Use Brand Jacking To Put Other Company’s Customers Into Your Marketing Funnel
Brand jacking is when your website appears in the search results while searchers look for information about another company’s brand.
And it’s an incredibly powerful technique.
The company you are brand jacking is putting their customers and prospects in your funnel.
The more money they spend on marketing and the more people Google their brand name, the more people end up on your website, where you can capture their contact details.
Or follow them around the internet using a LinkedIn or Facebook pixel.
Here are two examples.
Brand Jacking Microsoft
Archive360 wants to build awareness with the audience that is searching for information about a specific feature in Microsoft’s Office 365.
Archive360’s page about that feature is the first search result after Microsoft.
In order to rank well, Archive360’s page needs to give users what they’re expecting – to learn more about the Office 365 journaling feature.
Then the page transitions to educating the reader about deficiencies in Microsoft’s solution and scenarios where organizations seek 3rd party solutions like Archive360.
There are five things you need to align to implement an impactful brandjacking campaign.
Competitors OR complimentary brands
Brandjacking works best when you’re targeting competitors (self-explanatory), or complementary brands.
Complimentary brands are brands that your customers often use in conjunction with your product.
In the Archive360 example above, using Office 365 is a prerequisite of using Archive360 – they are an add-on that sits on top of Office 365.
Think about your customer’s software stack and identify overlap in buyer persona and audience.
Aligning your offer and audience
The brandjacking targets you pick must generate an audience that your offer will resonate with.
I’ve implemented campaigns that successfully generated tens of thousands of visitors searching for Instagram and Shopify branded terms.
But the traffic didn’t convert because our offer didn’t resonate.
Do 3rd party websites already rank?
If other 3rd party websites already rank for the branded search term we’re targeting, that indicates there we can also rank for that branded term.
The fact that GetHuman.com, a DoNotPay competitor, Reddit, and TrustPilot rank for uplay customer support indicated to us that we could also rank for this term.
Likewise, the fact that non-Microsoft pages were ranking for Office 365 journaling told us we could rank for that branded term too.
You need to satisfy search intent to brand jack
Google Analytics is deployed on every website that matters.
And Google uses this data to understand how users react to the pages it serves in its search results.
Pages with better bounce rates, time on site, pages visited, referral traffic and overall engagement will rank better than sites with lower user engagement metrics.
If your page doesn’t satisfy a user’s intent behind their search, Google will bounce you off the first page.
Your content needs to rank
Most companies have problems with content distribution. According to Sirius Decisions, 70% of B2B content created by marketing organizations doesn’t add business value.
And I suspect there is a similar percentage of underutilized content investments in B2C organizations.
We’ve worked with companies that have spent $250,000+ on content over 4 years created by very talented, and knowledgeable writers, that Google Analytics indicates has been viewed less than 20 times in the last 12 months – from any channel.
When your content aligns with what people are searching for, you’re creating a company asset that will create business impact 6, 12, 18, 24 months after making your investment.
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You can Brand Jack too
The examples shown above aren’t flukes.
Brand Jacking is consistently successful when:
You’re targeting a competitor or complementary brand
Your offer aligns with the audience you’re generating
Other 3rd party websites already rank for the branded term
Your content matches the searcher’s intent
Your content ranks
The final tip I have is Brand Jacking works best at scale.
Any given piece of content may or may not rank, but if you push out dozens and dozens of pieces of content, you will see week over week and month over month increases in qualified traffic.