The importance of positioning your brand online

[Or Here]


Does placement matter more online than offline?
Before you raise your hand and answer, sit back down and continue slurping on your milk and cookies. Today's lesson will explore whether placement of your brand matters more online than offlline and if so, why?

Placement, one of the seven P's of marketing, is a critical component of the offline marketing mix but online is absolutely HUGE. Organisations are beginning to realise the importance of ensuring that their brand is well positioned online and is visible at the 'virtual point of sale'.
 

Internet users continue to embrace search engines as a resource to navigate the overwhelming amount of information available to them.  Hence why techniques such as SEO have become so popular - it enables a brand to be placed where prospective consumers are going to come into contact with it. The driving force behind these techniques is to occupy one of the top three ranking positions, either in the organic or paid listings, to obtain maximum exposure to the ever increasing number of customers relying on search engines to find products and services.  Research has shown that people rarely go beyond the top 30 results listed from a search.

In fact:
•    The top 30 results get over 90% of search traffic
•    The top 10 results receive over 80% more traffic than those in positions 11-30
AND
•    Positions 1-3 obtain 80% of the OVERALL traffic.

Its ok, take a second, push your lower jaw back up and I will explain further.  

So by employing a strategy that allows your brand to obtain one of the top 3 positions you are going to achieve a significant portion of 80% of the overall search volume for your chosen keywords. The Enquiro click distribution study suggests 1st place position obtains 56% of the total consumer searches whereas as 2nd postion receives 13% and 3rd position 10%.



 
It is a legalised version of daylight robbery, sponsored by Google.

The Crime Scene: Artefact 1 - The Evidence

The 3rd "P" of the marketing mix deals with product placement.  Placement under the offline marketing mix involves various ways of making products available to customers.  This contrasts hugely with online as the distribution channels online are dwarfed by the importance that search engines hold as 80% of internet users visit a search engine every day. This is why the placement of a product is so much more crucial online than off.  If you did not have your brand positioned within one of the major shopping centres then it would slightly affect sales but due to the various other channels of distribution that exist you would still survive, with regards to online, if your brand can not be found within search engines then it will be detrimental to your ability to generate brand awareness and the acquisition of new customers.

According to the web monitoring company Hitwise (2008), here's where we pull out the big guns, the three largest search engines are Google, Yahoo! and MSN. These account for 90% of all searches carried out in the UK and since comScore states there were "4.1 billion searches conducted in the U.K., more than in any other European country" in April 2008,  you can imagine the integral part of a online strategy they must play.

Knowing that around 80% of web users visit a search engine every day for product or service research is why advertisers are investing "to fish where the fish are" (Roehm, 2005)  Positioning your brand online through search engines is as essential as opening your doors to let customers in.  

To summarise, what online marketers can identify is that the web is growing continuously; as new pages are published on the web every day. However, it is not enough to publish a web page; the site must also be locatable for it to succeed. See the placement pattern emerging here? This is why online product placement is vital.  


The Crime Scene: Judges Verdict


The foreman steps forward and summarises suitably:

"In retail marketing, the catchword is "location, location, location." In cyberspace, the same catchword holds true, only the locations are different. Hollywood got it wrong when they said, "If you build it they will come." The reality is, they will only come if they can find you. SEO is a matter of survival."