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SECONDARY BRANDING – DOMAINS FOR BUSINESS

February 21st, 2008 Posted in Aftermarket, Business Sector

I was posting on some of the fine domain blogs and news sites lately and coined the phrase “Secondary Branding”. Some people have asked me what that was and how that term applies to domain values. It’s a simple concept, and for the fact that it is simple, I think it should be exploited in your communications with any company you are attempting to educate on the value of domains you’re trying to sell them.

Secondary Branding: the use of a domain name online that describes the company’s main product or service generically.

The simplistic way to describe secondary branding to your potential buyer is to first start with telling the company the concept of them “owning” the “online location” of their product or service (we’ll just focus on the “product” for this article). The benefits of a company owning the generic domain of the product they sell is “instant product awareness” and “recognition factor”.

EXAMPLE: If a company installs “oil derricks”, and the company name is “XBAFF Products, Inc.“, then that company’s “name brand” does not instantly make a potential customer “aware of” nor “recognize” the product XBAFF sells (oil derricks) without XBAFF doing significant marketing to their demographic base about that product. Online, the company chose its name for its website domain address, XBAFFProductsinc.com. This company’s “primary branding” is weak, and does not focus on the product they sell.

A point to make to your prospective domain buyer is to make them understand that any advertising dollar spent by the company has a “life” that weakens and dies after a very short period of time, so the benefits of advertising is finite (focus on this word, “finite”). After the advertising appears, it only lasts for a “set period” of exposure and results.

Important note to express to a business sector domain buyer: advertising costs money, and all advertising dissipates into nothing after days, weeks or maybe a few months, unless the money is continually spent to keep it alive.

If a potential customer hadn’t seen any of that company’s advertising, they would not know what the company sold if they saw the company name XBAFFproducts, Inc. When a customer is online, it’s the same. The customer would have to do the following to identify the product with the company name:

1) Seen advertising about the company’s products somewhere (magazine, industry publication, adwords, newspaper, etc.).

2) Remember the product being advertised and associate it with the company’s name, if they even remember the company’s name.

3) Remember how to spell the company’s name to reach their website

However, in secondary branding, the company purchases one or more generic domains describing their product. If their product is a little-known niche, that generic domain may not get a lot of “direct navigation” visits. Now you have to educate your buyer on the concept of direct navigation, or what I call “browser searching“.

“Direct Navigation” is the term commonly used to define how visitors type in a domain name into their browser URL bar to “navigate” to a site. Millions of people use this type of “search” technique to find products that they feel will be best represented by the company that owns the domain that defines the product. However, at this moment in online marketing, tens of thousands of domains are NOT owned by the companies that SHOULD own them. There are maybe hundreds of thousands of domains that define products or services provided by companies, yet they do NOT own the domains that describe that service. (It’s almost insane if you look at it from a purely marketing perspective.)

The benefits of owning a generic domain is broad:

1) The domain may get only 20 people a month, but depending on how much a sale is worth to the company, even a few sales resulting from those 20 visitors may be the difference between a profitable month and a loss.

2) The generic domain can be used in Google or Yahoo adwords text as the domain to click. For example, if someone is looking to have some oil derricks built, and they search Google, the adsense ads will appear in order of who payed the most for the keyword term “oil derrick”. However, if company XBAFF owned “oilderricks.com”, the identification factor for the customer is complete. The company XBAFF could bid at lower keyword costs, and still command a better clickthrough if they come in third or even last on the search result page. Why? Because the user sees the exact name they’re searching for as a domain link in XBAFF’s ad.

So secondary branding is a term you sell to your potential domain buyer, especially if they are a company stuck on intensely advertising only their company brand, hoping their products and their company name will stick with the customer. When you present your potential buyer with the domain name that clearly defines their product, you can discuss all the marketing information about domain value I provide above. Then, as a final note, ask them this question:

“Would you like to see your competitors owning the domain names that generically describe the product you sell online?”

Any company wanting to rise to the top of their business sector would not like it. I know I wouldn’t.

This lesson in secondary branding does not cover the value of a generic domain being used as the focus of a major advertising and marketing campaign. That article will come later. For now, educate your potential buyer on the value of generic domains and the fact that buying a domain name that defines their product will only go up in value, and will work for them for 24/7/365 as long as they have the domain registered. A domain name investment for marketing is not “finite” (there’s that word). As far as the internet is set up now, a domain name that brings in customers at any level with direct navigation or “brower searching” will work constantly, without wilting, or dying, or fading away. The investment for the domain actually will most likely increase in value. Not only will it bring in customers, but the control of that product in a generic domain is a very valuable resource in that company’s business.

Unlike mainstream advertisements, a domain is an “appreciable marketing asset” that continues to bring in customers long after the domain has been paid for. Secondary Branding is the term that convinces the business sector that “initial branding” is not enough to be the “king” in their market, especially online.