Your brand personality is the face and the feel of your entire organization. It is the human-like traits and qualities that people experience whenever they interact with your brand. This is an easy enough idea to grasp when it comes to phone-based customer service. But when you try to frame it through the lens of search engine marketing (SEM), it seems a bit more abstract. The reality is, each and every time anyone interacts with your brand, the experiences need to be consistent, even in SEM.
The Role of Brand Personality
In some ways, brand personality is the most important aspect of your brand. It has to do with feelings, emotions, and perceptions. This arena is one of the most difficult to monitor and control, yet it often has the biggest impact on the decision-making process. You need to sincerely define your organization’s brand personality, internalize it, and then consistently communicate it to everyone with whom you come in contact.
The Branding Process at Work in SEM
Search engine marketing can appear as a cold, calculated form of advertising where science and testing manipulate wording to raise the needle by a percentage point or two. But this is an environment that is no less important than your front lobby when it comes to the branding process. People who are using Google are coming into contact with your name, website, and a purposeful message. By reinforcing your personality here you will enable users to connect previous positive impressions with your ad, resulting in more clicks and conversions. You will also create new interactions that can be reinforced down the road.
How to Brand a Google Ad
The bottom line is that an SEM ad is usually just a few more total characters than a tweet. So you cannot tell your brand’s entire story, nor do you have space to list all of your brand personality adjectives. And you cannot even count on other SEM ads to tell other parts of the story, because in just one click a user’s search can be over. You need a standalone ad that communicates your value proposition in a way that sounds like your brand. The text can be unique to the channel, but in context it should create a bridge to all of the previous experiences a user has had with your brand.
Sure, have a team of researchers in lab coats engineering new ad text, but keep it all in line with your brand personality. After all the clicks and conversions are tabulated, the brand impressions will be the emotional and perceptual capital that lives on.
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