November 18, 2015

AdWords and online reputation management

November 18, 2015

AdWords and online reputation management

AdWords and online reputation management

There’s no denying the effectiveness of AdWords as part of a company’s marketing battalion. As a strong driver of web traffic and leads, AdWords is a powerful platform across almost every industry. Beyond traffic and leads, AdWords still has a few “pay - per - tricks” up its sleeve. Let’s take a look at how AdWords (as well as most other PPC platforms) can help during a PR crisis and with online reputation management amidst a dilemma.

Client X - PR Crisis

You walk into the office one day and sit down at your desk for another unassuming day of digital dreaming. You open up your inbox to find a bombardment of negative social media notifications relating to Client X. You see, Client X was involved in a a bit of a controversy last night; we won’t go into details about what they’ve done but let’s just say it may or may not have involved the company’s director and his 98ft yacht sailing through international waters with all of this year's dividends…The small branded keyword campaign, that usually spends less than $5 of the shared budget each day, has spent over $250 and it’s only 9:30am. There’s obviously been quite an increase in branded keyword search traffic. The social media team are in a flurry responding to negative comments and you’re sitting there wondering if you can do anything beyond splitting the branded keyword campaign out from the shared budget. Yes you can.

Keyword additions

Add keywords like ‘client x reviews’, ‘ client x scam’, ‘client x dividends’, ‘company directors name’ to your campaigns. Marry these keywords up with either positive messaging ads, reclaim the SERP space with messages you have control over.

Ad extensions

Make use of ad extensions such as site links and callouts to highlight positive company messaging. You can create sitelinks that link to the website’s company value pages or perhaps blog posts that highlight the company's involvement in the community. You can create callouts that focus on things like awards and expertise.

Ad Copy

There’s a lot of opportunity to customise your branded keyword ads to focus on mitigating the backlash. This can be through the copy itself and also where the ads lead to. Ad copy can be strategically updated to highlight positive messaging. Consider the final URL’s, perhaps link the ads the company’s press release on the issue.We can all agree that it’s important to have a strategy in place for when unfortunate situations arise. As you can see, AdWords can be a solid part of this strategy. Here’s hoping Client X behaves in the meantime.To discuss how Adwords could benefit your company get in touch with the team at Bang here or give us a call on (08) 9328 7000.