech Support… and I was calling some scam shop in India masquerading as HP tech support. After several months I started getting bogus support calls until the scam shop upgraded to fake IRS calls.
The Gift That Keeps on Giving
Lousy brand management is one of those gifts that will keep tarnishing your brand, year after year, after year. Don’t get me wrong, I still like HP as a company, I like many of their products, but I seem to own more Dell servers these days. Hmmm- wonder why that is.
Brand Management and Reputation Management
The other thing worth mentioning- securing proper brand management early on can help minimize damage if you need to go into reputation management mode. Brand management is usually much cheaper than reputation management, and if it’s in place, it can shorten the time and resources needed for reputation management.
Need Brand Management SEO?
If you’re interested in brand management, fill out the client discovery form. In the notes- just let us know whether you’re interested in full-scale SEO, or only the brand management subset of SEO. Give us a few days to investigate, and we’ll get back with an estimate and recommendations.