Build your Brand Performance KPI with MyTelescope - Webinar
In this webinar, we go through how to use branded searches and Share of Search to build your Brand Performance KPI. We'll also be looking at what actions you can take based on your trend together with 3 real-life cases of the brands and how they could interpret and take action on their branded search trends: Tesla, SkyShowtime and Diesel. Note: The cases in the webinar are just hypothetical cases of how our data could have been used in each case, not what they have done. The host of the webinar is Carl Klevbo, part of the founding team at MyTelescope and member of the Share of Search Council. To find out more about MyTelescope's platform visit www.mytelescope.io
Summary:
🚀 Unlocking Brand Success: Share of Search & Share of Voice in Tough Times 📈
Research shows an impressive 83% correlation between branded search and future sales.
In the dynamic world of business, it's essential to steer your brand through economic downturns with precision.
Let's delve into the critical concepts of "Share of Search" and "Share of Voice" and their role in brand development during challenging times.
Plus, we'll explore how tools like MyTelescope can illuminate your Go-To-Market (GTM) strategies, product launches, and digital PR campaigns.
🔍 Share of Voice: More Than Visibility
Share of Voice isn't just about being seen; it's the embodiment of your brand's essence.
To make the most of this, focus on:
🎯 Selecting the Right Terms: Pick the terms that resonate with your audience and reflect your brand's message.
📊 Deep Analysis: Go beyond the surface; Analyse a diverse set of branded search terms for a comprehensive view.
🌟 Benchmark Against Competitors: Include at least four competitors for a clear picture of your brand's performance.
🚀 Track Products and Services: Expand your analysis to products and services to uncover fresh opportunities.
📉 Tackling Trends: Identify negative trends (underinvestment in shared search), flat trends (maintaining market share), and positive trends (working strategies) to refine your approach and increase your share of voice.
💻 Digital PR - A Game Changer
We've all faced situations where we've missed targets due to demand. Consider adjusting strategies, like a 30% price reduction, and explore new markets, such as the European market, to stimulate growth.
🔴 Red for Share of Voice, 🔵 Blue for Share of Search
Your marketing budget is your guide. It raises your share of search and market share. To allocate it wisely, understand your current budget and prioritise efforts where they'll have the most impact.
💼 B2B Buying Process
Remember, the B2B purchasing process is well-defined. Tailoring your strategies to align with it is the path to success.
In conclusion, Share of Search and Share of Voice are your guiding stars in recessions and growth phases.
With MyTelescope and data-driven insights, you'll make the right impact in the market. It's about quality, not just noise. 🚀
Transcript of Webinar:
All right, let's get started. So for those who don't already know me, my name is Carl Kevbo. I'm part of the founding team at MyTelescope and also part of the Share of Search Council and I've trained over 500 global companies and agencies on how to use your search and my telescope. Now in today's webinar, as we are in budget season today, we'll be going over how to build your brand performance KPI and what actions you can take based on your Trend which we hope will be helpful when you're setting and the devices on budgets and strategies for the upcoming year. And we have a link here over here that you can ask any questions along the way and we'll go through those at the end.
But we are talking about brand performance today. And I think it's important that we Define what brand performance is because of course, there are Multiple definitions out there, but I personally really like Peter Field’s way of talking about brand building and brand performance and that is that it's the business of creating future sales. And I think we can put that into comparison to what Performance Marketing quite often is, which is very much focused on creating a sale today and converting into sales today. but we know that that's not really how Marketing fully works much of what we do will have an effect in weeks months and even years in the future. But we want to be able to show that what we're doing now actually creates some form of sale at the end.
And the way that MyTelescope solves this issue is that we provide a KPI in the form of branded search and share of search to track your brand performance. And the logic behind this is quite simple. And that is that somebody taking time out of their day to search for your brand is a clear sign that they have your brand top of mind and that most likely they're considering buying from you or one of your competitors. So essentially the more people that have your brand top of mind and search for you compared to your competitors. The more likely it is that they'll buy from your brand rather than your competitors.
And it not only makes sense. But we know this now because of extensive research that has been done by both us and the IPA showing that there is on average an 83% correlation between branded searches and sales on average. So what that looks like is that a brand will have a surge in branded searches and then that is generally followed by a surge in sales and the reason I put them next to each other and the reason why this is such an actionable metric is that branded search is a leading KPI to sales. Meaning that you actually have time to act and optimize before it's too late. It's also a competitive KPI so we can get search data on just about any brand around the world. Meaning you can actually benchmark against any competitors.
To see how well you are actually doing. So the reason this is important is because if we're doing well and we have an increasing trend and you’re just looking at yourself. We don't really know if that is actually that great. But if we compare against our competitors and we can see that they're actually growing at 10 times the speed as us then we know for sure that we can actually do better than that. The same thing goes in the opposite direction in times of recession you could call what we are now. For a lot of companies right now. Their trend in both branded search and in sales is quite negative. But if you can compare that to your competitors. And you can say hey we have a negative Trend. Yeah. But our competitors have a ways steeper decline than we do. So actually we are not actually doing as bad as it might seem.
And in fact, if you're actually maintaining a higher level of branded search, you are winning Share of Search and that correlates to share of market. So you might actually be winning share of search even though you're on a decline. And that's very helpful during these times. Lastly, it's a holistic KPI. So the reality of how we perceive brands is that it is something that's affected by everything a company does not only is it advertising but it's things like product launches, shop openings, Word of mouth, if their CEO goes out and says something stupid in the media, etc. all of that plays into how we perceive a brand and that is all reflected within branded search as well. And that means it's a metric that your entire organization can get around. So not only your marketing department but also your entire company.
And it's beneficial for everybody not just for the marketing team to show that. Hey look what we did. But if you also have an increased branded search, that means that there's more demand for your brand. And your salespeople will have an easier time actually converting the leads into sales. And your performance marketing team will also have an paid search and it will be a lot cheaper as well. So It's really something that everybody can unite around.
how do you actually set it up? And that's the question we get quite often and over the years now, we've helped companies set up over thousands of trackers and at the same time we've conducted correlation studies on what setups give the best accuracy. So what are research has found is quite simple. Yeah, and I'll go through those but if you want to be 100% sure you can always reach out to us and we can run a custom study for your brand. But what we found is. Before I go into the tips, I think it's important that you base your analysis on real Search terms. Google Trends is a good way to test this out. But if you want to actively start tracking this on a serious level. You want to look at search volumes like you can get from Google Keyword Planner or you can get it automatically via a tool like MyTelescope.
and that's just because Google Trends data has a tendency to be a little bit unstable. And you don't really know what's going into your analysis and you don't have the ability either to explain what cost an increase either.
But how should you set up? So what you want to do is that you want to select all branded Search terms. So when you put in your brand in MyTelescope, you'll get a list of related branded Search terms and the best way is actually to select all of them that are And I'm saying relevant because there will be cases for brands that have generic brand names. So I'm talking about Brands like Blackberry which is of course both a berry and it's also a phone so you don't want to confuse it. So when you're looking at the keywords, you might not want to select the keyword BlackBerry. But instead, you want to select a group of keywords that contain things like Blackberry phone, blackberry price or Blackberry Model X.
and you create a group of keywords to that represent your brand. Secondly, we recommend you to compare against a minimum of four competitors.the reason for this I covered earlier that it's just hard to know what good looks like if you are just looking at your brand. So if you just put in your brand, that's a great start, but you'll be left with a volume and a trend. But how do I know if 5,000 searches? Is that bad? I don't know. But if I compare against my competitors and they have 2,000 searches that's a clear sign that's pretty good and it might trend is positive and there's this flat that's a very clear sign that we're doing something good. It also allows you to get a little ton of competitive insights to your competitors. So there's that too.
And lastly, it's important to not only track year around but your product brands and your services that you're offering as well because most of the work that we do within marketing isn't focused on the brand as a whole it's looking at promoting specific products so you want to split those up and also track those as well.
So once you have that setup, what do you do? it's very important that you actually look at the trend. And the reason why I say that is that when you're doing a share of search analysis the actual volume of searches actually don't matter all too much in the end. because if you think about it, these searches are a proxy for the wider public just like in a sample group in a survey where you would interview 500 people to represent a country of Millions. So I think it's important to look at those searches in that same lens. So 5000 searches going up to say 10,000 is a sign that the entire country has become more interested in your brand.
But how do you read these trend lines? So we've developed this super simple way of reading them. We call it the traffic lights system. So basically if you have a negative Trend over the year for your brand. And you might want to consider switching strategies or you have the right strategy, but you're just not spending enough on media. Switching strategies, it can include anything from switching creative. It could be switching how the products you offering, but it's a very clear sign that something needs to change. because if we bring it back to what we said earlier having a negative trend on branded searches generally comes with a decrease in future sales.
So it's important to act on this. But what if you have a flat Trend? and this is quite common actually with larger more mature Brands and an example would be Coca-Cola, for them it might not actually be a bad thing for them. It's not realistic to maybe grow by 20% because almost everybody already knows who Coca-Cola is and instead they might actually just want to maintain their market share over time. And over some companies, you see a stagnant trend line and say hey, we have more potential out there and let’s reassess and see if we can switch off our strategy to bring that up and I'll go through a key case where that actually happened after this.
And lastly we have a positive trend line. And that is the goal that essentially everybody wants to see because that means that your future sales is increasing so that's a super positive thing. And there's quite a couple different ways of interpreting this and in terms of how you should act when this is happening. Either you continue acting and investing exactly like you are doing now because clearly that is paying off. Or you might say hey things are working. Maybe we should consider pouring more money into this and see if we can actually bring that Trend even higher up. and I'm gonna go through another case where a company did this but there's a third option as well. If you are it's an ice cream brand.
You will of course have a huge spike in interest over the summer. if you have a limited budget over the year that might also be time to say let’s draw back on the media spend as well because there's already so much organic Demand Being created out there. So you can actually spend it on the rest of the year. but let's look at some cases where real-life companies that we should all recognize, that could have actually acted on their trends. And let's kick it off with one of my favorite examples which is Diesel. So the 90s and 2000s fashion brand that basically everybody was wearing back then but over the last decade they've been on a negative decline over time where their demand has been decreasing and they've been more and more. And discounting their products away to keep up their sales and eventually, they couldn't even do that. So they actually had to declare bankruptcy in the US earlier in 2020.
And after that, they realize we're on a negative trend we need to do something drastic. So they replace their CEO who in turn hires a new creative director and they reimagined Diesel’s entire strategy all the way down from how they price their products bringing it up to more of a premium brand. They looked at their sourcing so they brought in more sustainable sourcing methods and Incorporated that into their brand. So to be more of what they call “eco-punk”. And they also designed a lot of good products. And once they had that in place, they poured money into that and into media and since then they have now grown by over 100% And they are now one of the hottest brands out there This season so they've definitely been able to reverse that trend.
Here's an example of a company that had a relative flat line or flat trend but they were still category Kings and that is of course Tesla compared to other electric car vehicles. So Tesla had been maintaining itself as a category King, but it wasn't really growing or decreasing either. But they came to a point. at the end of last year where they saw that. The demand that we currently have will not make us reach our sales targets. So our sales Target is higher than the amount of demand out there. So we need to do something about this. And they decided to increase the amount for the brand and did this by decreasing the prices for their cars by 30%
You can see that in January here that immediately when they did that they immediately increased by 10% in share of search. So they increase by 10% in demand compared to their competitors and since then they've actually maintained and increased that over time. so there was more potential for them and they reevaluated their strategy and that paid off.
the last case that I want to go through is SkyShowtime, a streaming service that has a massive amount of massive library of movies, but For me personally. I had not heard about them until maybe a year ago or a couple of months back. And we can see this in their trend over time. They'd been relatively flat for a couple of years now. And they decided they needed to change as well, but we won't be focusing on their flat Trend instead. We will be looking at what happened when they decided to make a change. And in August of 2022, they decided to enter the European market. And they didn't do everything all at once instead. They went into the Nordics first. Yeah, so Finland Sweden Norway Denmark and launched their streaming service there and then evaluated and what you could see is that immediately their demand skyrocketed. So more than doubled during that time period so they said okay, this is working. Let’s pour more money into it and they launched their service in over 20 countries in Europe in just about five months as you can see that had an enormous spike in interest. And demand for their service and even after this short-term effects actually levelled out. They have still increased by over 1400% since August 2022. So they saw that they had a positive trend. It's thought that this is working. Let's level that up and that's exactly what they did.
We have a little bonus case which is really good when you're setting budgets. For next year and evaluating your strategy. And that is to understand this from a media perspective. And not just what your trend is showing you. As that's one step two is to look at. How media is playing into effect and affecting your Channel? And the way to do this is to plot out your media spend, per month next to your branded search or you can also do your share of voice compared to your share of search in this case. And that will be something super interesting. We did this for the outdoor clothing brand Outnorth.
And we were quite blown away by this because there was a 93% correlation between their media Investments and their share of search. Which we know according to theory correlates to their Share of Market. so basically by just taking this and showing this to your CEO and CFO. That is a massively powerful thing to do because that shows them that each time you increase your media investment. You're actually winning future sales and likewise if you cut Media or the marketing budgets tthen that will most likely result in a loss in market share. so no longer is your marketing budget not just something you can turn up and down but it has real-life effects that are quite visible when you look at it from a share of search perspective.
So that in itself is huge. But what you can also look at when you determine your strategy for the next year is to look at. Okay, we have an increase in media spend do we see the same increase each time? And let's zoom in here at the start of the year in red. You have their share of voice. We see two bumps here where they increase their media by roughly the same amount. But what's really interesting is the effect of that was not the same. Instead their second campaign was actually much more successful in driving Share of Search than the first one. And that immediately raises a few questions. is it a cumulative effect of two campaigns of each other then maybe in the next year. We should have a tighter campaign schedule.
Is it because we had a greater marketing mix in the second campaign? then we know which channels we should invest in. Or is it just that we had a better creative in the second campaign? And that is also something to look into. So that just tells us that one you get to see how your brand and Company is doing is it neutral negative? It tells you how your media spend is how effective that is. And I also allows you to see what media investment what's most efficient. so that you can plan that for the next year of how much should we spend and what should we spend our money on?
And that is the last case and now we're actually going to go through the questions that you guys came with. And let me have a look at So one question that I got here was does this work for all categories? Does this work for FMCG goods? And we had that same question as well when we got started with this and what our research has found is that it does work. There will always be somebody searching for your brand that it's a, realest relatively established brand. And those searches surprisingly correlate very well with sales. And we've tested this out in very weird categories such as ice cream pasta chocolate beverages. We see that the Branded searches correlate well with their sales, Of course, the volumes are quite a bit lower than some other products, but the volumes for their competitors are also low. so it's still a very solid metric there. We've also looked at it in B2B and we've seen that works very well there as well. Yeah, generally a rule of thumb is that in all purchase cycles there is some searching and in B2B, you might not start off with searching a brand when they come and talk to you for the first time but somebody in your organization will generally search that brand if you are buying a service for say thousands of dollars and as part of due diligence or finding just some contact information somebody will search and the more people search the more likely it is that people are actually buying from your brand as well. relative to your competitors
All right. How does MyTelescope differ from manual searches, So Google Trends is an index from 0 to 100. And so it's a bunch of different keywords indexed into Ascend a single index from 0 to 100 and their index is great, but it can be quite shaky. Sometimes we get our data from Google Keyword Planner. So we get as close to the real volumes as you can get and we also get the actual keywords as well so we can build up our own index and we can also explain what role increases in demand for our brands. in MyTelescope
So that is generally the best way to go about it when you want to start tracking you branded searches in more seriously. All right. We have a question here from Mohammed. How can you further analyze our digital PR efforts and share voice over time? Do we set up an event in MyTelescope called digital PR campaign? And we are lead generating a company and assess cover multiple locations. Can we be in the future to be able to segment by region? So yeah, I'm going to cover first the best way as you said here is to set up an event within your tracking. And if you see a bump in search interest during that time, that is a clear sign. That's something you did that month was doing well. Now if you're doing multiple campaigns at the same time, it can be hard to attribute exactly which campaign it was.
But there will be instances of specific keywords showing up that you can actually connect to your campaign. So if you have a specific call to action in your digital a specific promotion that can show up And in regards to covering molting in multiple regions and segmenting by region Yeah, that's absolutely possible currently. We support basically every country around the world and that's really what's so cool about this. I mean we can get data in a matter of minutes or you and announce what is on people's minds in Uzbekistan and that has never been possible before and now you can do that and we can recover all markets that have Google
and really the only markets that we can cover are quite predictable for reasons. I'm not going to go into but they are Russia China and certain places in the Middle East. and in our upcoming version for you'll actually be able to group multiple regions together. So you'll be able to create Europe or the Middle East and you'll actually be able to compare your branded searches from Europe to for example in the Middle East. So that would be super cool as well. so keep an eye out for our upcoming version 4
All right, a question here from Alexandre: Does it make sense to look at variations month over month instead of year over year in that case. How would you take the effect of seasonality out of the equation if you look at a month-over-month, so that's a great question. It definitely makes sense to look at variations month every month. We should always start off with your annual trend. So what direction are we going at? And then after that you look at it. Okay, and how are we doing this month? And what have we done this month? That might be driving this up because of course a trend is built out of each month built together. So if you can consistently staying above your trendline that means you are increasing your Trend. So that's a good thing to look out for.
And how do you take the effective seasonality out of the equation? So there are two ways first of all, if you're looking at your branded search, of course, your ice cream company It will always be a huge spike in interest over the summer.
And you can tackle that in two ways either you compare this Spike over the summer compared to last year spike in summer. And okay are we higher or lower in interest compared to last year? or you look at your share of voice, so If you're an ice cream company and your competitors also ice cream companies, all of them will have a spike or the summer. So if you're looking at the share of search They will all since they're all increasing the shares won't change too much. So we'll actually be flat line and the seasonality will be removed and you will be able to see if you're outperforming or underperforming versus your competitors. So that's how it would do.
How about when you have two overarching segments as in a b2c and a B2B setup? They are related but competitors differ quite much. So the needs of being able to segment on this is important for us. That's a great question as well. What we'd recommend you to do is to split that up. So you look at your brand compared to your b2c competitors and one to your B2B competitors. So set up and multiple trackers for that. You can even go into your keywords and say I only want to look at this keyword because I can see it is connected to the b2c customers. But I think for everybody, you should track your brown against multiple competitive groups. Even if you only work in b2c, you'll have both direct competitors and indirect competitors.
So an example of that would be a survey we did for 7-Eleven a couple years back where we saw that main competitors might not actually be
Other tobacco stores, but actually fast food chains, so people looking for a quick bite.
And we have another question here from Dan: are there any plans or possibilities for any demographic style breakdowns in MyTelescope or do you see brand KPIs and metrics as valuable when broken down by audience, so really the reason why we have access to this much search data. At such a granular level is the fact that it's purely anonymous. So without anonymity, we wouldn't be able to get as much data as we have. there are really no ways of getting the specific demographics behind who is searching sex age and so on. However, I think it's quite interesting because it forces us to reevaluate how we look at demographics and what is more important to understand that a group of people that are interested in ice cream and the segments of that. So some people might be interested in vegan, gluten-fre free ice cream how much calories are in ice cream Is it more important to understand them from a demographic perspective or is it more important to understand that they are a 45 year old woman?
I would almost lean towards that it's more interesting to see what they're actually interested in.
I think that covers all of the questions. So I'm going to stop the recording now. Thank you so much to everybody who's been watching today. And for those who can make it to this meeting. Please feel free to email me. If you have any questions. We'll be doing these webinars on a monthly basis so this is the first of many and I will send out a Google form for you guys to review this webinar. So please give me feedback and also let me know what other topics that you think would be interesting to talk about. All right. Thank you so much. Talk to you soon. Bye.